Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [46]
Another man murdered his wife for taking four shillings out of his pocket. As he explained: “I will serve blows to any damn whore who dares rob me.”
But enough of that. The conversation took a turn to cosmetics (eyebrows and how to make two out of what was often the one) and, more significant, clothing. Shoppies did not share the usual sartorial goals of the working class: urging wide feet into slim American slippers and attempting to master the impossible corset. They had other concerns. A working shop girl typically traveled some distance to and from work, in all kinds of weather, then spent an average of ten to twelve hours on her feet. From all descriptions, her uniform by day’s end was like a straightjacket. Many otherwise apolitical girls became adherents of dress reform.
The ideal, as one sympathetic writer explained, was to design for girls “a loosely arrayed garment that allows for easy movement but does not in any way excite the male libido.” There were all sorts of proposals. Many called for a kind of loose-fitting long-sleeved overall that would come with an attachable skirt to hide the pants and, sometimes, a “bodice vest” to hide the upper portion, or bib, of the overall. And there were plans for jumpers, long or short, to be worn with “broadened,” meaning wider, less constricting, shirtwaists. There’s no record detailing whether or not anyone actually executed these designs, if anyone ever wore them, or if anyone was bodily removed from a store as a result.
Rather, it seems, there were scattered instances of rebellion. In 1907 four hundred New York shop girls signed up for the Rainy Day Club, a citywide movement of working women who demanded the right to wear shorter skirts, raincoats, and rubber boots to and from work when it rained. The idea dated to the Civil War, when women had replaced men in many difficult jobs and found themselves essentially disabled inside their clothes. They had admired the nurses they saw out around the city; they dressed so sensibly—rain boots in bad weather and, always, shorter hems. (Nurses, like shop girls, could not afford the status symbol of the muddy hem.) The Rainy Day Clubs published pamphlets advising girls to shorten hems by four inches and to wear galoshes when it rained.
Official reactions varied. Some stores forbade all galoshes or demanded that on wet days girls arrive very early, long before any customers, so that they could remove their galoshes in the entryway and walk on store floors in workplace shoes. Some store managers let it filter down through the floorwalkers and buyers that these shoes—especially if skirts were an inch or two higher—would have to be “decent.” Most took no official position on the skirts, considering that most girls remained half visible behind a counter and rarely ventured onto the floors.
The nasty response came in the press. By demanding certain rights, shoppies were said to have put on “ludicrous airs,” to loudly have proclaimed themselves a “better class of girl deserving of higher things,” when in fact they were mere “independent strutting figments that wither[ed]” as they arrived back at their “shabby” homes. While playing the role of fine shop girl, such deluded female creatures were unbearable. “The American woman is vulgar,” wrote Hutchins Hapgood, in Types from City Streets. “[and] some of our most vulgar women are our salesladies…. They demand what is their ‘due.’…They read the society columns and [the magazine] The Smart Set.”
Others accused the girl of acting up like