Bachelor Girl (8 page)

There were hundreds of papers in any given year, including by the mid-nineteenth century the
New York Times
and the
New York Post
. But for the purpose of identifying, covering, and ultimately mythologizing the single working girl, there was the penny press.

The term
penny press
suggests the kind of tabloid many of us try very hard not to read while standing in line at the supermarket. But these were in many instances full, well-edited papers best known for introducing and
developing the urban sketch—that unlikely slice-of-life adventure that would much later come to be known as the human interest story. In these personal, chatty communiqués, writers acting as cultural explorers and translators introduced the latest in unfamiliar city types—single working girls, for example—to a curious and nervous public.

The penny press dates to 1833, when Benjamin Day bought the
New York Sun
and put in place an iron-cast steam-powered press so fast and so cheap to run that he upped his print run by 100 percent and cut his price to a penny. He also hired newsboys, like those in England, to hawk papers on the street—shrieking and badgering passersby, as if the Messiah had arrived (or a beautiful lone girl had been murdered) and only the
Sun
had the story.

The penny daily came into its own a few years later with the launch of the
New York Tribune,
a daily (including a more in-depth weekly version) that was founded and edited by Horace Greeley. Greeley was in all respects a public figure: a genuine intellectual, a sometime politician, a friend of Abraham Lincoln, a vehement abolitionist, and a man with an interest in just about everything from single women and their economic lives (feminist writer Margaret Fuller was a Boston correspondent) to world politics (Karl Marx covered London). He refused to run sensational police news or “objectionable medical advice,” and he introduced by-lines for reporters. He shared the journalistic spotlight with James Gordon Bennett of the
New York Herald,
a second-generation journalist with the sensibilities of a P. T. Barnum. He personally financed Henry Morton Stanley’s trip to Africa to find the lost missionary Dr. Livingstone and introduced polo as a sport to the United States, doing most of this while running the newspaper from abroad in Paris.

But the two men at least had one idea in common: Take the urban sketch—the man-about-town exposés, the true tales of low life, the unknown lone girl included—and make it into a regular news beat. As writer Hutchins Hapgood had noted sardonically just years before, “…the curiosity of well-to-do and so-called respectable people leads them to [under]go any physical, esthetic or moral discomfort in the search for truth and human nature…[especially] ‘low life.’”

Here was the first mass-media presentation of the single woman. There were many unexpected correspondents out in the field.

In every newspaper office, hundreds of “true-and-shocking-tales” flew, uninvited, over the transom. Many of these unsolicited works came from middle-class wives who, quoting one, “have taken it upon ourselves to go out upon visits [to the poor] and to be of good use in recording what we have found.” What they found were women of the tenements boiling potatoes and cabbage (our brave visitors swooned but did not, we are assured, faint from the stench). They typically encountered half-dressed children, husbands who read or drank without speaking, and seated off to the side, the infamous lone girl sewing and accidentally, repeatedly, stabbing herself with the needle.

Along with the wives there were many church ladies out on the beat, assisting the poor and in the process seeking conversions to their faiths. In their missives, the air is always damp, vaporous, and reeking of “imminent death.” There is a lot of coughing. Swearing. Children shriek. The self-styled missionaries worry that the lone girl, seventeen, a seamstress, a factory lass, will not be able to manage the children once the woman on the bed has converted to the faith and died, coughing. William Dean Howells satirizes the dramatic pretense of these reports in his novel
The Minister’s Charge
(1902). Here the niece of a devoted visiting woman tells a friend of her aunt’s good works. Every day, it seems, this aunt “carries bouquets of flowers to the deserving poor.” “Why?” asks the friend. Says the niece, “They prevent crime.”

Other chronicles arrived from the young male aristocrats who invented American “slumming”—drinking, smoking opium, and mixing with prostitutes whenever possible. Such dissolute rich boys were not likely to become reporters, in the sense that they were not likely to sit at a desk every day and crank out copy. But some wrote up their experiences in conversational essays; real reporters borrowed from them.

