by Betsy Israel
Rather, it seems, there were scattered instances of rebellion. In 1907 four hundred New York shop girls signed up for the Rainy Day Club, a citywide movement of working women who demanded the right to wear shorter skirts, raincoats, and rubber boots to and from work when it rained. The idea dated to the Civil War, when women had replaced men in many difficult jobs and found themselves essentially disabled inside their clothes. They had admired the nurses they saw out around the city; they dressed so sensibly—rain boots in bad weather and, always, shorter hems. (Nurses, like shop girls, could not afford the status symbol of the muddy hem.) The Rainy Day Clubs published pamphlets advising girls to shorten hems by four inches and to wear galoshes when it rained.
Official reactions varied. Some stores forbade all galoshes or demanded that on wet days girls arrive very early, long before any customers, so that they could remove their galoshes in the entryway and walk on store floors in workplace shoes. Some store managers let it filter down through the floorwalkers and buyers that these shoes—especially if skirts were an inch or two higher—would have to be “decent.” Most took no official position on the skirts, considering that most girls remained half visible behind a counter and rarely ventured onto the floors.
The nasty response came in the press. By demanding certain rights, shoppies were said to have put on “ludicrous airs,” to loudly have proclaimed themselves a “better class of girl deserving of higher things,” when in fact they were mere “independent strutting figments that wither[ed]” as they arrived back at their “shabby” homes. While playing the role of fine shop girl, such deluded female creatures were unbearable. “The American woman is vulgar,” wrote Hutchins Hapgood, in Types from City Streets. “[and] some of our most vulgar women are our salesladies…. They demand what is their ‘due.’ …They read the society columns and [the magazine] The Smart Set.”
Others accused the girl of acting up like her lewd cousin, the factory gal. Shoppies were frequently said to dance on their breaks and, according to many magazine reports, were “known to sing at any opportunity.” A twelve-paragraph letter in Harper’s magazine added to the indictment. “She sings, it is true, and she may also be found casually… strutting—talking out of turn—flirting, singing, dancing in the streets… I have heard the most vile language tossed between them… such that would make me… run in shame.”
Employers complained of “blue Mondays,” hangover days when the girl who’d been out “rubbering” could be observed leaning as opposed to standing. If blue Mondays became widespread, management deployed the store detectives to gather intelligence about the offenders. (Chances were that management had already gathered basic family information on its girls; they kept track not only of a girl’s “books,” or sales records, but of her outside reputation.) As long as a girl kept up her “books,” much of what she did outside could be overlooked, provided she brought no “ill-repute” to the store or began to look “mangy.” Borderline girls, those with good but occasionally erratic books, might be permitted a blue Monday or two. But they would not receive raises and they might suddenly be transferred to less desirable counters, and they would know exactly why. Nonperformers who “rubbered” too intensely and rolled in Mondays looking “shot” would be fired. As one girl told Hutchins Hapgood: “I do my work, they know that. When I no longer can ‘deliver the goods,’ they will fire me, of course. That’s my risk. In the mean time, however, I can do whatever I please, and they won’t say a word.”
The fact was, after all, that they were girls—85 percent of the store populations, circa 1900, were single, and most were under twenty-one. They were less faux ladies or incipient radicals than they were ordinary late adolescents. They liked to dance, whether on the streets, out at rackets, or in the store salons management eventually opened for the “tired, deserving female employee” on her breaks. In almost all photos of these salons—and there were numerous for release to the press—we see crowds of long-skirted girls waltzing with one another to a gramophone.
In secret they fashioned a subterranean girl culture within the store. Twice a month word went out through all departments that it was “fairy day.” On fairy day, two girls were chosen as the fairy queens and endowed with the right to “perform all mischief,” while their colleagues covered up their every act. Typical fairy business included sending unsigned mash notes to bosses and surrounding male floorwalkers in a flirtatious group while the fairy attached a silly tag to his back. By the greatest of horrific mistakes, a fairy queen might spray a parfum français into the face of an obnoxious client. Regular store social life, however, took the more traditional form of a club.
Almost every department had a club running its own special activities, from dances and parties to what we’d call self-help groups. One store had a very active “foot mould social club” and, on a different floor, a “fine linens sistership and social organization.” Mostly, the clubs tried to alleviate the dreariness of store life. Every member, for example, had, in addition to a fairy day, an “un-birthday.” On this day, the anointed gathered with her pals to slice up what was called a “Halloween cake,” a mountainous lopsided confection that had baked within it two tiny objects: a ring that signified marriage and a thimble forecasting spinsterhood. The results, turned up in slices, were published in the club’s private newsletter and sometimes in the larger storewide newsletters shop-girl clubs put out each month.
At Siegel-Cooper the house organ was called Thought and Work, a compendium of intrastore courtships, marriages, makeup tips, and celebrations of various departments within the store. Say the subject was leading salesladies. Twenty or so girls would be featured, as if in a theater program, delicate wreaths etched in around their faces, their area of expertise (“fine linens,” “ladies’ shoes,” “artificial flowers”) spelled below the photograph in fancy script. Eventually management decided that Thought and Work contained too little about work—and, for that matter, no thought at all—and discontinued it.
