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The girls thought so.

As I’ve said, few girls made their way to the Bowery—not at first. (Even the ones who went to gape at Broadway were usually home by eight, telling wholesome lies to parents who could not begin to understand this new scheme.) The bold ones who “walked out” were usually, like the b’hoys, transplanted Irish—tough, independent, a bit hotheaded. An estimated eight out of ten young Irish girls had come, some alone, to the United States as family scouts. They sent for their relatives, as many as they could, using the pay they made as domestics.

Friday nights were a release, and all over the “east end” one might view “a continuous procession,” as George G. Foster wrote, “which loses itself gradually in the innumerable side streets leading…into the unknown regions of Proletarianism.” The girls busily losing themselves had dressed ecstatically. Using magazine illustrations, inexpensive patterns, or improvisation, the Bowery gals put their seamstressing skills to work and made dresses that paid homage to uptown fashions. Then, as if the dress was a cake, they decorated it. They loved notions: fancy buttons, lots of lace, ribbons, bows, fake-silk sashes, any small inexpensive item they could afford. One observer reported that these had no “particular degree of correspondence or relationship in color—indeed [it was common to] see…startling contrasts…a light pink contrasting with a deep blue, a bright yellow with a brighter red, and a green with a dashing purple or maroon.”

The Bowery girl declared her independence from proper female decorum by appearing in public without a hat. All good women wore hats. The only exceptions were prostitutes, who needed open faces to make eye contact with prospective johns. Proper women went further and trimmed their expensive hats with veils and, below, wore heavy clothing to cover every imaginable body part. Skirts were worn so long for a while that it was a class marker, a sign of breeding, to have a strip of mud on one’s hem. (It meant that one had been out, appropriately dressed, promenading, stepping into and out of a coach.)

Excluding the reform set, the suffragists, the bohemians, and the “aberrant” (for example, the Lucy Stoners, women who fought to keep their names after marriage), prominent women went out for walks, or promenades, at appointed hours. They shopped, had their lunches and tea dates, then, as if returning from an afternoon shore leave, scurried home quickly with muddy hems. (That is, unless they had a planned assignation; certain madams in the best, least suspicious of brownstones catered exclusively to upper-class women and their lovers.) Occasionally, through the veil of her hat, a woman caught a glimpse of a g’hal, known to her as a servant, wearing…the Lord knew what.

As one remarked, “The washerwoman’s…attire is now like that of the merchant’s wife…and the blackboot’s daughter wears a bonnet made like that of the empress of the French.”

The true Bowery g’hal liked to look at least as outlandish as her evening’s companion, the b’hoy, who had a very clear idea of how his date should appear. Those in the Bowery fraternity, it may fairly be said, worshipped themselves. They spent much of their time watching plays and theatricals devoted to their own exploits as firefighting heroes and rulers supreme of the boulevard. Many of these lengthy epics, performed at the Bowery Theater, concerned a legendary firefighting hero called Mose, a John Henry/Paul Bunyan type who could walk through flames and had with him at all times his proportionately sized woman, Lize. Every Bowery girl wanted to be a beloved, tough-looking Lize. Every “reporter” out on the Bowery hoped to find one.

“Her very walk has a swing of mischief and defiance in it,” wrote George G. Foster of the Bowery girl; Abram Dayton noted, “Her gait and swing were studied imitations of her lord and master, and she trips by the side of her beau ideal with an air which plainly says, ‘I know no fear and I ask no favor.’”

One less sympathetic writer characterized