Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [40]
Prostitution was a major slice of the underground economy, a fact well known to politicians and the police, who accepted regular payoffs. Many landlords preferred hookers over working-class tenants because they obviously made much more money. (And under common law, owners were not regarded as accessories to a criminal act that happened to take place on their properties.) For a percentage, theater owners allowed prostitutes to see clients in the third-tier balcony. Several of the city’s most exclusive bordellos were run out of luxurious brownstones owned by the Catholic church.
As hierarchical, almost organized as this sounds, there was a randomness to sex work. Women never knew exactly when they’d need to go out there, and many were so terrified by the prospect that they postponed it as long as possible. Here is a recounting of a first time out, an act of enormous desperation, taken from a novel called The G’Hals of New York by Ned Buntline (1850). The story: Mary and Susan, the oldest of several orphaned sisters, are broke and about to be evicted. As a last resort, Mary has miserably agreed to an assignation. It’s dusk when she leaves. Susan waits. And waits.
The wind swept hoarsely, in loud wild wailings, up against the windows, as if they were moaning over the sacrifice her sister had that night made…to shield her sisters from absolute want and death…Mary, out on such a cold and fearful night on such a horrid mission…[Susan’s] dreamy fantasies ran…the body of a girl, half naked, stark and cold…A girl who had gone forth from that very house on Essex Street…. the clock struck four and Susan’s heart began to throb heavily and painfully…. Mary had not come home…. [but] the door swung back and Mary, herface flushed and haggard, her eyes fearfully wild and brilliant, and half-glaring like a maniac’s came whirling into the chamber—stretching out her right hand in which she clutched a number of bank notes [and] muttered in a hoarse deep toned voice: “’Tis here, the price of infamy—money! Money! We’ll gorge on’t. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
ONE VERY LONG DAY
There are few extant records of the working girl’s life, whether she spent it working in a brothel, a factory, or both. Because of language barriers, illiteracy, or all-out exhaustion, very few of the earliest single girls took many notes.
It’s a real discovery, then, to come across The Long Day (1905), a vivid diary reworked in prose form by a young woman named Dorothy Richardson. Her story begins on a train as she travels from rural Pennsylvania to New York City, where she arrives “an unskilled, friendless, almost penniless girl of 18…a stranger in a strange city.” There is but one thought in her head, which she repeats like a mantra: “work or starve, work or starve.”
Some selections:
DAY ONE, 6 A.M.: I had written the YWCA some weeks before as to respectable cheap boarding houses…. Was this it?…I jumped out of bed…there was a little puddle of water in the middle of the floor under the skylight, and the drip had brushed against…my shirtwaist and soaked into the soles of my only pair of shoes.
MEET THE NEIGHBORS: Breakfast consisted of heterogeneous little dabs of things…[I turned] my observations…to the people at my table…an old woman [who had] difficulty in making food reach the mouth…a little fidgety stupid-looking and very ugly woman…and a young girl who seemed to be dancing in her seat beside me.
HAVE YE WORK?: Advertisements for cigar and cigarette workers were numerous, accordingly I applied to the foreman of a factory at Avenue A who wanted “bunch makers.” He cut me off, asking to see my working card; when I looked at him blankly, he strode away in disgust. Nothing daunted me for I meant to be very energetic and brave…. I went to the next factory. They wanted labelers…this sounded easy…I approached the foreman…. He asked for my experience. “Sorry we’re not running a Kindergarten here.”
DAY TWO: “Girls wanted to learn