disreputable.
Out on her own, slumming with her beaux, the upper-class girl went to the shows. Actresses were interesting, but more immediately thrilling were the sequined chorus girls and the showgirls, curvaceous balletic things who appeared entr’acte to show new fashions. And everyone had a secret fascination with the Ziegfeld Follies girls and, most important, with Ziegfeld’s famed Floradora sextette. All six of these special stars, supermodels of their day, would marry millionaires.
In part, the allure of the working girl—like that of a low actress—derived from how much the mere idea of such a person upset one’s mother. Whether a shop girl or a showgirl, she was the exemplar of everything a daughter should not be—and should not even be exposed to. A great many mothers found these young working women personally threatening. If factory girls were thought to be whores with day jobs, then shoppies were believed to be mistresses in waiting. They spent their days surrounded by beautiful things and were encouraged to have men buy them clothes. If the girl was pretty, smart, and ambitious, she might walk out after work with a man, a husband, she’d sold a hat to. They would very likely “treat” each other in all sorts of ways.
One of the era’s most popular plays was called
For all their efforts, the fairy days, dances, and clubs, shop girls were unable to resolve their most basic problem: They were shop girls. And no matter what they did on weekends, the workdays were still long and depressing, and once or twice a month they took department inventory, at no extra pay. One plant observer, or investigator, captured the unavoidable results during a 1909 study of twenty stores. Here is his report on one set of counter girls:
I have been watching three misses… for three days now. The first is most instructive…. she wears a fixed smile on her made-up-face, and it never varies, no matter to whom she speaks… [First] she is either frowning or her face, like that of the others, is devoid of any expression. When a customer approaches, she immediately assumes her hard forced smile…. As they leave, it amazes how quickly it departs… I’ve never seen such calculation given to the timing of a smile…. The others make less drastic of an effort….
I have had the impression that one or both is lost in thought or asleep while standing.
But occasionally one read of a shoppie who, despite the physical rigors of work, the snotty clients, the pimpish bosses, seems to have done more than plot fantastic diversions; she’d made for herself a good life. One 1905 magazine story, “After Shop Hours—What?” follows “Bess,” an admirable, organized shop girl, as she describes what she does with her free time, each activity accompanied by small, if unfortunately blurry, engravings. As Bess was only too happy to explain:
MONDAY: Dine out or have chafing dish supper with one of the girls. To bed at 9:30.
TUESDAY: Read with one of my men friends (in parlour), novel or any book we choose. I do my week’s mending or fancy work while he reads. Sometimes we sing duets. To bed at 9:30.
WEDNESDAY: Dancing class. To bed at 10.
THURSDAY: Have someone to dinner. Sew or read or play games. To bed at 9:30.
FRIDAY: Two of my girlfriends and I have our fairy tale readings for settlement children every other Friday. Other Fridays we go out to a lecture or to something of the sort. To bed at 10.
SATURDAY: To theater or opera or dance and to bed any old time.
SUNDAY: Sleep. Every other Sunday is the Good Time Friendly Club. We have cake and tea and a sociable time. Others, I go for a walk with some of the men and the girls. To bed early.
The editors of this story made it clear that Bess was lucky. Most working girls were so anxious or so tired they did not get much from their time off, not even much-needed sleep. As more young women took jobs—nearly 60 percent of all New York City women, aged sixteen to twenty, worked during the early 1900s—a new set of reformers stepped in to help the workplace advocates. If Mary Gay Humphreys was concerned with underage cash runners, rest facilities, and horny floorwalkers, others now wondered how this girl might organize a “meaningful well thought out and rounded” life.
These were the words of Grace Dodge, a wealthy, socially conscious woman who “for them alone” opened the first YWCA, on Fifteenth Street. (She meant well, but given the time and place, “them” meant only white non- Jewish women with references and provably good reputations.) She also inaugurated a more inclusive network of clubs meant, and I quote from the cover of her popular book,
In fact, her “girls” increasingly agreed about very little. And the conflicts among club members became harder for Dodge and the growing number of her imitators to ignore. The better-attired, better-spoken women resented the presence of the immigrant girls Dodge had deliberately sought out and invited. Periodic attempts at unification ended in mild chaos, chair rattling, factions marching out as the “other side” spoke. One famous melee broke out over Dodge’s suggestion that club members wear badges. One young woman is reported to have shouted above the others: “Why should we want to tell everyone who rides in the streetcar with us that we are nothing more than ragged working girls who spend their entire evenings in a club hearing a lecture that is good for us?… Is it necessary to… advertise our status as working girls when that status… is as quickly recognized as that of the wealthy one?”
The clubs split up, despite Dodge’s insistence that girls, together, had so much to learn! Factory girls increasingly had their own very serious concerns—unionization, strike coordination, and the ongoing campaigns for workplace improvements. Shop girls continued, in the words of Mary Gay Humphreys, to “come in at night, nervous and tired, to be confronted by the problem of food, clothes, rent… of forever providing for bare material necessities.” But the shop girls, better dressed, more articulate, had at least a few options.
Store life was not as it would be in the movies: a fun, ducky universe populated by adorable girls like Louise Brooks and Clara Bow, whose signature film,
Some of these young women, often much to their surprise, became teachers. Public education had been compulsory since the 1860s, and as urban life overtook rural, more families, less in need of farmhands, complied with the law. At the turn of the century there were more schools than ever before, more students, and a constant demand for young teachers. Although very few young working women had secondary degrees, many had high school diplomas. (In fact, 60 percent of all high school graduates in 1880 were women.) Because they’d finished high school, and because teaching was associated with child care, many who’d never even contemplated teaching got the job. As early as 1910, 98 percent of all teachers, at all levels of the public-school system, were women.
But many, many more headed into what was known, with a slight hint of exotica, as “the world of business.”
True, there was never the slightest trace of exotica once you got there. But it was better. Better pay. Better
