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By Root 1430 0

problems stemming from their presumed unwanted status. That was about all they had in common with the average spinster. According to all reports and dramatizations, foreign girls were crude, illiterate, and extremely rude in what accented English they possessed. They spoke back to men. They walked the streets as they chose, unescorted and, as we shall see, improperly dressed. In the views of one nineteenth-century British visitor, the American working girl presented a moral calamity that, considering the temptations of New York, could prove even more disastrous than the English model. As he wrote in 1870, “They are neither fitted for wives by a due regard for the feelings and wishes of their husbands, nor a knowledge of the simple rudiments of housekeeping…one of their common remarks to each other when speaking of [men]…is that they would like to see a man who would [not] boss them.”

That, at least, was the communal fantasy. In truth, many of these girls, especially the newly arrived, lived quietly with their families. The emphasis was on work, usually “out work,” freelance piece sewing that brought in pennies—if the sewn pieces fit those in some unseen larger batch; if the home workers were not undercut by aggressive family groups equipped with sewing machines; and if everyone stayed healthy and could switch off during the night to meet deadlines.

By 1860, single working women formed one quarter of the total U.S. workforce and not only in home-based seamstressing. When they’d been around a while, girls fourteen years and up might find work in factories; others—usually the Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians—worked as maids. Whatever they did, they returned home after twelve-hour workdays, to a series of mandatory female chores. At the end of the week these girls were further expected to turn over all outside earnings to parents, pay envelope unopened. (The practice was never enforced among boys.) Worse—although girls argued the point—was getting by on your own.

For her book City of Women, scholar and urban detective Christine Stansell studied the New York City census for 1855 and found that of 400 single women surveyed, 224 lived on their own, somehow stretching three to four dollars per week to finance a tiny space in a boardinghouse or a bed in a dorm or, worse, an almshouse, what would look to us like a homeless shelter. In that same year it was estimated that close to 500 single women and young girls arrived in New York City every week, not only Europeans but Asians and “country girls” who’d run off from Upstate New York or Pennsylvania farms.

Alone, unsure what to do, some became “learners,” a misleading term for slavelike seamstresses who worked fifteen hours a day, six days a week, receiving in exchange only meals on the days they worked. To pay rent somewhere and to feed themselves on Sundays, learners had no choice but to double as prostitutes. Others were able to bypass “learning” and work for a few dollars a week in sweatshops, small makeshift factories hidden within tenement houses, but very few got by without occasional hooking. Others made their way up to the big shops—the factories, where they worked as bookbinders, fancy-hat or artificial-flower makers (good jobs, relatively speaking), or as inside seamstresses, cigar makers, shoe manufacturers, button or box makers.

Like the tenement sweatshop, the factory was a workplace nightmare, only bigger. In a space the size of a gymnasium, hundreds of women crowded almost on top of one another around tables or hulking machinery. They worked at their manual tasks for hours with only minutes-long breaks. The air seemed to be clotted, and the noise—like that of an indoor construction site—routinely led to partial hearing loss within a year. Many workers had scars on their hands and faces and permanent dye stain on their fingers.

One Christian organization published an end-of-the-year volume on women in the city, 1877. In language that had clearly been translated by an editor into readable English, one girl described her first view of the factory: “I felt within