The mid-to-late nineteenth century stands out as the World’s Fair age of high-end retailing. Palatial stores, among them Siegel-Cooper, A. T. Stewart, Lord & Taylor, B. Altman, and Arnold Constable, sold extensive merchandise from around the globe in settings that might have vied for the title Most Exotic
Together, these grand department stores formed “Ladies’ Mile,” a stretch of Broadway and Sixth Avenue, beginning at Ninth Street with Stewart’s and ending at Twenty-third Street with Stern Brothers. The ladies themselves arrived in shifts. The morning crew, usually with maids in tow, came determined to shop. They stayed on and were joined by hundreds of others for lunch, some of whom might stay around for the elaborate late- afternoon tea service. The daily promenade had expanded to fill all the time available.
For the girls who staffed the enterprise, however, life was far from glamorous. The standard-issue shop uniform—a bust-hugging shirtwaist and a long cinched skirt—was so tight that even standing still in it required effort. And salesgirls often stood in the same place for six hours at a stretch without moving. For this they earned between five and seven dollars a week, depending on how long they’d been there and how good a record they’d kept (attitude, neatness, sales). Less visible—and less well paid at three dollars per week—were the wrappers and stock girls who moved on ladders for hour upon hour at the back. Cash girls, or runners, most of them very young, received two dollars a week. In all jobs, but especially those at the counter, girls were instructed to control their facial expressions. There was a point in a transaction at which she smiled; at other times, she was impassive.
This seeming robotic quality led customers to believe that sales staff, like factory workers, were inherently dumb. If not, so the reasoning went, why would they be standing there in the first place? The answer was that they’d be standing there, or standing someplace else, but that they would, given the situation, have to stand somewhere, doing something they did not want to do. As the reformist Clara E. Laughlin wrote in a fascinating book,
That was true. And friends who got there first put it bluntly: Find a tolerable place, and please, don’t ask us what we really think or what we’ve already begun to figure out. For example, veteran shop girls knew that ten years before, men alone had done their jobs. Sales positions opened to women only as companies had grown, departments had spidered, and men had moved into the new managerial jobs. And they also knew that when men held the sales jobs, the work itself had been more interesting. As sales clerks, men had aggressively sold and developed relationships with customers; women, forbidden these exchanges, took a first step into what we’d call “the pink-collar ghetto.” As one manager explained, “Female salespersons do not urge the customer to buy… they simply ask the customer what he or she wants, and make a record of the sale.”
As she did this, bosses and floorwalkers, that is, male department managers, watched and judged her constantly. Had she made any slips? Was there a hint of rudeness in the voice, self-defense or disagreement? Had she been deliberately slow? Was her posture “slagging,” and did she seem evidently tired or exasperated when a customer asked to see that fifteenth variation on a scarf?
One shop girl, nineteen, described her practiced stoicism to a social worker:
Sometime I do admit I would like nothing more than to leap across my counter and topple on that girl, no older than me… smack her face the way it never smiles and demands you show it this and this. It’s not right. One day a girl came in. She had a feather in her hat and a fur, a little thing who told me I had better accustom me t’a call her “m’am,” and I thought, I will jump across and I will break her face up, smug pup’s nose…. [still] I was always smiling, smiling, yes, yes.
But she had problems far worse than uppity customers. By as late as 1890, some stores still provided no benches or perhaps had just one (hard, small) bench for girls to sit on during breaks, that is, if breaks had been established as a custom. Many girls ate their lunches—pickles, rolls, and tea—standing up. Much worse, many of the best stores had no employee bathrooms (workers were encouraged to take care of personal maintenance matters before leaving home in the morning; it was “their business”). Mary Gay Humphreys, a journalist and reformer who took the working girl as her subject, regularly escorted small parades of girls to her apartment house to “use facilities.”
Humphreys combined a reformer’s intensity with genuine skill as a journalist. She listened and reported as opposed to moralizing or operatically exaggerating the gal’s life. She banished the slangy linguistic back bends that made the working type, especially the factory girl, seem so alien. It was common to read about girls who, asked about, say, a boyfriend, replied: “He’s ’n me ’a go ’a wooken a bit—not w-h-a-t you say?” These pidgin dialects, whether Irish-Yiddish or Italian-Scottish, made the girl seem not only alien but mentally feeble. Humphreys’s pieces, printed in a variety of newspapers and magazines, were so immediate that it’s easy even now to imagine standing there, five hours into the workday and desperate to pee but unable, according to store policy, to move an inch. As she wrote: “Because the immediate surroundings are… hospitable, there is little comprehension of what a girl must get through on the average day, standing behind a counter for hours, back aching, waiting on rude bargain-hunting women…. and then the management…”
Humphreys was the first journalist to record the practice of “treating” as it occurred in the store. In one story, she quotes a young woman who’d been drawn into conversation with her boss. Between puffs on a cigar, he told her, “You got the look, get a man, go out with him and let him pay. Don’t wear this shirt again. It is filthy, a disgrace.” (No surprise, as it was likely her only one.) After similar encounters, many girls walked into the back— provided there was no one to see—and started crying. As one of them told Humphreys, she understood the barter concept but the terms of this one “startled” her. “If they expect this or that for an ice cream, what can they want for a hand-stitched shirt?” Some took the boss’s advice and attempted to find male help they could emotionally afford. Others didn’t think about it in such specific terms and just went out.
This was the age of the great “rackets,” huge public balls that had started as a youthful response to the dull extended-family dance. Anyone could go—invitations replicated like chain mail throughout the factories and stores —and as George G. Foster wrote, everyone went, “the folding girls and seamstresses, the milliner’s apprentices, the shopgirls… all unmarried womanhood.” Sometimes there were six balls on one night for them to choose from and a selection of venues. By 1890, thousands of dance halls stretched south from Houston to Canal Street and across the city from the Hudson River to Avenue B.
Shoppies traveled in groups—“lady friends” they called one another—and they were said to like the wild dancing or “rubbering.” Some of them even “spieled,” a notorious dance in which a couple twirled or whipped their way across the floor until someone either fainted or fell. (No one said it outright, but dancers were thought to faint or fall at the point of orgasm. It was perhaps this bit of gossip that inspired one senator to proclaim, “Rome’s downfall was due in part to the degenerate nature of its dances, and I only hope that we will not suffer the same result.”) Some, however, found the smoke and the sweat too much after a long day spent saying “Yes, ma’am.” They were happier heading back to their rooms for quiet dinners, reading, and, as always on so minuscule a weekly budget, the mending. (There were other means for attaining new shirtwaists: making a new one, or cleverly reinvigorating the sagging gray one using bleach.)
Some nights after curfew—and all rooming houses had 9 or 10 P.M. curfews—three or four girls would crawl through the dark to an appointed room. Someone brought chocolate to melt on the hot plate, someone brought a robe to stuff beneath the door to block the smell. Settled in, they reviewed the current themes: How much longer can we stand working at Stewart’s? Waitressing, do you get wages
