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Added another girl, nineteen: “I would always rather work with a man. They know what they want done and you do it.”

Yet the True Woman had a hard time comprehending why such a girl, known among employers as a “Bridget,” would not be grateful. As Catherine Beecher herself wrote: “We are continually harrowed with tales of the sufferings of distressed needlewomen and yet women will encounter these chances of ruin and starvation rather than make up their mind to permanent domestic service. Now what is the matter with domestic service?”

One Bridget explained: “Your life is not your own unless she says it is. She will always think of some other trifle task.”

This barely concealed hostility made wives suspicious of their Bridgets and far more likely to watch them closely for any change in attitude and appearance. Even observers like Catherine Beecher picked up on the growing tendency of maids to leave work in fancy clothes. And reports filtered back that such and such a girl had been seen down the street with a man. In England there had been a brief fad among newly prosperous matrons to have their servants look prosperous, too. But here, in the States, newly monied women were often insecure; a servant who put on airs was likely to be disciplined. No fancy clothes. Not a hint of cosmetics. No men picking her up from the kitchen door. “Hah!” one girl told a female reformer: “She is daft. What man would I want to have come to pick me up here anyways? Why would I want to have him see me here? To think that the best I can do is work in someone’s kitchen?”

Employers complained about the “servant problem” and the girls quit and went looking for a better place, but the situation never seemed to improve. In 1863 reformer Virginia Penny published the first edition of Employments of Women, for decades the most detailed listing of every job available to women, complete with technical workplace advice. (For example, in factories, “women should not wear hoops, as they check the progress of all whom they meet, in narrow passes and between machinery.”) About “serving girls” she agreed, they are “generally and unhesitatingly denounced, even in their presence, as pests and curses.”

For the average working girl, the logical conclusion to life was still in marriage, usually arranged or at least encouraged by the available relatives. If there was no immediate male candidate, elders of the community turned to the “homeland” or “exile” organizations that helped with the perplexing details of American life, including housing protocol, insurance, written English, and various legal matters. Quickly, however, many girls came to view the community’s Landsmanshaft balls, with their predictable collection of boys, or the yearly Oktoberfest outing the way an American mall rat might react to sitting through a four-hour plenary session of the Kiwanis Club. Once a girl had “got out” a bit, seen even a tiny slice of the city, its elaborate, romantic store windows, the neat pretty clothes on the shop girls, once she had read the sexy novels at work, sung the songs, she felt like doing something…new. One Grand Street sign put it this way:

WOMEN, WANT! PLEASE, PLEASE WANT—BEGIN TO WANT!

ALL THE NEWS THAT FIT HER (AND SOME THAT DIDN’T)

The early New York press concerned itself largely with business. Editors and publishers were there to cover an international seaport, a vast manufacturing sector, the hub of the nation’s transportation systems and its highest financial institutions. The papers they put out reflected that solemn responsibility: The Commercial Advertiser, Mercantile Adviser, and, among many others, The Journal of Commerce. Other less illustrious papers covered topics of more general interest: riots, fires, strikes, sex scandals, murders in seafront “bawdy houses,” and the discoveries of badly mutilated dead prostitutes.

There were hundreds of papers in any given year, including by the mid-nineteenth century the New York Times and the New York Post. But for the purpose of identifying, covering, and ultimately mythologizing