And it spit up increasingly undesirable transplants, meaning eastern European Jews and unwed women.[5] Like many middle-class spinsters, these women were often dangerously poor and thought to have psychological problems stemming from their presumed unwanted status. That was about all they had in common with the average spinster. According to all reports and dramatizations, foreign girls were crude, illiterate, and extremely rude in what accented English they possessed. They spoke back to men. They walked the streets as they chose, unescorted and, as we shall see, improperly dressed. In the views of one nineteenth-century British visitor, the American working girl presented a moral calamity that, considering the temptations of New York, could prove even more disastrous than the English model. As he wrote in 1870, “They are neither fitted for wives by a due regard for the feelings and wishes of their husbands, nor a knowledge of the simple rudiments of housekeeping… one of their common remarks to each other when speaking of [men]… is that they would like to see a man who would [not] boss them.”
That, at least, was the communal fantasy. In truth, many of these girls, especially the newly arrived, lived quietly with their families. The emphasis was on work, usually “out work,” freelance piece sewing that brought in pennies—if the sewn pieces fit those in some unseen larger batch; if the home workers were not undercut by aggressive family groups equipped with sewing machines; and if everyone stayed healthy and could switch off during the night to meet deadlines.
By 1860, single working women formed one quarter of the total U.S. workforce and not only in home-based seamstressing. When they’d been around a while, girls fourteen years and up might find work in factories; others—usually the Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians—worked as maids. Whatever they did, they returned home after twelve-hour workdays, to a series of mandatory female chores. At the end of the week these girls were further expected to turn over all outside earnings to parents, pay envelope unopened. (The practice was never enforced among boys.) Worse—although girls argued the point—was getting by on your own.
For her book City of Women, scholar and urban detective Christine Stansell studied the New York City census for 1855 and found that of 400 single women surveyed, 224 lived on their own, somehow stretching three to four dollars per week to finance a tiny space in a boardinghouse or a bed in a dorm or, worse, an almshouse, what would look to us like a homeless shelter. In that same year it was estimated that close to 500 single women and young girls arrived in New York City every week, not only Europeans but Asians and “country girls” who’d run off from Upstate New York or Pennsylvania farms.
Alone, unsure what to do, some became “learners,” a misleading term for slavelike seamstresses who worked fifteen hours a day, six days a week, receiving in exchange only meals on the days they worked. To pay rent somewhere and to feed themselves on Sundays, learners had no choice but to double as prostitutes. Others were able to bypass “learning” and work for a few dollars a week in sweatshops, small makeshift factories hidden within tenement houses, but very few got by without occasional hooking. Others made their way up to the big shops—the factories, where they worked as bookbinders, fancy-hat or artificial-flower makers (good jobs, relatively speaking), or as inside seamstresses, cigar makers, shoe manufacturers, button or box makers.
Like the tenement sweatshop, the factory was a workplace nightmare, only bigger. In a space the size of a gymnasium, hundreds of women crowded almost on top of one another around tables or hulking machinery. They worked at their manual tasks for hours with only minutes-long breaks. The air seemed to be clotted, and the noise—like that of an indoor construction site—routinely led to partial hearing loss within a year. Many workers had scars on their hands and faces and permanent dye stain on their fingers.
One Christian organization published an end-of-the-year volume on women in the city, 1877. In language that had clearly been translated by an editor into readable English, one girl described her first view of the factory: “I felt within me a deep and dark revulsion at the grim brick walls and the innumerable dirty windows and rusted fire escapes. It looked a ruin. The impulse I had was to run away, but there was a fascination with it, too.”
For a glimpse inside, let’s look at the once scandalous and banned novel Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900). Here we follow Carrie on her first day of work as an ill-equipped new factory operative in Chicago:
Carrie got so [anxious]… that she could scarcely sit still. Her legs began to tire and she felt as if she would give anything to stand up and stretch. Would noon never come? It seemed as if she had worked an entire day already. She was not hungry at all, but weak, and her eyes were tired straining at… one small point… her hands began to ache at the wrists and then in the fingers, and toward the last she seemed a mass of dull complaining muscles, fixed in an eternal position and performing a single mechanical movement which became more and more distasteful until at last it became absolutely nauseating.
Women staged “sit-downs” and actually went on strike—for better pay, windows, some form of toilet facilities, regular breaks—as early as 1825, but with little success. The only organized labor power lay in the male unions, and these groups, run like fraternal orders, excluded females. In the idealized social scheme, women were supposed to quit their paid jobs and go back to the home, resurrecting some shred of the former preindustrial order. (In fact, the only union discussions of working women early on concerned prostitution.) Working women knew where they stood—and that was alone. During their first major strikes leaders declined all advice offered by men.
But as much as the factories were filthy and dangerous, they offered girls something unavailable anywhere else, and that was companionship, the social connections that might lead to some small life beyond the family or the tiny room. On many floors in the needle trades, in the book binderies and cigar lofts, girls sang as they worked (a favorite: “The Fatal Wedding”). They shouted the latest gossip above the noise. A heavily grease-stained volume, The Lucky Dreambook, made its way around and girls recorded their wishes. And many read, or learned to read, from “yellowbacks,” early romance novels with titles like Woven on Fate’s Loom or Lost in a Fearful Fate’s Abyss.
The factory served as an unintentional means of assimilation. Irish, Jewish, Italian, Hungarian, Greek girls—well, some of them, anyway—learned to work together, the older girls offering linguistic corrections and lessons in the sartorial tricks that could make one look like an American. Ignoring management, girls ran secret contests and lotteries and held parties on their breaks for almost every occasion. The last survivor of the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911 recalled recently that when the fire broke out on floor six, the girls there had just lit the candles on a cake—a coworker was getting engaged! Quickly they scattered; the survivor, who’d somehow make her way to a staircase, looked around for her engaged friend and saw her standing by a window. When she looked away and then back, the girl was gone; like hundreds of others, she had jumped.
There was only one decent thing to be said for factory life: There were set hours. The workday started, you rang in (“punched in”), and you rang out. You were, in the words of one domestic who knew no such luck, an “independent.” Life for the domestic, usually an Irish girl—74 percent of all Irish girls in 1855 and an even higher percentage in 1870 worked as maids—was erratic. Their lists of tasks were long and often incomprehensible, involving both heavy labor and the care of clocks and Victorian music boxes and sculptures and various other precious objects they’d never before even seen. Newly stamped with her True Woman status, the wife, said one laboring girl, seemed never “to know what she wants done and how does she want it done? So she changes it ’round all the time and it’s you who gets the shriek, like a bloody animal, if you’re wrong in figuring what she wanted.”
5
The majority of applicants turned back at Ellis Island were unable to prove that they had waiting relatives. Either that, or they had physical problems (usually eye trouble) and/or mental disorders. Being female and single—and especially if there were no waiting relatives—was at times as incriminating as rheumy eyes. Many, many lone female travelers were sent back.