Many reporters, all of them men, did not regard themselves as permanent, serious journalists. Like “actor,” “journalist” was not yet deemed quite a respectable profession. Despite the influence of mighty editors like Horace Greeley, staff reporters imagined that they were on the job to get in shape
for writing their future books. Articles were like warmups, a means by which to hone one’s talent at crafting vignettes or eliciting (or inventing) the biting quote. And it was handy to have so much material to draw on: these fussy Christian women tracking seamstresses and factory waifs; the uptown cavaliers frequenting the top-notch whorehouses and concert saloons. On daily deadlines, one had so little time to get out and just
look;
here was a way to collect exotic mise-en-scènes and enhance dull and ordinary reportage writing.

The frequent subject of these hybrid narratives was the lone girl, preferably in the form of the beautiful, suffering young worker—the industrial-era Sleeping Beauty. In story after story, writers played out the tragic prophesy of her life, whether or not they’d ever actually met her. Here is a prime example from one Edgar J. Fawcett, “faithful correspondent,” writing beneath his beefy photo in an 1869 issue of
Arena
magazine:

That’s not to suggest that all stories on the working girl were moralistic or sex-drenched inventions. The major penny presses ran many serious exposés of factory and immigrant life, and a young woman’s unsteady, often terrorizing, experiences within. The author was usually George G. Foster, the so-called Dickens of New York City and the
Tribune
’s onetime “city items editor.” A self-styled urban ethnographer, he’d written a small library of hidden New York titles including
New York by Gaslight
and
New York Naked
. He’d written a novel,
New York Above Ground and Underground,
and he’d collected his works under the title
New York in Slices
. His following was huge and included many men who used his books as clandestine guides to the whorish New York. But his editors recognized in him a real reporter.

In one long 1845 series, “Labor in New York,” he found young female cigar makers who worked twelve-hour shifts standing, passing the time by singing “ribald drinking tunes,” each “courteous” to the others “when it came time for her to try for a harmony.” He contributed to investigative series, including the famed “Dens of Death,” a three-month extravaganza in 1850, and proposed or influenced many others, such as “Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York” by Solon Robinson, the agricultural editor. Not that this was an agricultural story, per se. The corn girls, many about fourteen, many black, were street vendors who sold roasted corncobs, as popular then as Italian ices and huge pretzels are now. Their famed cry—“Hot corn, hot corn, here’s your lily white hot corn, hot corn all hot, just come out of the boiling pot”—was believed to be less a fast-food pitch than a sexual come-on. (Perhaps that’s why the ubiquitous “corn girl” vanished in film to be replaced by a pure and virginal Lillian Gish type selling pencils, apples, or matches, none of which make a big appearance in the records.) Like Foster, Robinson later extended his piece into a popular book and
Hot Corn
even now stands as a compendium of eccentric lone-female types in old New York City. (Its subtitle:
Including the Story of Little Katy, Madalina, the Rag Picker’s Daughter, Wild Maggie &c.
)

Its success—two thousand copies sold in 1854—encouraged penny-press lords to recognize a reader who had even more interest in this female figure than the average male reader. That was the female figure herself.

IN WHICH THE TIRED HUDDLED MASSES FIX THEIR HAIR

The average immigrant working girl lived in two distinct worlds—the world outside and the unavoidable one inside. Reconciling the two demanded a huge amount of mental energy. Girls were under the strictest family scrutiny. And even those who lived in boardinghouses confronted questions: Where had she been and with whom had she spoken? Just who was that man walking up and back across the way? What girls did she know at work, and “what” were they? (German? Jew? Irish? Swede? Slut?)

Anzia Yezierska, a Polish immigrant who wrote stories in Yiddish about
ghetto life, focused much of her fiction on the tension between frightened, old-world parents and their newly American daughters. In
The Bread Givers,
a novel subtitled “A Struggle Between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New,” young women argue repeatedly with their fathers about the right to leave the house on their own. “Don’t you know what’s out there?” one typically bellows. “HOW can I know anything?” replies the girl. In “Fat of the Land,” a short story, a young woman laments the embarrassment she feels when with her mother: “God knows how hard I tried to civilize her so as not to have to blush with shame when I take her anywhere. I dressed her in the most stylish Paris models, but Delancey Street sticks out from every inch of her. Whenever she opens her mouth, I’m done for.”

