THE GIRL AND THE LOOKING GLASS: Truly I was a sorry-looking object. Had not been well washed or combed since the last morning… I had forgotten my gloves, a brand-new pair, too; my handkerchief, and most needful of all else, my ribbon stock collar, without which my neck rose horribly long and thin above my dusty jacket…. I began to feel for the first time what was for meat least the quintessence of poverty—the absolute impossibility of personal cleanliness and of decent raiment…. I was combing my heavy hair using a small side comb I wore to keep it up.
Soon after publishing The Long Day, Dorothy Richardson was revealed to have worked six years as a reporter and freelancer for the Herald, which had serialized her book. But she defended herself. As she publicly explained, she had indeed come to New York years before and, for years after, had worked in factories, laundries, and as she put it, “worse by far.” She worked her way out, thanks to a friend she’d met in a boardinghouse. With this woman’s help, Richardson got a job in a store and worked her way up to the near-exalted position of coffee-machine demonstrator.
She liked writing and sent in stories about her life to magazines and papers; eventually she landed a job writing society announcements at the Herald. She took on the massive task of “writing my life” without a firm assignment. On her own time, she went back to the factories, undercover, revisiting and “bringing more up to date” the scenes she had witnessed years before. Her story was part autobiography, part investigative reporting, and the end result, she believed, a truthful portrait.
Not everyone believed her story—not the train ride or the crummy houses and the fire, which was in particular an obvious plot point in melodramatic narratives. As additional evidence of deceit, many cited her middle-class disdain for factory colleagues. As she wrote, “Most girls could not work properly. They did not know how to work… there was something imbecilic in them…. They were female creatures doomed from their mothers’ wombs. Physically, mentally, morally doomed.” She further noted an excess of bulging foreheads, eyes placed too close together, outsized noses, and as “kind words butter no parsnips,” she was quick to point out how many seemed headed for the Tenderloin, an area west of Sixth Avenue stretching up to Thirty-fourth Street and rapidly becoming the city’s hub of prostitution.
In 1900, one in five American women worked, together accounting for 18 percent of the country’s labor force. (It’s unclear if that figure included underaged workers; another common statistic claimed that 40 percent of all unwed daughters fourteen or older worked outside the home.) In 1910, in New York City alone, 34 percent of all women went to work every day. And many worked in the way Dorothy Richardson described. Regardless of how she collected her data—and I believe her explanation—her account stands among the most vivid and chilling records we have of the single-girl working life.
THE GIRL BEHIND THE COUNTER
During the mid-nineteenth century, Arena magazine published one of many stories extolling the miracles of the Boston factory system and its 60,000 inhabitants, with special emphasis on the famed “Lowell girls.” Compared with the 600,000 slaves of the disparate, confused New York system, the Lowell enterprise sounded like girls’ camp. The girls had their own dorms or cabins. They took classes, and they were so grateful, so content, that they published a newspaper, the Lowell Offering, filled with essays, poems, and songs. Of course the most memorable Lowell anthem was the one girls enthusiastically performed when on strike. Dressed in white muslins and boaters, they’d walk hours singing, “Oh, isn’t it a shame… that such a pretty girl as I, should be locked inside a factory and left alone to die! Oh, I will not be a slave! I will not be a slave!”
It was clear that management had never spent much time on “the campus.” Lowell dorms held ten or twelve girls to a small room, three or four sharing beds. The so-called classes met sporadically and covered rote topics of etiquette. But the details didn’t matter. The owners had found a way to keep their business and their employees locked in one place—a feat impossible to accomplish in New York City.
Getting to the point, however, the Arena author noted that New York did indeed have its advantages. “With fewer class markers,” he wrote, New Yorkers were “sometime[s] likely to strike ‘a middle ground’… create… a class between…. Not the wretches of factories and sweatshops… nor the poor but morally upstanding widow. We shall see if this new type—the girl of the great shops—fares better than her predecessors.”
A new type, perhaps an entire social class, of working woman! They quickly became known as Shop Girls, or Shoppies: young, white, usually American-born, and thus ideal candidates to stand behind a counter and sell dry goods, which meant, for a female employee, to fetch them and show them to wealthy customers. In exchange for these efforts, the shop girl received little more than her factory cousins. But the view from her place at the counter was a world away from Ludlow and Grand and Delancey Streets.
The mid-to-late nineteenth century stands out as the World’s Fair age of high-end retailing. Palatial stores, among them Siegel-Cooper, A. T. Stewart, Lord & Taylor, B. Altman, and Arnold Constable, sold extensive merchandise from around the globe in settings that might have vied for the title Most Exotic and Most Bizarre. Every store had live orchestras, waterfalls, a Persian-or Japanese-or Dutch-themed tearoom, and alternating special attractions—tableaux vivants, ice-skating rinks, carousels. Sometimes there was a stocked pond and, in more than one establishment, live strolling peacocks. The King’s Handbook of New York, 1893, asked, “What are the Parisian Boulevards or even Regent Street to this magnificent panorama of mercantile display?” My favorite description comes from the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who called the department store “both a landscape and a room.”
Together, these grand department stores formed “Ladies’ Mile,” a stretch of Broadway and Sixth Avenue, beginning at Ninth Street with Stewart’s and ending at Twenty-third Street with Stern Brothers. The ladies themselves arrived in shifts. The morning crew, usually with maids in tow, came determined to shop. They stayed on and were joined by hundreds of others for lunch, some of whom might stay around for the elaborate late-afternoon tea service. The daily promenade had expanded to fill all the time available.
For the girls who staffed the enterprise, however, life was far from glamorous. The standard-issue shop uniform—a bust-hugging shirtwaist and a long cinched skirt—was so tight that even standing still in it required effort. And salesgirls often stood in the same place for six hours at a stretch without moving. For this they earned between five and seven dollars a week, depending on how long they’d been there and how good a record they’d kept (attitude, neatness, sales). Less visible—and less well paid at three dollars per week—were the wrappers and stock girls who moved on ladders for hour upon hour at the back. Cash girls, or runners, most of them very young, received two dollars a week. In all jobs, but especially those at the counter, girls were instructed to control their facial expressions. There was a point in a transaction at which she smiled; at other times, she was impassive.