A GAL’S LIFE
Picture a silent-movie set in the heart of Manhattan’s old Lower East Side, scene one, twilight. We pan across the tenements and laundry lines and see what we expect to see: a tangle of peddler’s carts, drunk, disheveled men, and large-bosomed women surrounded by animals and children who race like little Artful Dodgers in and out of the crowd. Making her way slowly through this mess is a girl. The camera picks her out, follows her, and slowly irises in to frame her face. Highlighted in her cinematic bubble, our girl twists a thinning gray scarf around her neck. Her face is chalky pale. Kohl liner has smudged to form half moons beneath her eyes. She looks ready to faint.
Back in the full shot that is her world, she limps along, past the garbage and the gangs of rude, hissing boys, and stops at last outside a windowless structure. Cut to the crumbly interior. The exhausted girl enters, then does what she’s supposed to do and faints. Plaster drops like snow onto her face. Cue the villain.
Most likely she knows him, this man now staring down at her, assessing his options. (Clearly going for help will not be one of them.) He shakes her, slaps her a few times, then with a quick look around props her up against a wall and lifts her skirts. The rest we don’t see, but we know that whatever went on it was her fault,
At about the time our spinster was canonized as an unfortunate social specimen, there appeared on the female landscape an even more unsettling single girl: the “factory maid” and her salacious cousin “the Bowery gal.” These new single icons were identified and dissected in the penny press. They later became the heroines of cheap novels, live points of interest in city guidebooks as well as characters in early vaudeville. This depraved and unnatural female, the poor thing preyed on by horny landlords, would become a staple of the new aesthetic form known as melodrama. She was born to fade to black.
The Bowery and factory gals were immigrants, part of the European exodus that had begun during the 1820s and increased radically every fifteen years thereafter. (In 1830, for example, there were an estimated 18,000 new Americans—Germans, Italians, Poles, Scots, Irish, Greeks. By 1845, the number stood at roughly 250,000.) As one commentator put it, Europe had “vomited.”
And it spit up increasingly undesirable transplants, meaning eastern European Jews and unwed women.[5] Like many middle-class spinsters, these women were often dangerously poor and thought to have psychological problems stemming from their presumed unwanted status. That was about all they had in common with the average spinster. According to all reports and dramatizations, foreign girls were crude, illiterate, and extremely rude in what accented English they possessed. They spoke back to men. They walked the streets as they chose, unescorted and, as we shall see, improperly dressed. In the views of one nineteenth-century British visitor, the American working girl presented a moral calamity that, considering the temptations of New York, could prove even more disastrous than the English model. As he wrote in 1870, “They are neither fitted for wives by a due regard for the feelings and wishes of their husbands, nor a knowledge of the simple rudiments of housekeeping… one of their common remarks to each other when speaking of [men]… is that they would like to see a man who would [not] boss them.”
That, at least, was the communal fantasy. In truth, many of these girls, especially the newly arrived, lived quietly with their families. The emphasis was on work, usually “out work,” freelance piece sewing that brought in pennies—
By 1860, single working women formed one quarter of the total U.S. workforce and not only in home-based seamstressing. When they’d been around a while, girls fourteen years and up might find work in factories; others— usually the Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians—worked as maids. Whatever they did, they returned home after twelve-hour workdays, to a series of mandatory female chores. At the end of the week these girls were further expected to turn over all outside earnings to parents, pay envelope unopened. (The practice was never enforced among boys.) Worse—although girls argued the point—was getting by on your own.
For her book
Alone, unsure what to do, some became “learners,” a misleading term for slavelike seamstresses who worked fifteen hours a day, six days a week, receiving in exchange only meals on the days they worked. To pay rent somewhere and to feed themselves on Sundays, learners had no choice but to double as prostitutes. Others were able to bypass “learning” and work for a few dollars a week in sweatshops, small makeshift factories hidden within tenement houses, but very few got by without occasional hooking. Others made their way up to the big shops—the factories, where they worked as bookbinders, fancy-hat or artificial-flower makers (good jobs, relatively speaking), or as inside seamstresses, cigar makers, shoe manufacturers, button or box makers.
Like the tenement sweatshop, the factory was a workplace nightmare, only bigger. In a space the size of a gymnasium, hundreds of women crowded almost on top of one another around tables or hulking machinery. They worked at their manual tasks for hours with only minutes-long breaks. The air seemed to be clotted, and the noise—like that of an indoor construction site—routinely led to partial hearing loss within a year. Many workers had scars on their hands and faces and permanent dye stain on their fingers.
One Christian organization published an end-of-the-year volume on women in the city, 1877. In language that had clearly been translated by an editor into readable English, one girl described her first view of the factory: “I felt within me a deep and dark revulsion at the grim brick walls and the innumerable dirty windows and rusted fire escapes. It looked a ruin. The impulse I had was to run away, but there was a fascination with it, too.”
For a glimpse inside, let’s look at the once scandalous and banned novel
Carrie got so [anxious]… that she could scarcely sit still. Her legs began to tire and she felt as if she would give anything to stand up and stretch. Would noon never come? It seemed as if she had worked an entire day already. She was not hungry at all, but weak, and her eyes were tired straining at… one small point… her hands began to ache at the wrists and then in the fingers, and toward the last she seemed a mass of dull complaining muscles, fixed in an eternal position and performing a single mechanical movement which became more and more distasteful until at last it became absolutely nauseating.
Women staged “sit-downs” and actually went on strike—for better pay, windows, some form of toilet facilities, regular breaks—as early as 1825, but with little success. The only organized labor power lay in the male unions, and these groups, run like fraternal orders, excluded females. In the idealized social scheme, women were supposed to quit their paid jobs and go back to the home, resurrecting some shred of the former preindustrial order. (In fact, the only union discussions of working women early on concerned prostitution.) Working women knew where they stood—and that was alone. During their first major strikes leaders declined all advice offered by men.
But as much as the factories were filthy and dangerous, they offered girls something unavailable anywhere else, and that was companionship, the social connections that might lead to some small life beyond the family or the tiny room. On many floors in the needle trades, in the book binderies and cigar lofts, girls sang as they worked (a favorite: “The Fatal Wedding”). They shouted the latest gossip above the noise. A heavily grease-stained volume,