Yezierska, who’d gone to Hollywood to work as scenarist on the film version of her story collection
Hungry Hearts,
was known as “the queen of the ghetto” or “the immigrant Cinderella.” She always returned to the Lower East Side and somehow managed to live there in a way unimaginable for most immigrant women. She married twice and had a child, but unable to live a constricted wife’s life, she left the child with her husband and lived alone.

Her gift lay in detailing the generational assimilationist battle but also in revealing the underlying ambivalence felt on all sides. It was never as simple as girls begging to leave and frightened parents shrieking NO! While most immigrant parents feared America and what was “out there,” they also wanted their children to fit in, to make a good life, to marry, and, while keeping the faith and traditions, to do what was needed to thrive. Many new arrivals were urged to bury the wigs, lose the cloggish thicklaced shoes, the shawls and kerchiefs, plus any other article of clothing that reeked of the homeland. One man, age thirty, wrote to a late-arriving cousin, then seventeen: “Don’t take your dresses. Just one to wear…. Ifyou try to wear them here, we will not let you wear them.”

Ultimately, however, it was not that difficult for the young single girl to balance out these demands. That’s because it was impossible to ignore what one called “the Americanist way.” Whatever their inherited ambivalence, young women learned to “want.” They wanted to “put on style,” and they were willing to spend money earmarked for their families to do so.
Wrote one factory girl in 1906, “Some of the women blame me very much because I spend so much money on clothes…. but a girl must have clothes if she is to go into society at Ulmer Park or Coney Island or the theater.”

One Sophie Abrams recalls her first real day in America as the day her aunt took her shopping: “She bought me a shirtwaist…a shirt, a blue print with red buttons and a hat like I never seen. I took my old brown dress and shawl and threw them away! I know it sounds foolish, we being so poor, but I didn’t care…. when I looked in the mirror, I said, ‘Boy, Sophie, look at you now…just like an American.’”

The daily press continued to cover the working girl as the terrorized figure at the heart of melodramatic sex plots and/or the victim of workplace or street abuse. But from time to time editors addressed single women as readers with questions. Following the example set by the new women’s magazines, papers launched personal-advice columns. By 1900, even the
Jewish Daily Forward
ran a Q-and-A called the Bintel Brief. Some sample questions: “Is it a sin to wear facial powder?” (answer unrecorded) and “Does facial hair make a bad impression?” (It does.) And over and over one read, “IS there anything I can do to hide the marks on my forehead?”

To look an absolute American was not solely a matter of dress. As many a heart-sinking magazine piece declared, fair, untainted skin alone identified the native girl. And many, many immigrants had arrived with noticeable blemishes. Often these were smallpox scars or acne caused by poor diet, stress, delayed adolescence. Whatever the cause, facial blemishes were widely attributed to syphilis, a disease often diagnosed by the appearance of red splotches. Dermatology did not exist yet as a medical specialty, and so a girl looking to have her skin healed had to wait to see the doctors on duty at the syphilis clinic. And any female seen entering or leaving a syphilis clinic was presumed to be a whore.

Some refused the humiliation and tried to treat themselves. (Not that so many who saw VD doctors got “well.”) It was on matters just like these that young women turned en masse to the advice columns. They learned, in this case, that the “fairest skin belongs to people in the earliest stages of consumption or [to] those of a scrofulous nature,” though there were ways to emulate a native glow. According to one story, the most efficient means
was to starve oneself, thus “securing the purity of the blood.” Rest was important, cold breezes, running quickly around, then sitting and breathing until one felt dizzy. If none of that worked, girls were advised to track down a massive beauty volume called
The Ugly Girl Papers
by Susan C. Power (1875), a dense collection of beauty advice that had a small-type table of contents four pages long.