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climb up from piece or “out” work to factory work (and includes a fascinating discus sion of how one patriarchal system—in the home—was simply substituted with another in the factory). It is invaluable as a study of Bowery culture, the rackets, prostitution, and attitudes about domestic work. Virginia Penny’s original Employments of Women, A Cyclopedia of Women’s Work: How Women Can Make Money Married or Single (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1863) literally lists the thousands of jobs a woman did or might do during the Civil War era. If a woman earned a dime doing it, it’s in here. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986) is the best overall examination of the “culture of commercial leisure” (her phrase) and the dangers of the new, unsupervised world of dance halls and amusement parks and the practice of treating.

“The Story of a Sweatshop Girl,” originally printed in Independent, no. 55 (1902) and reprinted in David Katzman and William Tuttle, eds., Plain Folk: The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Benita Eisler, ed., The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women 1840–1845 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1977); Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood (1889; Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973); Bessie and Marie Van Vorst, The Woman Who Toils: Being the Experience of Two Ladies as Factory Girls (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1903); Alvin F. Harlow, Old Bowery Days (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1931); David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (London: Ox ford University Press, 1978). In Clara E. Laughlin, The Work-a-Day Girl: A Study of Some Present-Day Conditions (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1913), each chapter is an in-depth report on one of many lowly jobs. The book is illustrated with precise black-and-white photographs of lone working women; Hutchins Hapgood, Types from City Streets (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1910); Garry Gaines, The American Girl of the Period: Her Ways and Views (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1878); Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt, Making Both Ends Meet: The Income and Outlay of New York Working Girls (New York: MacMillan, 1911); Esther Packard, A Study of Living Conditions of Self-Supporting Women in New York City (New York: Metropolitan Board of the Young Women’s Christian Association, 1915); Carol B. Schoen, Anzia Yezierska (Boston: Twayne, 1982); Louise Henrikson, Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life (Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, Young Working Girls: A Summary of Evidence from Two Thousand Social Workers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913); Derek and Julia Parker, The Natural History of the Chorus Girl (London: David and Charles, 1975).

Store and office culture:

Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); “‘The Customers Ain’t God’: The World Culture of Department-Store Saleswomen,” in Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds., Working-Class America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); John William Ferry, The History of the Department Store (New York: Macmillan, 1960); Robert Hendrickson, The Grand Emporiums: The Illustrated History of America’s Great Department Stores (New York: Stein and Day, 1979); Lisa M. Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870–1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Helen Woodward, a successful advertising woman who began as a secretary, argued that stenography was “a woman’s shortest cut to a big job,” in Through Many Windows (New York: Harper Brothers, 1926); Grace Dodge, A Bundle of Letters (New York/London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1887); Florence Wenderoth Saunders, Letters to a Business Girl: A Woman in the World of Business (“…replete with Practical Information Regarding the Perplexing Problems of a Girl Stenographer…”) (Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1908);