ONE VERY LONG DAY
There are few extant records of the working girl’s life, whether she spent it working in a brothel, a factory, or both. Because of language barriers, illiteracy, or all-out exhaustion, very few of the earliest single girls took many notes.
It’s a real discovery, then, to come across The Long Day (1905), a vivid diary reworked in prose form by a young woman named Dorothy Richardson. Her story begins on a train as she travels from rural Pennsylvania to New York City, where she arrives “an unskilled, friendless, almost penniless girl of 18… a stranger in a strange city.” There is but one thought in her head, which she repeats like a mantra: “work or starve, work or starve.”
Some selections:
DAY ONE, 6 A.M.: I had written the YWCA some weeks before as to respectable cheap boarding houses…. Was this it?… I jumped out of bed…there was a little puddle of water in the middle of the floor under the skylight, and the drip had brushed against… my shirtwaist and soaked into the soles of my only pair of shoes.
MEET THE NEIGHBORS: Breakfast consisted of heterogeneous little dabs of things… [I turned] my observations… to the people at my table…an old woman [who had] difficulty in making food reach the mouth… a little fidgety stupid-looking and very ugly woman… and a young girl who seemed to be dancing in her seat beside me.
HAVE YE WORK?: Advertisements for cigar and cigarette workers were numerous, accordingly I applied to the foreman of a factory at Avenue A who wanted “bunch makers.” He cut me off, asking to see my working card; when I looked at him blankly, he strode away in disgust. Nothing daunted me for I meant to be very energetic and brave…. I went to the next factory. They wanted labelers… this sounded easy… I approached the foreman…. He asked for my experience. “Sorry we’re not running a Kindergarten here.”
DAY TWO: “Girls wanted to learn binding and folding—paid while learning!” The address took me to Brooklyn Bridge and down a strange dark thoroughfare… zigzag alleys wrigg[ling] through a great bridge arch into a world of book-binderies…. Supervisor civil. He did not need girls until Monday, but he told me to come back then and bring a bone paper cutter. Might find something better.
DAY THREE: I found it! Salesladies—experience not necessary—Brooklyn. Lindbloom’s. After much dickering, Mr. L. and wife decided I’d do on $3 a week—working from seven until nine in the evening, Saturdays until midnight… if I must Work and Starve, I should not do it in Lindbloom’s.”
In the meantime—day four—the landlady has revealed herself as a religious nut, spying on girls, entering and searching rooms. Our protagonist flees.
TOO DEAD TIRED TO MIND: I had a chance with the janitress of a fourteenth street lodging house. She had a cleft palate, and all I could understand was [it would cost] one dollar a week with light housekeeping… bedtime arrived. I moved closer to the most… mutilated cook-stove that ever cheered the heart of a… “light housekeeper.” …Its little body [was] cracked and rust-eaten—a bright merry little cripple of a stove…. On its front… in broken letters [it said] “Little Lottie.” …Straightaway, Little Lottie gave me an inspiring example of courage and fortitude. Still precaution prompted me… to drag my mother’s trunk against the door… this was the first journey it had made since it carried her bridal finery to and from the Philadelphia Centennial.
NEW MANTRA: How different it all was in reality from what I had imagined it would be!
BOXED IN: The office of E. Springer & Co. was in pleasant contrast… A portly young man who sat behind a glass partition acknowledged my entrance by glancing up…. The man opened the glass door…. Possibly he had seen my chin quiver… and knew that I was ready to cry…. The foreman sent word that No. 105 had not rung up that morning, and that I could have her key. The pay was $3 a week to learners, but Miss Price, the superintendent, thought I could learn in a week’s time… the portly gentleman gave me the key, showed me how to “ring up,” in the register…. henceforth I should be known as “105.”
FIRST DAY OF WORK: Sickly gas jet, and in its flicker a horde of loud-mouthed girls were making frantic efforts to insert their keys into the time-register…. Everyone was late…. I was pushed and punched unmercifully by the crowding elbows, until I found myself squeezed tight against the wall… thread[ing] a narrow passageway in and out the stamping, throbbing machinery…. By the light that filtered through the grimy windows, I got vague confused glimpses of girl faces shining like stars out of this dark, fearful chaos of revolving belts and wheels… through the ramparts of machinery, we entered… Phoebe, a tall girl in tortoise earrings and curl papers, was assigned to “learn” me.
WHAT PHOEBE SAYS: “No apron!… Turn your skirt! The ladies I’m used to working with likes to walk home looking decent and respectable, no difference what they’re like other times.”
WHAT PHOEBE SAYS TO ANY REMARK, MADE BY ANYONE: “HOT A-I-R!”
WHAT THEY DO: …paste slippery strips of muslin over the corners of the rough brown boxes that were piled high about us in frail, tottering towers reaching to the ceiling.
AFTER DOING IT FIVE MINUTES: shoving and shifting and lifting. In order that we not be walled in completely by our cumbersome materials, every few minutes we bore tottering piles across the floor to the “strippers.”
TEN HOURS LATER: Dead tired. The awful noise and confusion, the terrific heat [and] foul smell of the glue, and the agony of breaking ankles and blistered hands seemed almost unendurable.
NUMBER 105 ARRIVES HOME: I stopped myself dead. An older woman said, “Youse didn’t live there, too?” I stood before the mass of red embers… dazed… stupefied… and watched the firemen pour their quenching streams upon the ashes of my lodging house…. Nobody knew anything definite. “Five, ten dead.”
IN A WOMEN’S SHELTER: Whatever is going to become of me? Why in the name of all common sense, had I ever come to New York City? Why was I not content to remain a country school-m’am?
Henrietta, a religious, industrious coworker, hears the story and offers our girl a room. Other workers advise against it; they say Henrietta is strange, not as she seems. But our heroine decides that they, as lazy dopey girls, resent Henrietta for her excellent work habits. Later, walking “home,” our girl begins to suspect that Henrietta does indeed have things to hide. Her house, far to the other side of town, is a squalid firetrap. And there’s a man waiting for them in the room. A religious friend, says Henrietta, though the pious man is… drinking. Our heroine feels as if she’s wandered into an opium den and, terrified, finds that she can barely speak. Henrietta and the pious drinking man go out on an “errand,” leaving our nervous heroine alone to look under the bed, in the closet—where she finds liquor—and finally out the window, where she sees Henrietta walking back now with two men.
Panicked, she flees and in her rush trips over an old woman lying half asleep on the stairs. The woman says she lives there (on the stairs, at least) and sympathizes with the story. In her view, Henrietta is indeed a drunk, a religious nut, and a whore. The old woman and our heroine, “two strange compatriots,” decide to leave the building in search of food, shelter, anything more comforting than where they are. For hours they wander the city, at last reaching Bleecker Street, where they find an all-night cafeteria willing to accept such shabby females. Our heroine uneasily spies a mirror.