Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [45]
Humphreys combined a reformer’s intensity with genuine skill as a journalist. She listened and reported as opposed to moralizing or operatically exaggerating the gal’s life. She banished the slangy linguistic back bends that made the working type, especially the factory girl, seem so alien. It was common to read about girls who, asked about, say, a boyfriend, replied: “He’s ’n me ’a go ’a wooken a bit—not w-h-a-t you say?” These pidgin dialects, whether Irish-Yiddish or Italian-Scottish, made the girl seem not only alien but mentally feeble. Humphreys’s pieces, printed in a variety of newspapers and magazines, were so immediate that it’s easy even now to imagine standing there, five hours into the workday and desperate to pee but unable, according to store policy, to move an inch. As she wrote: “Because the immediate surroundings are…hospitable, there is little comprehension of what a girl must get through on the average day, standing behind a counter for hours, back aching, waiting on rude bargain-hunting women…. and then the management…”
Humphreys was the first journalist to record the practice of “treating” as it occurred in the store. In one story, she quotes a young woman who’d been drawn into conversation with her boss. Between puffs on a cigar, he told her, “You got the look, get a man, go out with him and let him pay. Don’t wear this shirt again. It is filthy, a disgrace.” (No surprise, as it was likely her only one.) After similar encounters, many girls walked into the back—provided there was no one to see—and started crying. As one of them told Humphreys, she understood the barter concept but the terms of this one “startled” her. “If they expect this or that for an ice cream, what can they want for a hand-stitched shirt?” Some took the boss’s advice and attempted to find male help they could emotionally afford. Others didn’t think about it in such specific terms and just went out.
This was the age of the great “rackets,” huge public balls that had started as a youthful response to the dull extended-family dance. Anyone could go—invitations replicated like chain mail throughout the factories and stores—and as George G. Foster wrote, everyone went, “the folding girls and seamstresses, the milliner’s apprentices, the shopgirls…all unmarried womanhood.” Sometimes there were six balls on one night for them to choose from and a selection of venues. By 1890, thousands of dance halls stretched south from Houston to Canal Street and across the city from the Hudson River to Avenue B.
Shoppies traveled in groups—“lady friends” they called one another—and they were said to like the wild dancing or “rubbering.” Some of them even “spieled,” a notorious dance in which a couple twirled or whipped their way across the floor until someone either fainted or fell. (No one said it outright, but dancers were thought to faint or fall at the point of orgasm. It was perhaps this bit of gossip that inspired one senator to proclaim, “Rome’s downfall was due in part to the degenerate nature of its dances, and I only hope that we will not suffer the same result.”) Some, however, found the smoke and the sweat too much after a long day spent saying “Yes, ma’am.” They were happier heading back to their rooms for quiet dinners, reading, and, as always on so minuscule a weekly budget, the mending. (There were other means for attaining new shirtwaists: making a new one, or cleverly reinvigorating the sagging gray one using bleach.)
Some nights after curfew—and all rooming houses had 9 or 10 P.M. curfews—three or four girls would crawl through the dark to an appointed room. Someone brought chocolate to melt on the hot plate, someone brought a robe to stuff beneath the door to block the smell. Settled in, they reviewed the current themes: How much longer can we stand working at Stewart’s? Waitressing, do you get wages and a tip? And—the eternal question—whom should I marry and how soon? According to the few diary entries