Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [39]
GETTING HOOKED
No matter how comfortable she felt out promenading, the Bowery girl, like any woman on the streets, was likely to be viewed as a “vagabond,” a potential prostitute dressed not for an evening out but for work. The associations between prostitution and lone women were so deeply embedded in the culture that women themselves often assumed that their peers, other gals they happened to pass on the street, were on the make. Even a girl stuck at home, guarded by a tyrannical father, could easily adopt that view based on the stories she read. Novels and magazines were filled with tales of prostitutional woe; periodicals seemed to run entire tales-of-woe sections. Here, from a newspaper account, is the testimony of one landlady who’d lost a tenant to the streets:
I seen her. ’A tiltin’ off her head, to sees up and back on the street…this girl, ’corse, she’d ’a lived in my old house. I felt turrible about her leaving…a house that she know’d was decent and where she could manage to live within her means…she was good when she came to this house. When I seen her that day I tried to get her to come. Coffee. She looked almost grateful…but she saw a man…and turned on me and raced to do what she would.
In fact, it was extremely difficult to assess who was a real sex professional. During the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth, prostitution fell under the criminal heading of “vagrancy.” Vagrancy, as then defined, meant loitering—standing or else walking up and back along a stretch of sidewalk. (Mothers, waiting to cross streets, were anxious to keep their girls moving lest they seem “loitery.”) Vagrancy arrests more than doubled between 1850 and 1860, but how many of these related to prostitution and how many were the result of more girls simply out on the street, it’s hard to say.
Like other cities, New York had a long tradition of hysterical estimates. In 1832 the evangelical Magdalene Society wrote in its annual report: “We have satisfactorily ascertained the fact that the numbers of females in this city, who abandon themselves to prostitution is not less than 10,000!” Throughout the mid-nineteenth century the Ladies’ Industrial Association, an early union, with almost all the city papers concurring, would claim that poor girls were turning in desperation to the street or low houses at rates approaching, roughly, 50,000 to 100,000 per year. The Justice Department predicted that by 1910 the figures would rise to 200,000 nationwide, and New York City, of course, would hold its own.
The obvious fact was that no one could live on two dollars a week—the typical salary—or even on a generous raise to four dollars or, if she was very lucky, seven. In 1870 the Herald estimated that 5 to 10 percent of all young working women made extra money by hooking, treating it as an adjunct to their jobs, although most sources, the Herald included, believed that the majority did not take it up as a career. But so hopeful a conclusion was open to ongoing debate.
In The Women of New York, or Social Life in the Great City (1870, “with numerous engravings”), George Ellington, wealthy man-about-town and writer, told the whole story, cold. In a chapter entitled “Women of Pleasure,” he ran through what a girl could earn for sex in all kinds of situations. On the street, if she survived, she could make per session what a factory girl made during a week, roughly three to four dollars. In the “disorderly” houses, usually down by the seaport, arrangements were made on the spot, while at the merely down-at-the-heels parlor houses, pay ran at ten dollars a week and at the cleaner ones reached twenty to twenty-five. More respectable parlor houses paid live-in girls up to seventy dollars a week. At the elite houses the women—white