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Periodicals:

“The Old Maid of the Family—A Sketch of Human Life,” Atheneum, no. 3 (January 1830); J. A. Turner, “Link Not Thy Fate to His,” Peterson’s (Apr. 1859); “A Woman Alone: Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Spinsterhood in Nineteenth-Century America,” New England Quarterly, vol. 51 (1978); Elizabeth Meriweather Gilmer, “The Unglorified Spinster,” Cosmopolitan (May 1907); Francis Power Cobbe, “What Shall We Do With Our Old Maids?” Fraser’s, no. 66, (1862); “Why Is Single Life Becoming More General?” The Nation (1868); Molly Haskell, “Paying Homage to the Spinster,” The New York Times Magazine (May 1988).

The cult of true womanhood/domesticity:

Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly, no. XVII (1966); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New Eng land, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982); Glenna Matthews, Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

Memoirs and essays:

Marian Governeur, As I Remember: Recollections of American Society During the Nineteenth Century (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1911); Domingo Sarmiento, Michael Rockland, ed. and trans., Travels in the United States in 1847 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970); Elizabeth Lynn Linton, The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays (London: Richard and Bentley, 1883) and Modern Women and What Is Said of Them (New York: Redfield, 1868); Natalie Dana, Young in New York: A Memoir of a Victorian Girlhood (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963); Hazel Hunton, Pantaloons and Petticoats: The Diary of a Young Woman (New York: Field, 1950); Edith Wharton, A Backwards Glance (New York: D. Appleton and Co., Century, 1934).

CHAPTER 2: THE SINGLE STEPS OUT

On working women in general and their economic status in the United States:

Lynn Y. Weiner, From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Alice Kessler Harris, History of Wage Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). On male attitudes about organized female labor, specifically the idea that men, not women, had to support what would be recognized as a “family,” see Martha May, “Bread Before Roses: American Workingmen, Labor Unions, and the Family Wage,” part of the larger, very useful Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women’s Labor History, Ruth Milkman, ed. (New York: Routledge Publishing, 1985); Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York: Pantheon, 1977).

On immigration:

Hasia R. Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Sidney Stahl Steinberg, The World of Our Mothers: The Lives of Jewish Immigrant Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto: Studies of the Jewish Quarter in New York (1902; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); Maxine Seller, ed., Immigrant Women (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981); portions of Susan Ware, ed., Modern American Women: A Documentary History (Chicago: Dorsey, 1989); the classic, still viable New York story, Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Scribner’s, 1890), and Robert Hunter, Poverty (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1904), about Chicago; Henry Roth, Call it Sleep (New York: Random House, 1937).

Factory life and domestic service:

An extraordinary overview of women working in nineteenth-century New York is Christine Stansell, City of Women (New York: Knopf, 1986). The book tracks the long