Bachelor Girl

meant loitering—standing or else walking up and back along a stretch of sidewalk. (Mothers, waiting to cross streets, were anxious to keep their girls moving lest they seem “loitery.”) Vagrancy arrests more than doubled between 1850 and 1860, but how many of these related to prostitution and how many were the result of more girls simply out on the street, it’s hard to say.

Like other cities, New York had a long tradition of hysterical estimates. In 1832 the evangelical Magdalene Society wrote in its annual report: “We have satisfactorily ascertained the fact that the numbers of females in this city, who abandon themselves to prostitution is not less than 10,000!” Throughout the mid-nineteenth century the Ladies’ Industrial Association, an early union, with almost all the city papers concurring, would claim that poor girls were turning in desperation to the street or low houses at rates approaching, roughly, 50,000 to 100,000 per year. The Justice Department predicted that by 1910 the figures would rise to 200,000 nationwide, and New York City, of course, would hold its own.

The obvious fact was that no one could live on two dollars a week—the typical salary—or even on a generous raise to four dollars or, if she was very lucky, seven. In 1870 the Herald estimated that 5 to 10 percent of all young working women made extra money by hooking, treating it as an adjunct to their jobs, although most sources, the Herald included, believed that the majority did not take it up as a career. But so hopeful a conclusion was open to ongoing debate.

In The Women of New York, or Social Life in the Great City (1870, “with numerous engravings”), George Ellington, wealthy man-about-town and writer, told the whole story, cold. In a chapter entitled “Women of Pleasure,” he ran through what a girl could earn for sex in all kinds of situations. On the street, if she survived, she could make per session what a factory girl made during a week, roughly three to four dollars. In the “disorderly” houses, usually down by the seaport, arrangements were made on the spot, while at the merely down-at-the-heels parlor houses, pay ran at ten dollars a week and at the cleaner ones reached twenty to twenty- five. More respectable parlor houses paid live-in girls up to seventy dollars a week. At the elite houses the women —white women, usually actresses, showgirls, other out-of-work performers—started at two hundred per week and were known in some cases to marry their clients.

Prostitution was a major slice of the underground economy, a fact well known to politicians and the police, who accepted regular payoffs. Many landlords preferred hookers over working-class tenants because they obviously made much more money. (And under common law, owners were not regarded as accessories to a criminal act that happened to take place on their properties.) For a percentage, theater owners allowed prostitutes to see clients in the third-tier balcony. Several of the city’s most exclusive bordellos were run out of luxurious brownstones owned by the Catholic church.

As hierarchical, almost organized as this sounds, there was a randomness to sex work. Women never knew exactly when they’d need to go out there, and many were so terrified by the prospect that they postponed it as long as possible. Here is a recounting of a first time out, an act of enormous desperation, taken from a novel called The G’Hals of New York by Ned Buntline (1850). The story: Mary and Susan, the oldest of several orphaned sisters, are broke and about to be evicted. As a last resort, Mary has miserably agreed to an assignation. It’s dusk when she leaves. Susan waits. And waits.

The wind swept hoarsely, in loud wild wailings, up against the windows, as if they were moaning over the sacrifice her sister had that night made… to shield her sisters from absolute want and death… Mary, out on such a cold and fearful night on such a horrid mission… [Susan’s] dreamy fantasies ran… the body of a girl, half naked, stark and cold… A girl who had gone forth from that very house on Essex Street…. the clock struck four and Susan’s heart began to throb heavily and painfully…. Mary had not come home…. [but] the door swung back and Mary, herface flushed and haggard, her eyes fearfully wild and brilliant, and half-glaring like a maniac’s came whirling into the chamber—stretching out her right hand in which she clutched a number of bank notes [and] muttered in a hoarse deep toned voice: “’Tis here, the price of infamy—money! Money! We’ll gorge on’t. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

ONE VERY LONG DAY

There are few extant records of the working girl’s life, whether she spent it working in a brothel, a factory, or both. Because of language barriers, illiteracy, or all-out exhaustion, very few of the earliest single girls took many notes.

It’s a real discovery, then, to come across The Long Day (1905), a vivid diary reworked in prose form by a young woman named Dorothy Richardson. Her story begins on a train as she travels from rural Pennsylvania to New York City, where she arrives “an unskilled, friendless, almost penniless girl of 18… a stranger in a strange city.” There is but one thought in her head, which she repeats like a mantra: “work or starve, work or starve.”

Some selections:

DAY ONE, 6 A.M.: I had written the YWCA some weeks before as to respectable cheap boarding houses…. Was this it?… I jumped out of bed…there was a little puddle of water in the middle of the floor under the skylight, and the drip had brushed against… my shirtwaist and soaked into the soles of my only pair of shoes.

MEET THE NEIGHBORS: Breakfast consisted of heterogeneous little dabs of things… [I turned] my observations… to the people at my table…an old woman [who had] difficulty in making food reach the mouth… a little fidgety stupid-looking and very ugly woman… and a young girl who seemed to be dancing in her seat beside me.

HAVE YE WORK?: Advertisements for cigar and cigarette workers were numerous, accordingly I applied to the foreman of a factory at Avenue A who wanted “bunch makers.” He cut me off, asking to see my working card; when I looked at him blankly, he strode away in disgust. Nothing daunted me for I meant to be very energetic and brave…. I went to the next factory. They wanted labelers… this sounded easy… I approached the foreman…. He asked for my experience. “Sorry we’re not running a Kindergarten here.”

DAY TWO: “Girls wanted to learn binding and folding—paid while learning!” The address took me to Brooklyn Bridge and down a strange dark thoroughfare… zigzag alleys wrigg[ling] through a great bridge arch into a world of book-binderies…. Supervisor civil. He did not need girls until Monday, but he told me to come back then and bring a bone paper cutter. Might find something better.

DAY THREE: I found it! Salesladies—experience not necessary—Brooklyn. Lindbloom’s. After much dickering, Mr. L. and wife decided I’d do on $3 a week—working from seven until nine in the evening, Saturdays until midnight… if I must Work and Starve, I should not do it in Lindbloom’s.”

In the meantime—day four—the landlady has revealed herself as a religious nut, spying on girls, entering and searching rooms. Our protagonist flees.

TOO DEAD TIRED TO MIND: I had a chance with the janitress of a fourteenth street lodging house. She had a cleft palate, and all I could understand was [it would cost] one dollar a week with light housekeeping… bedtime arrived. I moved closer to the most… mutilated cook-stove that ever cheered the heart of a… “light housekeeper.” …Its little body [was] cracked and rust-eaten—a bright merry little cripple of a stove…. On its front… in broken letters [it said] “Little Lottie.” …Straightaway, Little Lottie gave me an inspiring example of courage and fortitude. Still precaution prompted me… to drag my mother’s trunk against the door… this was the first journey it had made since it carried her bridal finery to and from the Philadelphia Centennial.

NEW MANTRA: How different it all was in reality from what I had imagined it would be!

BOXED IN: The office of E. Springer & Co. was in pleasant contrast… A portly young man who sat behind a glass partition acknowledged my entrance by glancing up…. The man opened the glass door…. Possibly he had seen my chin quiver… and knew that I was ready to cry…. The foreman sent word that No. 105 had not rung up that morning, and that I could have her key. The pay was $3 a week to learners, but Miss Price, the superintendent, thought I could learn in a week’s time… the portly gentleman gave me the key, showed me how to “ring up,” in the register…. henceforth I should be known as “105.”