Bachelor Girl

Fate’s Loom or Lost in a Fearful Fate’s Abyss.

The factory served as an unintentional means of assimilation. Irish, Jewish, Italian, Hungarian, Greek girls —well, some of them, anyway—learned to work together, the older girls offering linguistic corrections and lessons in the sartorial tricks that could make one look like an American. Ignoring management, girls ran secret contests and lotteries and held parties on their breaks for almost every occasion. The last survivor of the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911 recalled recently that when the fire broke out on floor six, the girls there had just lit the candles on a cake—a coworker was getting engaged! Quickly they scattered; the survivor, who’d somehow make her way to a staircase, looked around for her engaged friend and saw her standing by a window. When she looked away and then back, the girl was gone; like hundreds of others, she had jumped.

There was only one decent thing to be said for factory life: There were set hours. The workday started, you rang in (“punched in”), and you rang out. You were, in the words of one domestic who knew no such luck, an “independent.” Life for the domestic, usually an Irish girl—74 percent of all Irish girls in 1855 and an even higher percentage in 1870 worked as maids—was erratic. Their lists of tasks were long and often incomprehensible, involving both heavy labor and the care of clocks and Victorian music boxes and sculptures and various other precious objects they’d never before even seen. Newly stamped with her True Woman status, the wife, said one laboring girl, seemed never “to know what she wants done and how does she want it done? So she changes it ’round all the time and it’s you who gets the shriek, like a bloody animal, if you’re wrong in figuring what she wanted.”

Added another girl, nineteen: “I would always rather work with a man. They know what they want done and you do it.”

Yet the True Woman had a hard time comprehending why such a girl, known among employers as a “Bridget,” would not be grateful. As Catherine Beecher herself wrote: “We are continually harrowed with tales of the sufferings of distressed needlewomen and yet women will encounter these chances of ruin and starvation rather than make up their mind to permanent domestic service. Now what is the matter with domestic service?”

One Bridget explained: “Your life is not your own unless she says it is. She will always think of some other trifle task.”

This barely concealed hostility made wives suspicious of their Bridgets and far more likely to watch them closely for any change in attitude and appearance. Even observers like Catherine Beecher picked up on the growing tendency of maids to leave work in fancy clothes. And reports filtered back that such and such a girl had been seen down the street with a man. In England there had been a brief fad among newly prosperous matrons to have their servants look prosperous, too. But here, in the States, newly monied women were often insecure; a servant who put on airs was likely to be disciplined. No fancy clothes. Not a hint of cosmetics. No men picking her up from the kitchen door. “Hah!” one girl told a female reformer: “She is daft. What man would I want to have come to pick me up here anyways? Why would I want to have him see me here? To think that the best I can do is work in someone’s kitchen?”

Employers complained about the “servant problem” and the girls quit and went looking for a better place, but the situation never seemed to improve. In 1863 reformer Virginia Penny published the first edition of Employments of Women, for decades the most detailed listing of every job available to women, complete with technical workplace advice. (For example, in factories, “women should not wear hoops, as they check the progress of all whom they meet, in narrow passes and between machinery.”) About “serving girls” she agreed, they are “generally and unhesitatingly denounced, even in their presence, as pests and curses.”

For the average working girl, the logical conclusion to life was still in marriage, usually arranged or at least encouraged by the available relatives. If there was no immediate male candidate, elders of the community turned to the “homeland” or “exile” organizations that helped with the perplexing details of American life, including housing protocol, insurance, written English, and various legal matters. Quickly, however, many girls came to view the community’s Landsmanshaft balls, with their predictable collection of boys, or the yearly Oktoberfest outing the way an American mall rat might react to sitting through a four-hour plenary session of the Kiwanis Club. Once a girl had “got out” a bit, seen even a tiny slice of the city, its elaborate, romantic store windows, the neat pretty clothes on the shop girls, once she had read the sexy novels at work, sung the songs, she felt like doing something… new. One Grand Street sign put it this way:

WOMEN, WANT! PLEASE, PLEASE WANT—BEGIN TO WANT!

ALL THE NEWS THAT FIT HER (AND SOME THAT DIDN’T)

The early New York press concerned itself largely with business. Editors and publishers were there to cover an international seaport, a vast manufacturing sector, the hub of the nation’s transportation systems and its highest financial institutions. The papers they put out reflected that solemn responsibility: The Commercial Advertiser, Mercantile Adviser, and, among many others, The Journal of Commerce. Other less illustrious papers covered topics of more general interest: riots, fires, strikes, sex scandals, murders in seafront “bawdy houses,” and the discoveries of badly mutilated dead prostitutes.

There were hundreds of papers in any given year, including by the mid-nineteenth century the New York Times and the New York Post. But for the purpose of identifying, covering, and ultimately mythologizing the single working girl, there was the penny press.

The term penny press suggests the kind of tabloid many of us try very hard not to read while standing in line at the supermarket. But these were in many instances full, well-edited papers best known for introducing and developing the urban sketch—that unlikely slice-of-life adventure that would much later come to be known as the human interest story. In these personal, chatty communiques, writers acting as cultural explorers and translators introduced the latest in unfamiliar city types—single working girls, for example—to a curious and nervous public.

The penny press dates to 1833, when Benjamin Day bought the New York Sun and put in place an iron-cast steam-powered press so fast and so cheap to run that he upped his print run by 100 percent and cut his price to a penny. He also hired newsboys, like those in England, to hawk papers on the street— shrieking and badgering passersby, as if the Messiah had arrived (or a beautiful lone girl had been murdered) and only the Sun had the story.

The penny daily came into its own a few years later with the launch of the New York Tribune, a daily (including a more in-depth weekly version) that was founded and edited by Horace Greeley. Greeley was in all respects a public figure: a genuine intellectual, a sometime politician, a friend of Abraham Lincoln, a vehement abolitionist, and a man with an interest in just about everything from single women and their economic lives (feminist writer Margaret Fuller was a Boston correspondent) to world politics (Karl Marx covered London). He refused to run sensational police news or “objectionable medical advice,” and he introduced by-lines for reporters. He shared the journalistic spotlight with James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, a second-generation journalist with the sensibilities of a P. T. Barnum. He personally financed Henry Morton Stanley’s trip to Africa to find the lost missionary Dr. Livingstone and introduced polo as a sport to the United States, doing most of this while running the newspaper from abroad in Paris.

But the two men at least had one idea in common: Take the urban sketch—the man-about-town exposes, the true tales of low life, the unknown lone girl included—and make it into a regular news beat. As writer Hutchins Hapgood had noted sardonically just years before, “…the curiosity of well-to-do and so-called respectable people leads them to [under]go any physical, esthetic or moral discomfort in the search for truth and human nature… [especially] ‘low life.’”

Here was the first mass-media presentation of the single woman. There were many unexpected correspondents out in the field.

In every newspaper office, hundreds of “true-and-shocking-tales” flew, uninvited, over the transom. Many of these unsolicited works came from middle-class wives who, quoting one, “have taken it upon ourselves to go out upon visits [to the poor] and to be of good use in recording what we have found.” What they found were women of the tenements boiling potatoes and cabbage (our brave visitors swooned but did not, we are assured, faint from the