Bachelor Girl (12 page)

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 her lewd cousin, the factory gal. Shoppies were frequently said to dance on their breaks and, according to many magazine reports, were “known to sing at any opportunity.” A twelve-paragraph letter in
Harper’s
magazine added to the indictment. “She sings, it is true, and she may also be found casually…strutting—talking out of turn—flirting, singing, dancing in the streets…I have heard the most vile language tossed between them…such that would make me…run in shame.”

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 (“fine linens,” “ladies’ shoes,” “artificial flowers”) spelled below the photograph in fancy script. Eventually management decided that
Thought and Work
contained too little about work—and, for that matter, no thought at all—and discontinued it.

Occasionally the clubs exhibited nascent hints of feminism, or at least signs of independent thinking. In 1910, for example, the Siegel-Cooper Bachelor Girl Social Club organized a celebration of Washington’s Birthday “without even inviting men.” Instantly they were denounced by male employees as man haters. Replied the bachelor girls: “No, we are not married, neither are we men haters, but we believe in women’s rights and we enjoy our independence and our freedom. Notwithstanding that if a fair offer came our way we might not [sic] consider it.”

Wealthy matrons found such beings coarse and undesirable in all ways, but their daughters were often intrigued. Trapped in a life of calling cards, formal teas, and chaperoned balls, young society girls craved some small measure of freedom before the inevitable wedding. Not that one would be so low as to actually
work
, but they had heard of these dances—the rackets—and there was something, why, it went without saying,
monstrous
in it all, yet still compelling.

“Slumming” even then had its magnetic lure, but it was rare to stumble upon the ideal circumstances for actually doing it. Rackets presented the perfect opportunity to anonymously and briefly indulge in—or at least watch—rowdy downtown behavior. Of course the girls under investigation were very “low,” headed for a life one could not begin to contemplate. Yet in the heat of a spiel, they seemed powerful—daring girls, brave, and perhaps even the tiniest bit enviable. Some of these same well-bred young ladies felt a secret fascination with stage stars. They would not, even for a laugh, stand among the “matinee girls,” the back-door fixtures who waited every day for their current idols to exit. But they were drawn to actresses, who throughout the nineteenth century had set the leading fashion trends. (Serious dramatic actresses were expected to supply their own costumes, and part of the thrill of theatergoing lay in the anticipation of seeing what they wore.) Actresses were also considered somewhat disreputable.

Out on her own, slumming with her beaux, the upper-class girl went to the shows. Actresses were interesting, but more immediately thrilling were the sequined chorus girls and the showgirls, curvaceous balletic things
who appeared entr’acte to show new fashions. And everyone had a secret fascination with the Ziegfeld Follies girls and, most important, with Ziegfeld’s famed Floradora sextette. All six of these special stars, supermodels of their day, would marry millionaires.

In part, the allure of the working girl—like that of a low actress—derived from how much the mere idea of such a person upset one’s mother. Whether a shop girl or a showgirl, she was the exemplar of everything a daughter should not be—and should not even be exposed to. A great many mothers found these young working women personally threatening. If factory girls were thought to be whores with day jobs, then shoppies were believed to be mistresses in waiting. They spent their days surrounded by beautiful things and were encouraged to have men buy them clothes. If the girl was pretty, smart, and ambitious, she might walk out after work with a man, a husband, she’d sold a hat to. They would very likely “treat” each other in all sorts of ways.

One of the era’s most popular plays was called
Only a Shopgirl
(1902) by Claire Wellesley Sterling. Posters show a wealthy fur-clad wife bursting into a dim boardinghouse room. She points one manicured finger at a shirtwaisted girl named Hulda. Hulda stares back defiantly, her smaller siblings gathered around her in terror. “YOU,” shouts the woman, “are nothing but a low shop girl!” Says Hulda: “Better a low shop girl than a fashionable idler as heaven is above hell!” The play was produced throughout the teens and the themes reworked in several silent films until its class love triangle gradually entered the standard melodramatic lexicon.

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 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:

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.