Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [47]
Employers complained of “blue Mondays,” hangover days when the girl who’d been out “rubbering” could be observed leaning as opposed to standing. If blue Mondays became widespread, management deployed the store detectives to gather intelligence about the offenders. (Chances were that management had already gathered basic family information on its girls; they kept track not only of a girl’s “books,” or sales records, but of her outside reputation.) As long as a girl kept up her “books,” much of what she did outside could be overlooked, provided she brought no “ill-repute” to the store or began to look “mangy.” Borderline girls, those with good but occasionally erratic books, might be permitted a blue Monday or two. But they would not receive raises and they might suddenly be transferred to less desirable counters, and they would know exactly why. Nonperformers who “rubbered” too intensely and rolled in Mondays looking “shot” would be fired. As one girl told Hutchins Hapgood: “I do my work, they know that. When I no longer can ‘deliver the goods,’ they will fire me, of course. That’s my risk. In the mean time, however, I can do whatever I please, and they won’t say a word.”
The fact was, after all, that they were girls—85 percent of the store populations, circa 1900, were single, and most were under twenty-one. They were less faux ladies or incipient radicals than they were ordinary late adolescents. They liked to dance, whether on the streets, out at rackets, or in the store salons management eventually opened for the “tired, deserving female employee” on her breaks. In almost all photos of these salons—and there were numerous for release to the press—we see crowds of long-skirted girls waltzing with one another to a gramophone.
In secret they fashioned a subterranean girl culture within the store. Twice a month word went out through all departments that it was “fairy day.” On fairy day, two girls were chosen as the fairy queens and endowed with the right to “perform all mischief,” while their colleagues covered up their every act. Typical fairy business included sending unsigned mash notes to bosses and surrounding male floorwalkers in a flirtatious group while the fairy attached a silly tag to his back. By the greatest of horrific mistakes, a fairy queen might spray a parfum français into the face of an obnoxious client. Regular store social life, however, took the more traditional form of a club.
Almost every department had a club running its own special activities, from dances and parties to what we’d call self-help groups. One store had a very active “foot mould social club” and, on a different floor, a “fine linens sistership and social organization.” Mostly, the clubs tried to alleviate the dreariness of store life. Every member, for example, had, in addition to a fairy day, an “un-birthday.” On this day, the anointed gathered with her pals to slice up what was called a “Halloween cake,” a mountainous lopsided confection that had baked within it two tiny objects: a ring that signified marriage and a thimble forecasting spinsterhood. The results, turned up in slices, were published in the club’s private newsletter and sometimes in the larger storewide newsletters shop-girl clubs put out each month.
At Siegel-Cooper the house organ was called Thought and Work, a compendium of intrastore courtships, marriages, makeup tips, and celebrations of various departments within the store. Say the subject was leading salesladies. Twenty or so girls would be featured, as if in a theater program, delicate wreaths etched in around their faces, their area of expertise