Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [28]
The activist Frances Power Cobbe wrote in 1869, “Yes, the old maid will suffer a solitary old age as the bachelor must. It will go hard. But,” she added, “she will find a woman ready to share it.”
CHAPTER TWO
THE SINGLE STEPS OUT: BOWERY GALS, SHOPPIES, AND THE BOHEMIAN BACHELORETTE
I do love it—me makin’ a spectacle ’o myself…but that’s how it is now: [I’m] an American girl in her finery and telling the men “where d’ you get off?”
—IRISH DOMESTIC TURNED “FREE WORKING GIRL,” 1871
Here is the work-a-day fact: No one knows where you came from, no body knows where you go.
—THE LONG DAY, BY DOROTHY RICHARDSON, 1905
…Your white collar girls?…I see them on buses, poor damned share croppers in the Dust Bowl of business, putting up a fight in their pretty clothes and keeping their heeby-jeebies to themselves. There’s something so courageous about it, it hurts me inside.
—KITTY, EN ROUTE TO WORK, KITTY FOYLE
A GAL’S LIFE
Picture a silent-movie set in the heart of Manhattan’s old Lower East Side, scene one, twilight. We pan across the tenements and laundry lines and see what we expect to see: a tangle of peddler’s carts, drunk, disheveled men, and large-bosomed women surrounded by animals and children who race like little Artful Dodgers in and out of the crowd. Making her way slowly through this mess is a girl. The camera picks her out, follows her, and slowly irises in to frame her face. Highlighted in her cinematic bubble, our girl twists a thinning gray scarf around her neck. Her face is chalky pale. Kohl liner has smudged to form half moons beneath her eyes. She looks ready to faint.
Back in the full shot that is her world, she limps along, past the garbage and the gangs of rude, hissing boys, and stops at last outside a windowless structure. Cut to the crumbly interior. The exhausted girl enters, then does what she’s supposed to do and faints. Plaster drops like snow onto her face. Cue the villain.
Most likely she knows him, this man now staring down at her, assessing his options. (Clearly going for help will not be one of them.) He shakes her, slaps her a few times, then with a quick look around props her up against a wall and lifts her skirts. The rest we don’t see, but we know that whatever went on it was her fault, for she lives a depraved unnatural female life in a harsh, cold world that has depleted whatever slight moral fiber she had to start with.
At about the time our spinster was canonized as an unfortunate social specimen, there appeared on the female landscape an even more unsettling single girl: the “factory maid” and her salacious cousin “the Bowery gal.” These new single icons were identified and dissected in the penny press. They later became the heroines of cheap novels, live points of interest in city guidebooks as well as characters in early vaudeville. This depraved and unnatural female, the poor thing preyed on by horny landlords, would become a staple of the new aesthetic form known as melodrama. She was born to fade to black.
The Bowery and factory gals were immigrants, part of the European exodus that had begun during the 1820s and increased radically every fifteen years thereafter. (In 1830, for example, there were an estimated 18,000 new Americans—Germans, Italians, Poles, Scots, Irish, Greeks. By 1845, the number stood at roughly 250,000.) As one commentator put it, Europe had “vomited.”
And it spit up increasingly undesirable transplants, meaning eastern European Jews and unwed women.* Like many middle-class spinsters, these women were often dangerously poor and thought to have psychological