Bachelor Girl

by Betsy Israel

  Here was the first mass-media presentation of the single woman. There were many unexpected correspondents out in the field.

  In every newspaper office, hundreds of “true-and-shocking-tales” flew, uninvited, over the transom. Many of these unsolicited works came from middle-class wives who, quoting one, “have taken it upon ourselves to go out upon visits [to the poor] and to be of good use in recording what we have found.” What they found were women of the tenements boiling potatoes and cabbage (our brave visitors swooned but did not, we are assured, faint from the stench). They typically encountered half-dressed children, husbands who read or drank without speaking, and seated off to the side, the infamous lone girl sewing and accidentally, repeatedly, stabbing herself with the needle.

  Along with the wives there were many church ladies out on the beat, assisting the poor and in the process seeking conversions to their faiths. In their missives, the air is always damp, vaporous, and reeking of “imminent death.” There is a lot of coughing. Swearing. Children shriek. The self-styled missionaries worry that the lone girl, seventeen, a seamstress, a factory lass, will not be able to manage the children once the woman on the bed has converted to the faith and died, coughing. William Dean Howells satirizes the dramatic pretense of these reports in his novel The Minister’s Charge (1902). Here the niece of a devoted visiting woman tells a friend of her aunt’s good works. Every day, it seems, this aunt “carries bouquets of flowers to the deserving poor.” “Why?” asks the friend. Says the niece, “They prevent crime.”

  Other chronicles arrived from the young male aristocrats who invented American “slumming”—drinking, smoking opium, and mixing with prostitutes whenever possible. Such dissolute rich boys were not likely to become reporters, in the sense that they were not likely to sit at a desk every day and crank out copy. But some wrote up their experiences in conversational essays; real reporters borrowed from them.

  Many reporters, all of them men, did not regard themselves as permanent, serious journalists. Like “actor,” “journalist” was not yet deemed quite a respectable profession. Despite the influence of mighty editors like Horace Greeley, staff reporters imagined that they were on the job to get in shape for writing their future books. Articles were like warmups, a means by which to hone one’s talent at crafting vignettes or eliciting (or inventing) the biting quote. And it was handy to have so much material to draw on: these fussy Christian women tracking seamstresses and factory waifs; the uptown cavaliers frequenting the top-notch whorehouses and concert saloons. On daily deadlines, one had so little time to get out and just look; here was a way to collect exotic mise-en-scènes and enhance dull and ordinary reportage writing.

  The frequent subject of these hybrid narratives was the lone girl, preferably in the form of the beautiful, suffering young worker—the industrial-era Sleeping Beauty. In story after story, writers played out the tragic prophesy of her life, whether or not they’d ever actually met her. Here is a prime example from one Edgar J. Fawcett, “faithful correspondent,” writing beneath his beefy photo in an 1869 issue of Arena magazine:

  What wonder… beneath the onus of her torments… that their morals, like their clothes and fingers, are sadly stained? Haggard and jaded, they are… robbed of even the physical chance to seek ease through sin… [desirable only to] a Quasimodo of the slums. How should it concern You, Mrs. Fine Lady, to care that girls of the same age of your Carrie and Fannie are starving… walking miles to work in direst weather in thinnest tattered shawls.”

  That’s not to suggest that all stories on the working girl were moralistic or sex-drenched inventions. The major penny presses ran many serious exposés of factory and immigrant life, and a young woman’s unsteady, often terrorizing, experiences within. The author was usually George G. Foster, the so-called Dickens of New York City and the Tribune’s onetime “city items editor.” A self-styled urban ethnographer, he’d written a small library of hidden New York titles including New York by Gaslight and New York Naked. He’d written a novel, New York Above Ground and Underground, and he’d collected his works under the title New York in Slices. His following was huge and included many men who used his books as clandestine guides to the whorish New York. But his editors recognized in him a real reporter.

