Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [381]
Poorer women spent much of their time on the streets. Rather than retreat to domestic sanctuaries, they pawned and redeemed possessions, bargained with shopkeepers and peddlers for goods and credit, and scavenged for such discarded items as wood to burn, scraps of old clothing, and bits of food: one could scoop a week’s worth of flour from a broken barrel on the docks. Children were dispatched to forage for manufacturing wastes—nails and screws, old rope, broken glass, shreds of cotton plucked from wharves where southern packets docked. These could be sold to waterfront junk dealers, who in turn recycled them to iron founders, shipwrights, glassmakers, or makers of shoddy (the cheap cloth used in producing “slop” apparel for the poor).
Women worked hard to supplement a diet that consisted largely of bread and potatoes, corn and peas, beans and cabbage, and milk from cows fed on “swill”—byproducts of the city’s distilleries. In good times, they might add salt meat and cheese, a little butter, some sugar, coffee, and tea. But meat and poultry, though widely available in city markets, were expensive, even when purchased for a reduced price at the end of the market day. Many working-class wives therefore kept their own animals, notably pigs; lacking the space to board them, they let the hogs run free to scavenge for themselves. New York had long been infamous for its thousands of porcine prowlers, and when city fathers once again tried to sweep them from the streets, they touched off a raucous confrontation with poor mothers.
In 1818 Mayor Cadwallader Golden regretted that “our wives and daughters cannot walk abroad through the streets of the city without encountering the most disgusting spectacles of these animals indulging the propensities of nature.” Copulating and defecating porkers were a decidedly ungenteel sight, and their “grunting ferocity” could be dangerous to children. Golden empaneled a grand jury, which indicted a butcher, Christian Harriet, as a public nuisance for keeping hogs on the streets. He hired a lawyer, who contended that customary social practices, especially those “of immemorial duration,” could not be declared a public nuisance unless they violated standards held in common by the entire population. Pigs might offend ladies and dandies, “who are too delicate to endure the sight, or even the idea of so odious a creature.” But “many poor families might experience far different sensations, and be driven to beggary or the Alms House,” if deprived of this source of sustenance. Mayor Golden, in charging the jury, ruled the food factor irrelevant, and Harriet was convicted, establishing the absence of a legal right to keep pigs in the street. In 1821 the Common Council ordered a roundup of the swinish multitudes, but when pig-owning Irish and African-American women discovered city officials seizing their property, they mobilized, hundreds strong, and forcibly liberated the animals. Further hog riots broke out in 1825, 1826, 1830, and 1832, invariably ending with the women saving their bacon.
Women also earned hard cash for their households. They took in laundry, catered for boarders, or sewed pantaloons and vests as outworkers. Some worked as neighborhood midwives; others assisted their artisanal or shopkeeping husbands (butchers’ wives cut meat for market, junk-shop owners’ spouses took care of customers). Still others roamed the city streets as hucksters, hawking roots and herbs they had dug up, clams collected from beaches, muffins purchased cheap at the end of the previous day’s market, or berries and apples bought from country women at the edge of town. African American hot-corn girls were famed for their street cry: “Hot corn, hot corn, here’s your lily white hot corn / Hot corn all hot, just come out of the boiling pot.”
If a huckster could afford the fee, she rented a stall at a city market; if not, she circulated among the market’s customers. Those whose husbands could afford a backyard garden