stench). They typically encountered half-dressed children, husbands who read or drank without speaking, and seated off to the side, the infamous lone girl sewing and accidentally, repeatedly, stabbing herself with the needle.
Along with the wives there were many church ladies out on the beat, assisting the poor and in the process seeking conversions to their faiths. In their missives, the air is always damp, vaporous, and reeking of “imminent death.” There is a lot of coughing. Swearing. Children shriek. The self-styled missionaries worry that the lone girl, seventeen, a seamstress, a factory lass, will not be able to manage the children once the woman on the bed has converted to the faith and died, coughing. William Dean Howells satirizes the dramatic pretense of these reports in his novel
Other chronicles arrived from the young male aristocrats who invented American “slumming”—drinking, smoking opium, and mixing with prostitutes whenever possible. Such dissolute rich boys were not likely to become reporters, in the sense that they were not likely to sit at a desk every day and crank out copy. But some wrote up their experiences in conversational essays; real reporters borrowed from them.
Many reporters, all of them men, did not regard themselves as permanent, serious journalists. Like “actor,” “journalist” was not yet deemed quite a respectable profession. Despite the influence of mighty editors like Horace Greeley, staff reporters imagined that they were on the job to get in shape for writing their future books. Articles were like warmups, a means by which to hone one’s talent at crafting vignettes or eliciting (or inventing) the biting quote. And it was handy to have so much material to draw on: these fussy Christian women tracking seamstresses and factory waifs; the uptown cavaliers frequenting the top-notch whorehouses and concert saloons. On daily deadlines, one had so little time to get out and just
The frequent subject of these hybrid narratives was the lone girl, preferably in the form of the beautiful, suffering young worker—the industrial-era Sleeping Beauty. In story after story, writers played out the tragic prophesy of her life, whether or not they’d ever actually met her. Here is a prime example from one Edgar J. Fawcett, “faithful correspondent,” writing beneath his beefy photo in an 1869 issue of
What wonder… beneath the onus of her torments… that their morals, like their clothes and fingers, are sadly stained? Haggard and jaded, they are… robbed of even the physical chance to seek ease through sin… [desirable only to] a Quasimodo of the slums. How should it concern You, Mrs. Fine Lady, to care that girls of the same age of your Carrie and Fannie are starving… walking miles to work in direst weather in thinnest tattered shawls.”
That’s not to suggest that all stories on the working girl were moralistic or sex-drenched inventions. The major penny presses ran many serious exposes of factory and immigrant life, and a young woman’s unsteady, often terrorizing, experiences within. The author was usually George G. Foster, the so-called Dickens of New York City and the
In one long 1845 series, “Labor in New York,” he found young female cigar makers who worked twelve-hour shifts standing, passing the time by singing “ribald drinking tunes,” each “courteous” to the others “when it came time for her to try for a harmony.” He contributed to investigative series, including the famed “Dens of Death,” a three-month extravaganza in 1850, and proposed or influenced many others, such as “Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York” by Solon Robinson, the agricultural editor. Not that this was an agricultural story, per se. The corn girls, many about fourteen, many black, were street vendors who sold roasted corncobs, as popular then as Italian ices and huge pretzels are now. Their famed cry—“Hot corn, hot corn, here’s your lily white hot corn, hot corn all hot, just come out of the boiling pot”—was believed to be less a fast-food pitch than a sexual come-on. (Perhaps that’s why the ubiquitous “corn girl” vanished in film to be replaced by a pure and virginal Lillian Gish type selling pencils, apples, or matches, none of which make a big appearance in the records.) Like Foster, Robinson later extended his piece into a popular book and
Its success—two thousand copies sold in 1854—encouraged penny-press lords to recognize a reader who had even more interest in this female figure than the average male reader. That was the female figure herself.
IN WHICH THE TIRED HUDDLED MASSES FIX THEIR HAIR
The average immigrant working girl lived in two distinct worlds—the world outside and the unavoidable one inside. Reconciling the two demanded a huge amount of mental energy. Girls were under the strictest family scrutiny. And even those who lived in boardinghouses confronted questions: Where had she been and with whom had she spoken? Just who was that man walking up and back across the way? What girls did she know at work, and “what” were they? (German? Jew? Irish? Swede? Slut?)
Anzia Yezierska, a Polish immigrant who wrote stories in Yiddish about ghetto life, focused much of her fiction on the tension between frightened, old-world parents and their newly American daughters. In
Yezierska, who’d gone to Hollywood to work as scenarist on the film version of her story collection
Her gift lay in detailing the generational assimilationist battle but also in revealing the underlying ambivalence felt on all sides. It was never as simple as girls begging to leave and frightened parents shrieking NO! While most immigrant parents feared America and what was “out there,” they also wanted their children to fit in, to make a good life, to marry, and, while keeping the faith and traditions, to do what was needed to thrive. Many new arrivals were urged to bury the wigs, lose the cloggish thicklaced shoes, the shawls and kerchiefs, plus any other article of clothing that reeked of the homeland. One man, age thirty, wrote to a late-arriving cousin, then seventeen: “Don’t take your dresses. Just one to wear…. If you try to wear them here, we will not let you wear them.”
Ultimately, however, it was not that difficult for the young single girl to balance out these demands. That’s because it was impossible to ignore what one called “the Americanist way.” Whatever their inherited ambivalence, young women learned to “want.” They wanted to “put on style,” and they were willing to spend money earmarked for their families to do so. Wrote one factory girl in 1906, “Some of the women blame me very much because I spend so much money on clothes…. but a girl must have clothes if she is to go into society at Ulmer Park or Coney Island or the theater.”
One Sophie Abrams recalls her first real day in America as the day her aunt took her shopping: “She bought me a shirtwaist… a shirt, a blue print with red buttons and a hat like I never seen. I took my old brown dress and