  In one long 1845 series, “Labor in New York,” he found young female cigar makers who worked twelve-hour shifts standing, passing the time by singing “ribald drinking tunes,” each “courteous” to the others “when it came time for her to try for a harmony.” He contributed to investigative series, including the famed “Dens of Death,” a three-month extravaganza in 1850, and proposed or influenced many others, such as “Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York” by Solon Robinson, the agricultural editor. Not that this was an agricultural story, per se. The corn girls, many about fourteen, many black, were street vendors who sold roasted corncobs, as popular then as Italian ices and huge pretzels are now. Their famed cry—“Hot corn, hot corn, here’s your lily white hot corn, hot corn all hot, just come out of the boiling pot”—was believed to be less a fast-food pitch than a sexual come-on. (Perhaps that’s why the ubiquitous “corn girl” vanished in film to be replaced by a pure and virginal Lillian Gish type selling pencils, apples, or matches, none of which make a big appearance in the records.) Like Foster, Robinson later extended his piece into a popular book and Hot Corn even now stands as a compendium of eccentric lone-female types in old New York City. (Its subtitle: Including the Story of Little Katy, Madalina, the Rag Picker’s Daughter, Wild Maggie &c.)

  Its success—two thousand copies sold in 1854—encouraged penny-press lords to recognize a reader who had even more interest in this female figure than the average male reader. That was the female figure herself.

  IN WHICH THE TIRED HUDDLED MASSES FIX THEIR HAIR

  The average immigrant working girl lived in two distinct worlds—the world outside and the unavoidable one inside. Reconciling the two demanded a huge amount of mental energy. Girls were under the strictest family scrutiny. And even those who lived in boardinghouses confronted questions: Where had she been and with whom had she spoken? Just who was that man walking up and back across the way? What girls did she know at work, and “what” were they? (German? Jew? Irish? Swede? Slut?)

  Anzia Yezierska, a Polish immigrant who wrote stories in Yiddish about ghetto life, focused much of her fiction on the tension between frightened, old-world parents and their newly American daughters. In The Bread Givers, a novel subtitled “A Struggle Between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New,” young women argue repeatedly with their fathers about the right to leave the house on their own. “Don’t you know what’s out there?” one typically bellows. “HOW can I know anything?” replies the girl. In “Fat of the Land,” a short story, a young woman laments the embarrassment she feels when with her mother: “God knows how hard I tried to civilize her so as not to have to blush with shame when I take her anywhere. I dressed her in the most stylish Paris models, but Delancey Street sticks out from every inch of her. Whenever she opens her mouth, I’m done for.”

  Yezierska, who’d gone to Hollywood to work as scenarist on the film version of her story collection Hungry Hearts, was known as “the queen of the ghetto” or “the immigrant Cinderella.” She always returned to the Lower East Side and somehow managed to live there in a way unimaginable for most immigrant women. She married twice and had a child, but unable to live a constricted wife’s life, she left the child with her husband and lived alone.

  Her gift lay in detailing the generational assimilationist battle but also in revealing the underlying ambivalence felt on all sides. It was never as simple as girls begging to leave and frightened parents shrieking NO! While most immigrant parents feared America and what was “out there,” they also wanted their children to fit in, to make a good life, to marry, and, while keeping the faith and traditions, to do what was needed to thrive. Many new arrivals were urged to bury the wigs, lose the cloggish thicklaced shoes, the shawls and kerchiefs,
plus any other article of clothing that reeked of the homeland. One man, age thirty, wrote to a late-arriving cousin, then seventeen: “Don’t take your dresses. Just one to wear…. If you try to wear them here, we will not let you wear them.”

  Ultimately, however, it was not that difficult for the young single girl to balance out these demands. That’s because it was impossible to ignore what one called “the Americanist way.” Whatever their inherited ambivalence, young women learned to “want.” They wanted to “put on style,” and they were willing to spend money earmarked for their families to do so. Wrote one factory girl in 1906, “Some of the women blame me very much because I spend so much money on clothes…. but a girl must have clothes if she is to go into society at Ulmer Park or Coney Island or the theater.”

