Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [42]
Henrietta, a religious, industrious coworker, hears the story and offers our girl a room. Other workers advise against it; they say Henrietta is strange, not as she seems. But our heroine decides that they, as lazy dopey girls, resent Henrietta for her excellent work habits. Later, walking “home,” our girl begins to suspect that Henrietta does indeed have things to hide. Her house, far to the other side of town, is a squalid firetrap. And there’s a man waiting for them in the room. A religious friend, says Henrietta, though the pious man is…drinking. Our heroine feels as if she’s wandered into an opium den and, terrified, finds that she can barely speak. Henrietta and the pious drinking man go out on an “errand,” leaving our nervous heroine alone to look under the bed, in the closet—where she finds liquor—and finally out the window, where she sees Henrietta walking back now with two men.
Panicked, she flees and in her rush trips over an old woman lying half asleep on the stairs. The woman says she lives there (on the stairs, at least) and sympathizes with the story. In her view, Henrietta is indeed a drunk, a religious nut, and a whore. The old woman and our heroine, “two strange compatriots,” decide to leave the building in search of food, shelter, anything more comforting than where they are. For hours they wander the city, at last reaching Bleecker Street, where they find an all-night cafeteria willing to accept such shabby females. Our heroine uneasily spies a mirror.
THE GIRL AND THE LOOKING GLASS: Truly I was a sorry-looking object. Had not been well washed or combed since the last morning…I had forgotten my gloves, a brand-new pair, too; my handkerchief, and most needful of all else, my ribbon stock collar, without which my neck rose horribly long and thin above my dusty jacket…. I began to feel for the first time what was for meat least the quintessence of poverty—the absolute impossibility of personal cleanliness and of decent raiment…. I was combing my heavy hair using a small side comb I wore to keep it up.
Soon after publishing The Long Day, Dorothy Richardson was revealed to have worked six years as a reporter and freelancer for the Herald, which had serialized her book. But she defended herself. As she publicly explained, she had indeed come to New York years before and, for years after, had worked in factories, laundries, and as she put it, “worse by far.” She worked her way out, thanks to a friend she’d met in a boardinghouse. With this woman’s help, Richardson got a job in a store and worked her way up to the near-exalted position of coffee-machine demonstrator.
She liked writing and sent in stories about her life to magazines and papers; eventually she landed a job writing society announcements at the Herald. She took on the massive task of “writing my life” without a firm assignment. On her own time, she went back to the factories, undercover, revisiting and “bringing more up to date” the scenes she had witnessed years before. Her story was part autobiography, part investigative reporting, and the end result, she believed, a truthful portrait.
Not everyone believed her story—not the train ride or the crummy houses and the fire, which was in particular an obvious plot point in melodramatic narratives. As additional evidence of deceit, many cited her middle-class disdain for factory colleagues. As she wrote, “Most girls could not work properly. They did not know how to work…there was something imbecilic in them…. They were female creatures doomed from their mothers’ wombs. Physically, mentally, morally doomed.” She further noted an excess of bulging foreheads, eyes placed too close together, outsized noses, and as “kind words butter no parsnips,” she was quick to point out how many seemed headed for the Tenderloin, an area west of Sixth Avenue stretching up to Thirty-fourth Street and rapidly becoming the city’s hub of prostitution.
In 1900, one in five American women worked, together accounting for 18