Schoen, Anzia Yezierska (Boston: Twayne, 1982); Louise Henrikson, Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life (Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, Young Working Girls: A Summary of Evidence from Two Thousand Social Workers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913); Derek and Julia Parker, The Natural History of the Chorus Girl (London: David and Charles, 1975).
Store and office culture:
Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); “‘The Customers Ain’t God’: The World Culture of Department-Store Saleswomen,” in Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds., Working-Class America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); John William Ferry, The History of the Department Store (New York: Macmillan, 1960); Robert Hendrickson, The Grand Emporiums: The Illustrated History of America’s Great Department Stores (New York: Stein and Day, 1979); Lisa M. Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870–1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Helen Woodward, a successful advertising woman who began as a secretary, argued that stenography was “a woman’s shortest cut to a big job,” in Through Many Windows (New York: Harper Brothers, 1926); Grace Dodge, A Bundle of Letters (New York/London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1887); Florence Wenderoth Saunders, Letters to a Business Girl: A Woman in the World of Business (“…replete with Practical Information Regarding the Perplexing Problems of a Girl Stenographer…”) (Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1908); Mary S. Fergusson, Boarding Homes and Clubs for Working Women, Bulletin No. 15 (The U.S. Bureau of Labor, 1898).
Working-girl novels:
Dorothy Richardson, The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl (1905; Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990): the controversy surrounding the authenticity of the author’s account was never officially resolved, although it seems she likely did as she said: had some early experiences as a working girl, then later in life went back as an undercover reporter. The sticking point was how much time she could possibly have spent as a young penniless girl in the factories. In her hometown, she worked for the Pittsburgh Dispatch; in New York she wrote for many publications, including Eugene Debb’s Social Democrat, and in 1899 she began a ten-year engagement at the New York Herald. That’s when she did her research for what’s been called—and I think, accurately—an autobiographical novel. Richardson published another novel in 1924, The Book of Blanche, this one about a single woman, a musician, trying to establish herself in New York City. The book, less socially conscious, had more traditionally romantic and sexual concerns, but as in The Long Day, the heroine never marries.
Sinclair Lewis, The Job, 3d ed. (1917; Omaha: Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press, 1994), Main Street (1920; New York: Dover, 1999), and Ann Vickers (New York: P. F. Collier, 1933); Christopher Morley, Human Being (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1932) and Kitty Foyle (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1939); Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900; New York: Penguin Classics, 1986) and Jennie Gerhardt (1910; New York: Penguin, 1994); Anzia Yezierska: The Breadgivers (1925; New York: Persea, 1999) and The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection (New York: Persea, 1999).
Prostitution:
Ned Buntline, G’hals of New York (New York: Dewitt and Davenport, 1850); Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Kathy Peiss, “Charity Girls and City Pleasures,” in Pow ers of Desire, Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983); George Ellington, Women of New York (New York: New York Books, 1869).
Periodicals:
Edgar Fawcett, “Woes of the New York Working Girl,” Arena (Dec. 1891); Lillian W. Betts, “Tenement-House Life and Recreation” (Outlook 61, Dec. 11, 1899); Mary Gay Humphreys, “The New York Working Girl,” (Scribner’s 20, Oct. 1896); Barbara Schreier, “Becoming American: Jewish Women Immigrants, 1880–1920,” History Today (Mar. 1994); Mark K. Maule, “What Is a Shop-Girl’s Life?” World’s Work (Sept. 1907); “A Salesgirl’s Story,” Independent (July 1902); “The Shopgirl,” Outlook (Feb. 1908); “After Business Hours, What?—Pleasure!” Ladies’ Home Journal (Feb. 1907); “What It Means to Be a Department Store Girl,” Ladies’ Home Journal (June 1913); “Glimpses at the Mind of a Waitress” (American Journal of Sociology 13, July, 1907); Belle Lindners Israel’s “The Way of the Girl” (Survey 22, July 3, 1909).
The early bohemian periodicals:
Mary Gay Humphreys, “Women Bachelors in New York,” Scribner’s (Aug. 1896) and “Women Bachelors in London” (Scribner’s, Aug. 1896) in which we learn “Women are everywhere; climbing down from omnibuses; coming up in processions from the under ground stations. They are hurrying along Fleet Street… Chelsea and South Kensing ton are peopled with petticoats…. This new figure has no place in fiction. That is why we know so little of her….”; “Feminine Bachelorism,” Scribner’s (Oct. 1896); Olga Stanley, “Some Reflections on the Life of a Bachelor Girl,” Outlook (Nov. 1896); Winifred Sothern, “The Truth About the Bachelor Girl,” Munsey’s (May, 1901); “The Matinee Girls,” Metropolitan (June 1900). For the origins of the Trilby character, see Lois Banner, American Beauty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
Novels:
From The Folks (1934; Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), the “Margaret” section: I. “The Hidden Time,” II. “Basement Apartment,” III. “And It Had a Green Door,” IV. “After the End of the Story.” Ruth McKenney, My Sister Eileen (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1938). Enormously popular novel turned play and musical film featuring two sisters who daringly take a basement apartment in the Village. Tragically, just after publication, Eileen, the pretty, adventurous sister, was killed in a car accident with her husband, Nathanael West, who was the author of Miss Lonelyhearts and other novels.
CHAPTER 3: THIN AND RAGING THINGS
Social crusaders:
Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and City Streets (New York: Macmillan, 1909), Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1910), and The Second Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1930). For more general information, Allen Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (London: Oxford University Press, 1973); the section on Hull House in Roy Lubove, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965); Karen J. Blair, The Club Woman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1980); William Dean Howells, The Minister’s Charge (Boston: Ticknor, 1887).
New women:
Judith Schwarz, The Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy (Lebanon, N.H.: New Victoria, 1982); Elaine Showalter, These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1978); Lila Rose McCabe, The American Girl at College (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1893); June Sochen, The New Woman: Feminism in Greenwich Village, 1910–1920 (New York: Quadrangle, 1972); Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Ellen Trimberger, “Feminism, Men and Modern Love: Greenwich Village, 1900–1925,” in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds., Powers of Desire (New York: Monthly