  One Sophie Abrams recalls her first real day in America as the day her aunt took her shopping: “She bought me a shirtwaist… a shirt, a blue print with red buttons and a hat like I never seen. I took my old brown dress and shawl and threw them away! I know it sounds foolish, we being so poor, but I didn’t care…. when I looked in the mirror, I said, ‘Boy, Sophie, look at you now… just like an American.’”

  The daily press continued to cover the working girl as the terrorized figure at the heart of melodramatic sex plots and/or the victim of workplace or street abuse. But from time to time editors addressed single women as readers with questions. Following the example set by the new women’s magazines, papers launched personal-advice columns. By 1900, even the Jewish Daily Forward ran a Q-and-A called the Bintel Brief. Some sample questions: “Is it a sin to wear facial powder?” (answer unrecorded) and “Does facial hair make a bad impression?” (It does.) And over and over one read, “IS there anything I can do to hide the marks on my forehead?”

  To look an absolute American was not solely a matter of dress. As many a heart-sinking magazine piece declared, fair, untainted skin alone identified the native girl. And many, many immigrants had arrived with noticeable blemishes. Often these were smallpox scars or acne caused by poor diet, stress, delayed adolescence. Whatever the cause, facial blemishes were widely attributed to syphilis, a disease often diagnosed by the appearance of red splotches. Dermatology did not exist yet as a medical specialty, and so a girl looking to have her skin healed had to wait to see the doctors on duty at the syphilis clinic. And any female seen entering or leaving a syphilis clinic was presumed to be a whore.

  Some refused the humiliation and tried to treat themselves. (Not that so many who saw VD doctors got “well.”) It was on matters just like these that young women turned en masse to the advice columns. They learned, in this case, that the “fairest skin belongs to people in the earliest stages of consumption or [to] those of a scrofulous nature,” though there were ways to emulate a native glow. According to one story, the most efficient means was to starve oneself, thus “securing the purity of the blood.” Rest was important, cold breezes, running quickly around, then sitting and breathing until one felt dizzy. If none of that worked, girls were advised to track down a massive beauty volume called The Ugly Girl Papers by Susan C. Power (1875), a dense collection of beauty advice that had a small-type table of contents four pages long.

  From this a girl learned that even “the worst face may be softened by wearing a mask of quilted cotton wet in cold water at night. Distilled water.” If that was not possible, there was advice on the clever usage of “carbonate of Ammonia and powdered charcoal… lettuce as a cosmetic… the secretive ways of arsenic,” and, should such materials prove difficult to obtain, a reader could still study “how to acquire sloping shoulders… how to use red hair… [and] the means to imitate the serpentine glide of the Creole.”

  The average girl, the one who barely spoke English, might have sought out the less exotic but no less precise Young Ladies’ Counsellor: On the Outlines and Illustrations of the Sphere, Duties and Proper Appearance of the Young Woman. Others experimented.

  One of their best experiments was in “banging,” a style that caught on like the shag. “One of the first things we learned,” wrote an anonymous woman “of business,” “was our way in the art of banging. We let our hair cover our foreheads in a small quick cut that would of necessity keep hid any flaring.” Once a girl was banged, all the sashes and ribbons and other fancy accouterments made better sense. Wrote one memoirist years later, banging was “the second best” thing that one could get to “a nose job.”

  Whatever they tried, girls had to be clever and stylish on a pittance, and from the extant illustrations it seems a few at least succeeded. Anzia Yezierska made this point in The Bread Givers: “It took ten cents worth of pink paper roses purchased from a pushcart on Hester Street to… look like a lady from Fifth Ave.”

  THE BOWERY BABE

  Before we meet this uniquely decked-out single archetype, a few words about the world she inhabited. Historian Kathy Peiss has called the early industrial era the cultural age of “commercial leisure.” Huge public entertainment venues—Coney Island, dance halls, theaters—opened to the working classes at just the moment the working classes were discovering the concept of “fun.”

