Bachelor Girl

FIRST DAY OF WORK: Sickly gas jet, and in its flicker a horde of loud-mouthed girls were making frantic efforts to insert their keys into the time-register…. Everyone was late…. I was pushed and punched unmercifully by the crowding elbows, until I found myself squeezed tight against the wall… thread[ing] a narrow passageway in and out the stamping, throbbing machinery…. By the light that filtered through the grimy windows, I got vague confused glimpses of girl faces shining like stars out of this dark, fearful chaos of revolving belts and wheels… through the ramparts of machinery, we entered… Phoebe, a tall girl in tortoise earrings and curl papers, was assigned to “learn” me.

WHAT PHOEBE SAYS: “No apron!… Turn your skirt! The ladies I’m used to working with likes to walk home looking decent and respectable, no difference what they’re like other times.”

WHAT PHOEBE SAYS TO ANY REMARK, MADE BY ANYONE: “HOT A-I-R!”

WHAT THEY DO: …paste slippery strips of muslin over the corners of the rough brown boxes that were piled high about us in frail, tottering towers reaching to the ceiling.

AFTER DOING IT FIVE MINUTES: shoving and shifting and lifting. In order that we not be walled in completely by our cumbersome materials, every few minutes we bore tottering piles across the floor to the “strippers.”

TEN HOURS LATER: Dead tired. The awful noise and confusion, the terrific heat [and] foul smell of the glue, and the agony of breaking ankles and blistered hands seemed almost unendurable.

NUMBER 105 ARRIVES HOME: I stopped myself dead. An older woman said, “Youse didn’t live there, too?” I stood before the mass of red embers… dazed… stupefied… and watched the firemen pour their quenching streams upon the ashes of my lodging house…. Nobody knew anything definite. “Five, ten dead.”

IN A WOMEN’S SHELTER: Whatever is going to become of me? Why in the name of all common sense, had I ever come to New York City? Why was I not content to remain a country school-m’am?

Henrietta, a religious, industrious coworker, hears the story and offers our girl a room. Other workers advise against it; they say Henrietta is strange, not as she seems. But our heroine decides that they, as lazy dopey girls, resent Henrietta for her excellent work habits. Later, walking “home,” our girl begins to suspect that Henrietta does indeed have things to hide. Her house, far to the other side of town, is a squalid firetrap. And there’s a man waiting for them in the room. A religious friend, says Henrietta, though the pious man is… drinking. Our heroine feels as if she’s wandered into an opium den and, terrified, finds that she can barely speak. Henrietta and the pious drinking man go out on an “errand,” leaving our nervous heroine alone to look under the bed, in the closet—where she finds liquor—and finally out the window, where she sees Henrietta walking back now with two men.

Panicked, she flees and in her rush trips over an old woman lying half asleep on the stairs. The woman says she lives there (on the stairs, at least) and sympathizes with the story. In her view, Henrietta is indeed a drunk, a religious nut, and a whore. The old woman and our heroine, “two strange compatriots,” decide to leave the building in search of food, shelter, anything more comforting than where they are. For hours they wander the city, at last reaching Bleecker Street, where they find an all-night cafeteria willing to accept such shabby females. Our heroine uneasily spies a mirror.

THE GIRL AND THE LOOKING GLASS: Truly I was a sorry-looking object. Had not been well washed or combed since the last morning… I had forgotten my gloves, a brand-new pair, too; my handkerchief, and most needful of all else, my ribbon stock collar, without which my neck rose horribly long and thin above my dusty jacket…. I began to feel for the first time what was for meat least the quintessence of poverty—the absolute impossibility of personal cleanliness and of decent raiment…. I was combing my heavy hair using a small side comb I wore to keep it up.

Soon after publishing The Long Day, Dorothy Richardson was revealed to have worked six years as a reporter and freelancer for the Herald, which had serialized her book. But she defended herself. As she publicly explained, she had indeed come to New York years before and, for years after, had worked in factories, laundries, and as she put it, “worse by far.” She worked her way out, thanks to a friend she’d met in a boardinghouse. With this woman’s help, Richardson got a job in a store and worked her way up to the near-exalted position of coffee-machine demonstrator.

She liked writing and sent in stories about her life to magazines and papers; eventually she landed a job writing society announcements at the Herald. She took on the massive task of “writing my life” without a firm assignment. On her own time, she went back to the factories, undercover, revisiting and “bringing more up to date” the scenes she had witnessed years before. Her story was part autobiography, part investigative reporting, and the end result, she believed, a truthful portrait.

Not everyone believed her story—not the train ride or the crummy houses and the fire, which was in particular an obvious plot point in melodramatic narratives. As additional evidence of deceit, many cited her middle-class disdain for factory colleagues. As she wrote, “Most girls could not work properly. They did not know how to work… there was something imbecilic in them…. They were female creatures doomed from their mothers’ wombs. Physically, mentally, morally doomed.” She further noted an excess of bulging foreheads, eyes placed too close together, outsized noses, and as “kind words butter no parsnips,” she was quick to point out how many seemed headed for the Tenderloin, an area west of Sixth Avenue stretching up to Thirty-fourth Street and rapidly becoming the city’s hub of prostitution.

In 1900, one in five American women worked, together accounting for 18 percent of the country’s labor force. (It’s unclear if that figure included underaged workers; another common statistic claimed that 40 percent of all unwed daughters fourteen or older worked outside the home.) In 1910, in New York City alone, 34 percent of all women went to work every day. And many worked in the way Dorothy Richardson described. Regardless of how she collected her data—and I believe her explanation—her account stands among the most vivid and chilling records we have of the single-girl working life.

THE GIRL BEHIND THE COUNTER

During the mid-nineteenth century, Arena magazine published one of many stories extolling the miracles of the Boston factory system and its 60,000 inhabitants, with special emphasis on the famed “Lowell girls.” Compared with the 600,000 slaves of the disparate, confused New York system, the Lowell enterprise sounded like girls’ camp. The girls had their own dorms or cabins. They took classes, and they were so grateful, so content, that they published a newspaper, the Lowell Offering, filled with essays, poems, and songs. Of course the most memorable Lowell anthem was the one girls enthusiastically performed when on strike. Dressed in white muslins and boaters, they’d walk hours singing, “Oh, isn’t it a shame… that such a pretty girl as I, should be locked inside a factory and left alone to die! Oh, I will not be a slave! I will not be a slave!”

It was clear that management had never spent much time on “the campus.” Lowell dorms held ten or twelve girls to a small room, three or four sharing beds. The so-called classes met sporadically and covered rote topics of etiquette. But the details didn’t matter. The owners had found a way to keep their business and their employees locked in one place—a feat impossible to accomplish in New York City.

Getting to the point, however, the Arena author noted that New York did indeed have its advantages. “With fewer class markers,” he wrote, New Yorkers were “sometime[s] likely to strike ‘a middle ground’… create… a class between…. Not the wretches of factories and sweatshops… nor the poor but morally upstanding widow. We shall see if this new type—the girl of the great shops—fares better than her predecessors.”

A new type, perhaps an entire social class, of working woman! They quickly became known as Shop Girls, or Shoppies: young, white, usually American-born, and thus ideal candidates to stand behind a counter and sell dry goods, which meant, for a female employee, to fetch them and show them to wealthy customers. In exchange for these efforts, the shop girl received little more than her factory cousins. But the view from her place at the counter was a world away from Ludlow and Grand and Delancey Streets.