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For all their efforts, the fairy days, dances, and clubs, shop girls were unable to resolve their most basic problem: They were shop girls. And no matter what they did on weekends, the workdays were still long and depressing, and once or twice a month they took department inventory, at no extra pay. One plant observer, or investigator, captured the unavoidable results during a 1909 study of twenty stores. Here is his report on one set of counter girls:

I have been watching three misses…for three days now. The first is most instructive…. she wears a fixed smile on her made-up-face, and it never varies, no matter to whom she speaks…[First] she is either frowning or her face, like that of the others, is devoid of any expression. When a customer approaches, she immediately assumes her hard forced smile…. As they leave, it amazes how quickly it departs…I’ve never seen such calculation given to the timing of a smile…. The others make less drastic of an effort….

I have had the impression that one or both is lost in thought or asleep while standing.

But occasionally one read of a shoppie who, despite the physical rigors of work, the snotty clients, the pimpish bosses, seems to have done more than plot fantastic diversions; she’d made for herself a good life. One 1905 magazine story, “After Shop Hours—What?” follows “Bess,” an admirable, organized shop girl, as she describes what she does with her free time, each activity accompanied by small, if unfortunately blurry, engravings. As Bess was only too happy to explain:

MONDAY: Dine out or have chafing dish supper with one of the girls. To bed at 9:30.

TUESDAY: Read with one of my men friends (in parlour), novel or any book we choose. I do my week’s mending or fancy work while he reads. Sometimes we sing duets. To bed at 9:30.

WEDNESDAY: Dancing class. To bed at 10.

THURSDAY: Have someone to dinner. Sew or read or play games. To bed at 9:30.

FRIDAY: Two of my girlfriends and I have our fairy tale readings for settlement children every other Friday. Other Fridays we go out to a lecture or to something of the sort. To bed at 10.

SATURDAY: To theater or opera or dance and to bed any old time.

SUNDAY: Sleep. Every other Sunday is the Good Time Friendly Club. We have cake and tea and a sociable time. Others, I go for a walk with some of the men and the girls. To bed early.

The editors of this story made it clear that Bess was lucky. Most working girls were so anxious or so tired they did not get much from their time off, not even much-needed sleep. As more young women took jobs—nearly 60 percent of all New York City women, aged sixteen to twenty, worked during the early 1900s—a new set of reformers stepped in to help the workplace advocates. If Mary Gay Humphreys was concerned with underage cash runners, rest facilities, and horny floorwalkers, others now wondered how this girl might organize a “meaningful well thought out and rounded” life.

These were the words of Grace Dodge, a wealthy, socially conscious woman who “for them alone” opened the first YWCA, on Fifteenth Street. (She meant well, but given the time and place, “them” meant only white non-Jewish women with references and provably good reputations.) She also inaugurated a more inclusive network of clubs meant, and I quote from the cover of her popular book, A Bundle of Letters to Busy Girls (1887): “[to help] those girls who have not time or inclination to think and study about the many important things which make up life and living.” Dodge feared girls “had not time for the higher things.” She seems also to have believed they had not time for lower things. At weekly meetings, many held in her downtown apartment, she covered everything, for example: attending work with one’s menstrual period and “the disposal of rags.” Another: the importance of bowel movements and whether it was acceptable to move one’s bowels at work. She discussed clothing, hair, correspondence, and she expressed her belief that far more enjoyable than a racket, a wild dance,