Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [34]
Its success—two thousand copies sold in 1854—encouraged penny-press lords to recognize a reader who had even more interest in this female figure than the average male reader. That was the female figure herself.
IN WHICH THE TIRED HUDDLED MASSES FIX THEIR HAIR
The average immigrant working girl lived in two distinct worlds—the world outside and the unavoidable one inside. Reconciling the two demanded a huge amount of mental energy. Girls were under the strictest family scrutiny. And even those who lived in boardinghouses confronted questions: Where had she been and with whom had she spoken? Just who was that man walking up and back across the way? What girls did she know at work, and “what” were they? (German? Jew? Irish? Swede? Slut?)
Anzia Yezierska, a Polish immigrant who wrote stories in Yiddish about ghetto life, focused much of her fiction on the tension between frightened, old-world parents and their newly American daughters. In The Bread Givers, a novel subtitled “A Struggle Between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New,” young women argue repeatedly with their fathers about the right to leave the house on their own. “Don’t you know what’s out there?” one typically bellows. “HOW can I know anything?” replies the girl. In “Fat of the Land,” a short story, a young woman laments the embarrassment she feels when with her mother: “God knows how hard I tried to civilize her so as not to have to blush with shame when I take her anywhere. I dressed her in the most stylish Paris models, but Delancey Street sticks out from every inch of her. Whenever she opens her mouth, I’m done for.”
Yezierska, who’d gone to Hollywood to work as scenarist on the film version of her story collection Hungry Hearts, was known as “the queen of the ghetto” or “the immigrant Cinderella.” She always returned to the Lower East Side and somehow managed to live there in a way unimaginable for most immigrant women. She married twice and had a child, but unable to live a constricted wife’s life, she left the child with her husband and lived alone.
Her gift lay in detailing the generational assimilationist battle but also in revealing the underlying ambivalence felt on all sides. It was never as simple as girls begging to leave and frightened parents shrieking NO! While most immigrant parents feared America and what was “out there,” they also wanted their children to fit in, to make a good life, to marry, and, while keeping the faith and traditions, to do what was needed to thrive. Many new arrivals were urged to bury the wigs, lose the cloggish thicklaced shoes, the shawls and kerchiefs, plus any other article of clothing that reeked of the homeland. One man, age thirty, wrote to a late-arriving cousin, then seventeen: “Don’t take your dresses. Just one to wear…. Ifyou try to wear them here, we will not let you wear them.”
Ultimately, however, it was not that difficult for the young single girl to balance out these demands. That’s because it was impossible to ignore what one called “the Americanist way.” Whatever their inherited ambivalence, young women learned to “want.” They wanted to “put on style,” and they were willing to spend money earmarked for their families to do so. Wrote one factory girl in 1906, “Some of the women blame me very much because I spend so much money on clothes…. but a girl must have clothes if she is to go into society at Ulmer Park or Coney Island or the theater.”
One Sophie Abrams recalls her first real day in America as the day her aunt took her shopping: “She bought me a shirtwaist…a shirt, a blue print with red buttons and a hat like I never seen. I took my old brown dress and shawl and threw them away! I know it sounds foolish, we being so poor, but I didn’t care…. when I looked in the mirror, I said, ‘Boy, Sophie,