Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [44]
For the girls who staffed the enterprise, however, life was far from glamorous. The standard-issue shop uniform—a bust-hugging shirtwaist and a long cinched skirt—was so tight that even standing still in it required effort. And salesgirls often stood in the same place for six hours at a stretch without moving. For this they earned between five and seven dollars a week, depending on how long they’d been there and how good a record they’d kept (attitude, neatness, sales). Less visible—and less well paid at three dollars per week—were the wrappers and stock girls who moved on ladders for hour upon hour at the back. Cash girls, or runners, most of them very young, received two dollars a week. In all jobs, but especially those at the counter, girls were instructed to control their facial expressions. There was a point in a transaction at which she smiled; at other times, she was impassive.
This seeming robotic quality led customers to believe that sales staff, like factory workers, were inherently dumb. If not, so the reasoning went, why would they be standing there in the first place? The answer was that they’d be standing there, or standing someplace else, but that they would, given the situation, have to stand somewhere, doing something they did not want to do. As the reformist Clara E. Laughlin wrote in a fascinating book, The Work-a-Day Girl: A Study of Some Present-Day Conditions (1913): “The average girl has no idea what she wants to do…except that she wants to…and must…earn money…the majority of girls drift in[to] this or that because they have a friend…the notion of the number and variety of possible employments is usually limited by what they know of the occupations of their acquaintances.”
That was true. And friends who got there first put it bluntly: Find a tolerable place, and please, don’t ask us what we really think or what we’ve already begun to figure out. For example, veteran shop girls knew that ten years before, men alone had done their jobs. Sales positions opened to women only as companies had grown, departments had spidered, and men had moved into the new managerial jobs. And they also knew that when men held the sales jobs, the work itself had been more interesting. As sales clerks, men had aggressively sold and developed relationships with customers; women, forbidden these exchanges, took a first step into what we’d call “the pink-collar ghetto.” As one manager explained, “Female salespersons do not urge the customer to buy…they simply ask the customer what he or she wants, and make a record of the sale.”
As she did this, bosses and floorwalkers, that is, male department managers, watched and judged her constantly. Had she made any slips? Was there a hint of rudeness in the voice, self-defense or disagreement? Had she been deliberately slow? Was her posture “slagging,” and did she seem evidently tired or exasperated when a customer asked to see that fifteenth variation on a scarf?
One shop girl, nineteen, described her practiced stoicism to a social worker:
Sometime I do admit I would like nothing more than to leap across my counter and topple on that girl, no older than me…smack her face the way it never smiles and demands you show it this and this. It’s not right. One day a girl came in. She had a feather in her hat and a fur, a little thing who told me I had better accustom me t’a call her “m’am,” and I thought, I will jump across and I will break her face up, smug pup’s nose…. [still] I was always smiling, smiling, yes, yes.
But she had problems far worse than uppity customers. By as late as 1890, some stores still provided no benches or perhaps had just one (hard, small) bench for girls to sit on during breaks, that is, if breaks had been established as a custom. Many girls ate their lunches—pickles, rolls, and tea—standing up. Much worse, many of the best stores had no employee bathrooms (workers were encouraged to take care of personal maintenance matters before leaving home in the morning; it was “their business”). Mary Gay Humphreys, a journalist and reformer