Occasionally the clubs exhibited nascent hints of feminism, or at least signs of independent thinking. In 1910, for example, the Siegel-Cooper Bachelor Girl Social Club organized a celebration of Washington’s Birthday “without even inviting men.” Instantly they were denounced by male employees as man haters. Replied the bachelor girls: “No, we are not married, neither are we men haters, but we believe in women’s rights and we enjoy our independence and our freedom. Notwithstanding that if a fair offer came our way we might not [sic] consider it.”
Wealthy matrons found such beings coarse and undesirable in all ways, but their daughters were often intrigued. Trapped in a life of calling cards, formal teas, and chaperoned balls, young society girls craved some small measure of freedom before the inevitable wedding. Not that one would be so low as to actually work, but they had heard of these dances—the rackets—and there was something, why, it went without saying, monstrous in it all, yet still compelling.
“Slumming” even then had its magnetic lure, but it was rare to stumble upon the ideal circumstances for actually doing it. Rackets presented the perfect opportunity to anonymously and briefly indulge in—or at least watch—rowdy downtown behavior. Of course the girls under investigation were very “low,” headed for a life one could not begin to contemplate. Yet in the heat of a spiel, they seemed powerful—daring girls, brave, and perhaps even the tiniest bit enviable. Some of these same well-bred young ladies felt a secret fascination with stage stars. They would not, even for a laugh, stand among the “matinee girls,” the back-door fixtures who waited every day for their current idols to exit. But they were drawn to actresses, who throughout the nineteenth century had set the leading fashion trends. (Serious dramatic actresses were expected to supply their own costumes, and part of the thrill of theatergoing lay in the anticipation of seeing what they wore.) Actresses were also considered somewhat 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 Only a Shopgirl (1902) by Claire Wellesley Sterling. Posters show a wealthy fur-clad wife bursting into a dim boardinghouse room. She points one manicured finger at a shirtwaisted girl named Hulda. Hulda stares back defiantly, her smaller siblings gathered around her in terror. “YOU,” shouts the woman, “are nothing but a low shop girl!” Says Hulda: “Better a low shop girl than a fashionable idler as heaven is above hell!” The play was produced throughout the teens and the themes reworked in several silent films until its class love triangle gradually entered the standard melodramatic lexicon.
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, A Bundle of Letters to Busy Girls (1887): “[to help] those girls who have not time or inclination to think and study about the many important things which make up life and living.” Dodge feared girls “had not time for the higher things.” She seems also to have believed they had not time for lower things. At weekly meetings, many held in her downtown apartment, she covered everything, for example: attending work with one’s menstrual period and “the disposal of rags.” Another: the importance of bowel movements and whether it was acceptable to move one’s bowels at work. She discussed clothing, hair, correspondence, and she expressed her belief that far more enjoyable than a racket, a wild dance, was a pleasant tea or reading party. Not all present agreed.
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 mêlée 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, It (1927), among many others, was set in a big store (a fishbowl universe perfect for the stationary camera). But real-life shoppies, like their movieland counterparts, had a pretty good chance of finding the exit. That most often meant marriage—but not always. Many girls, supporting themselves, sending money home, would continue to work and live singly. And the more intelligent and ambitious among them might land a very different kind of job.
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 teach
ing 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 people to mix it up with. “Aren’t we all women in business now and more of us as the years pass?” asked film star Mary Pickford in a 1911 movie magazine. Without mentioning her salary, she exulted, “We are all working girls, and I am ever so proud to be among you!”
I AM A TYPEWRITER
In the original single work schematic, office work was about as good as it got. The pay could start as high as ten dollars per week. The work did not require hours of militaristic standing, and the men did not seem as ungentlemanly as they had back in ladies’ shoes. Even the jobs themselves sounded better: sorting “clerk” or file “chief,” positions requiring some rushing around, some work seated at one’s own desk. There was the “typewriter,” the original name for both the machine and its operator. Above them all, to be had through promotion, was the secretary, and best of all, the personal secretary. The boss chose her above all others, allowing her to move freely within the inner sanctum of the business (except at luncheons), and trusting her to be highly skilled and discreet in all matters, including who it was the boss actually took to lunch.
As newly self-defined professionals, young women worked to master their jobs, and worked, too, to overlook the feeling that these tasks were as tiresome as the ones they’d performed in stores. Typewriters began their day by grooming their machines, a process that, in photos, suggests a row of well-dressed young women picking inky nits off large black armadillos. Others ran letter presses, primitive copying devices that required inking and hand pressing and left copiers weak-wristed, while the all-purpose clerks had to manipulate tall ladders that slid on tracks. The hours were long, the “lounge” facilities minimal. As one worker told Collier’s magazine: “Your chair is given as your chair and there isn’t much point in asking for one that fits beneath the desk or anything else that does not fit.”