Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [36]
Everyone secretly longed to see what was out there. Many girls had spent their childhoods walking the neighborhood, peeking out at the world from behind packages and bundles of fabric they were bringing home for their mothers. At seventeen or at twenty-one, they were ready to go out. One young girl, nineteen, told the Herald: “All the waiting to go out and see people, to be brave enough to do it, to walk outside. Yes, we all heard about it; I don’t think any of us even imagined we would do it—go to a dance with two girls from the floor?…It was a very long time to tell mother. Mother did not have many pleasures in her life…. I was very worried of how I would dress.”
The only drawback was that these adventures and outings cost money. Girls never had enough. They didn’t make it, and what they made they “handed over.” Boys had the cash, and the crude equation came down to this: Girls who wanted to go out, who finally got up the nerve, understood that they’d be “treated.” The boy would pay her way. If this was not the first “treat”—if she’d walked out with him before, accepted ice cream or drinks, or gone with him to a park or a play—he’d expect some form of sex in return. And often he just took it. The girl who experienced these pleasures, this slight sense of freedom, also ran the risk of the murky occurrence now known as date rape.
The most infamous “treating” episode concerned Lanah Sawyer, a young woman who accepted the offer of treats—ice cream and a walk around the Battery—from a refined professional man who called himself “lawyer Smith.” His name was in fact Harry Bedlow, widely known to others as a “rascal” and “rake.” Afterward, he offered to walk Sawyer home and lured her instead into a bawdy house, where he raped her. At his trial, Bedlow was found not guilty in fifteen minutes. Despite the minor riot that followed—and some of the rioters were working-class men—the general consensus was that both had played their parts in the script. He had taken her out, treated her, bought her trifles, then taken what he deserved in return. In the “commercial culture of leisure” rape (and acquittal) would become a recurrent motif.
In the “old” countries, girls had moved seamlessly from the father’s house, perhaps briefly to an employer’s, and then to the husband’s. Usually the family knew the fiancé and his parents; marriages were often arranged. In the new world, and in its odd new single sector, girls would soon wander off in gangs to the Bowery, to the crowds and dance halls, so that their families could not possibly oversee whom they met or what they did. And men in New York City seemed less reliable than they had back home; they moved on—to other women, to other jobs outside the city.
As Christine Stansell wrote, in City of Women, “As people moved around…from the Old World to the New…and from country to city…and [amidst] the mobile and anonymous circumstances of the city…methods of ensuring male responsibility weakened.”
The most extreme example of this breakdown was the Alma Sands case. Sands was a Quaker girl who lived with her parents and took an interest in the family’s boarder, one Eli Weeks. The two slept together—not unusual in certain Old Country courtship systems; in fact, it was viewed as a sign of the couple’s seriousness and especially the commitment of the prospective bridegroom. Then, on the night before she was supposed to marry Eli Weeks, Alma Sands turned up dead. After weeks of wild public speculation, a jury indicted Weeks, describing him as a man who understood the depth of his commitment—an engagement—and in “fury” at “his unbearable promises” took unique, punishing measures to break free.
The Sands murder evoked a response similar to the hysteria surrounding the 1969 Manson murders. Everyone talked about it in gory detail and traded in rumors about witchcraft and satanic practices. Hundreds lined up to see the house where it occurred and, later, to see the girl