  Everyone secretly longed to see what was out there. Many girls had spent their childhoods walking the neighborhood, peeking out at the world from behind packages and bundles of fabric they were bringing home for their mothers. At seventeen or at twenty-one, they were ready to go out. One young girl, nineteen, told the Herald: “All the waiting to go out and see people, to be brave enough to do it, to walk outside. Yes, we all heard about it; I don’t think any of us even imagined we would do it—go to a dance with two girls from the floor?… It was a very long time to tell mother. Mother did not have many pleasures in her life…. I was very worried of how I would dress.”

  The only drawback was that these adventures and outings cost money. Girls never had enough. They didn’t make it, and what they made they “handed over.” Boys had the cash, and the crude equation came down to this: Girls who wanted to go out, who finally got up the nerve, understood that they’d be “treated.” The boy would pay her way. If this was not the first “treat”—if she’d walked out with him before, accepted ice cream or drinks, or gone with him to a park or a play—he’d expect some form of sex in return. And often he just took it. The girl who experienced these pleasures, this slight sense of freedom, also ran the risk of the murky occurrence now known as date rape.

  The most infamous “treating” episode concerned Lanah Sawyer, a young woman who accepted the offer of treats—ice cream and a walk around the Battery—from a refined professional man who called himself “lawyer Smith.” His name was in fact Harry Bedlow, widely known to others as a “rascal” and “rake.” Afterward, he offered to walk Sawyer home and lured her instead into a bawdy house, where he raped her. At his trial, Bedlow was found not guilty in fifteen minutes. Despite the minor riot that followed—and some of the rioters were working-class men—the general consensus was that both had played their parts in the script. He had taken her out, treated her, bought her trifles, then taken what he deserved in return. In the “commercial culture of leisure” rape (and acquittal) would become a recurrent motif.

  In the “old” countries, girls had moved seamlessly from the father’s house, perhaps briefly to an employer’s, and then to the husband’s. Usually the family knew the fiancé and his parents; marriages were often arranged. In the new world, and in its odd new single sector, girls would soon wander off in gangs to the Bowery, to the crowds and dance halls, so that their families could not possibly oversee whom they met or what they did. And men in New York City seemed less reliable than they had back home; they moved on—to other women, to other jobs outside the city.

  As Christine Stansell wrote, in City of Women, “As people moved around… from the Old World to the New… and from country to city… and [amidst] the mobile and anonymous circumstances of the city… methods of ensuring male responsibility weakened.”

  The most extreme example of this breakdown was the Alma Sands
case. Sands was a Quaker girl who lived with her parents and took an interest in the family’s boarder, one Eli Weeks. The two slept together—not unusual in certain Old Country courtship systems; in fact, it was viewed as a sign of the couple’s seriousness and especially the commitment of the prospective bridegroom. Then, on the night before she was supposed to marry Eli Weeks, Alma Sands turned up dead. After weeks of wild public speculation, a jury indicted Weeks, describing him as a man who understood the depth of his commitment—an engagement—and in “fury” at “his unbearable promises” took unique, punishing measures to break free.

  The Sands murder evoked a response similar to the hysteria surrounding the 1969 Manson murders. Everyone talked about it in gory detail and traded in rumors about witchcraft and satanic practices. Hundreds lined up to see the house where it occurred and, later, to see the girl’s shrouded body. Mothers, in particular, dragged their daughters to make a point that was sadly never less than confusing: Know and trust the man, my dear, although it’s hard now to ever know or trust the man. In cartoons a joking case was made for marrying one’s brother. Although who was to say how city life had changed one’s brother?

  In the early days of working-girl life, most avoided the Bowery and instead gathered in groups of four or five and, arms linked, headed to Broadway. In an 1863 guidebook, Miller’s New York as It Is, or a Stranger’s Guidebook, the authors made the distinction: “To denizens of New York, society is usually known under the generic divisions of Broadway and the Bowery.” Broadway was the street—the golden thoroughfare of theaters and their wealthy clientele in furs and silks. For a working girl, there was little else to do but look. To hook up, to have a real time out, meant turning around and heading back to the Bowery, and this did not seem—not at first, anyway—to be an option.