Bachelor Girl (9 page)

From this a girl learned that even “the worst face may be softened by wearing a mask of quilted cotton wet in cold water at night. Distilled water.” If that was not possible, there was advice on the clever usage of “carbonate of Ammonia and powdered charcoal…lettuce as a cosmetic…the secretive ways of arsenic,” and, should such materials prove difficult to obtain, a reader could still study “how to acquire sloping shoulders…how to use red hair…[and] the means to imitate the serpentine glide of the Creole.”

The average girl, the one who barely spoke English, might have sought out the less exotic but no less precise
Young Ladies’ Counsellor: On the Outlines and Illustrations of the Sphere, Duties and Proper Appearance of the Young Woman.
Others experimented.

One of their best experiments was in “banging,” a style that caught on like the shag. “One of the first things we learned,” wrote an anonymous woman “of business,” “was our way in the art of banging. We let our hair cover our foreheads in a small quick cut that would of necessity keep hid any flaring.” Once a girl was banged, all the sashes and ribbons and other fancy accouterments made better sense. Wrote one memoirist years later, banging was “the second best” thing that one could get to “a nose job.”

Whatever they tried, girls had to be clever and stylish on a pittance, and from the extant illustrations it seems a few at least succeeded. Anzia Yezierska made this point in
The Bread Givers
: “It took ten cents worth of pink paper roses purchased from a pushcart on Hester Street to…look like a lady from Fifth Ave.”

THE BOWERY BABE

Before we meet this uniquely decked-out single archetype, a few words about the world she inhabited. Historian Kathy Peiss has called the early industrial era the cultural age of “commercial leisure.” Huge public entertainment venues—Coney Island, dance halls, theaters—opened to the working classes at just the moment the working classes were discovering the concept of “fun.”

Everyone secretly longed to see what was out there. Many girls had spent their childhoods walking the neighborhood, peeking out at the world from behind packages and bundles of fabric they were bringing home for their mothers. At seventeen or at twenty-one, they were ready to go out. One young girl, nineteen, told the
Herald
: “All the waiting to go out and see people, to be brave enough to do it, to walk outside. Yes, we all heard about it; I don’t think any of us even imagined we would do it—go to a dance with two girls from the floor?…It was a very long time to tell mother. Mother did not have many pleasures in her life…. I was very worried of how I would dress.”

The only drawback was that these adventures and outings cost money. Girls never had enough. They didn’t make it, and what they made they “handed over.” Boys had the cash, and the crude equation came down to this: Girls who wanted to go out, who finally got up the nerve, understood that they’d be “treated.” The boy would pay her way. If this was not the first “treat”—if she’d walked out with him before, accepted ice cream or drinks, or gone with him to a park or a play—he’d expect some form of sex in return. And often he just took it. The girl who experienced these pleasures, this slight sense of freedom, also ran the risk of the murky occurrence now known as date rape.

The most infamous “treating” episode concerned Lanah Sawyer, a young woman who accepted the offer of treats—ice cream and a walk around the Battery—from a refined professional man who called himself “lawyer Smith.” His name was in fact Harry Bedlow, widely known to others as a “rascal” and “rake.” Afterward, he offered to walk Sawyer home and
lured her instead into a bawdy house, where he raped her. At his trial, Bedlow was found not guilty in fifteen minutes. Despite the minor riot that followed—and some of the rioters were working-class men—the general consensus was that both had played their parts in the script. He had taken her out, treated her, bought her trifles, then taken what he deserved in return. In the “commercial culture of leisure” rape (and acquittal) would become a recurrent motif.

In the “old” countries, girls had moved seamlessly from the father’s house, perhaps briefly to an employer’s, and then to the husband’s. Usually the family knew the fiancé and his parents; marriages were often arranged. In the new world, and in its odd new single sector, girls would soon wander off in gangs to the Bowery, to the crowds and dance halls, so that their families could not possibly oversee whom they met or what they did. And men in New York City seemed less reliable than they had back home; they moved on—to other women, to other jobs outside the city.

As Christine Stansell wrote, in
City of Women,
“As people moved around…from the Old World to the New…and from country to city…and [amidst] the mobile and anonymous circumstances of the city…methods of ensuring male responsibility weakened.”

The most extreme example of this breakdown was the Alma Sands case. Sands was a Quaker girl who lived with her parents and took an interest in the family’s boarder, one Eli Weeks. The two slept together—not unusual in certain Old Country courtship systems; in fact, it was viewed as a sign of the couple’s seriousness and especially the commitment of the prospective bridegroom. Then, on the night before she was supposed to marry Eli Weeks, Alma Sands turned up dead. After weeks of wild public speculation, a jury indicted Weeks, describing him as a man who understood the depth of his commitment—an engagement—and in “fury” at “his unbearable promises” took unique, punishing measures to break free.

The Sands murder evoked a response similar to the hysteria surrounding the 1969 Manson murders. Everyone talked about it in gory detail and traded in rumors about witchcraft and satanic practices. Hundreds lined up to see the house where it occurred and, later, to see the girl’s shrouded body. Mothers, in particular, dragged their daughters to make a point that
was sadly never less than confusing: Know and trust the man, my dear, although it’s hard now to ever know or trust the man. In cartoons a joking case was made for marrying one’s brother. Although who was to say how city life had changed one’s brother?

In the early days of working-girl life, most avoided the Bowery and instead gathered in groups of four or five and, arms linked, headed to Broadway. In an 1863 guidebook,
Miller’s New York as It Is, or a Stranger’s Guidebook,
the authors made the distinction: “To denizens of New York, society is usually known under the generic divisions of Broadway and the Bowery.” Broadway was the street—the golden thoroughfare of theaters and their wealthy clientele in furs and silks. For a working girl, there was little else to do but look. To hook up, to have a real time out, meant turning around and heading back to the Bowery, and this did not seem—not at first, anyway—to be an option.

We hear the word Bowery—a long two-way boulevard running from Manhattan’s East Village into Chinatown—and light on phrases such as “skid row” or perhaps “junkie bum.” But back then it was a
scene
. At sundown every day, this hub of the butcher’s trade became the site of a daring all-night party. Couples crowded for miles beneath the elevated train, or El, whose tracks cast slatted lantern strips across the gaudy attractions—the famed Bowery Theater, freak shows, oyster houses, hundreds of eateries and food carts, some selling the first mass-produced ice cream, and the concert saloons (
saloon
was a takeoff on the word
salon
); these were for men only. In the average concert saloon, “waiter girls” were often topless and there were bedrooms at the back.

Reigning over it all was a bunch of Irish boys, former gang members or pals who’d once worked together on the city’s famed volunteer fire crews. Now they worked mostly as journeymen and laborers. At least during the daylight hours. At night they came out dressed to rule. This was hostile male turf; girls were never entirely safe, but to some extent Bowery boys viewed the single girl as a compatriot—usually Irish and always working-class—and as such entitled to some brotherly protection. (Again, not that she was immune from brotherly advance and, sometimes, attack.) Raconteur and socialite Abram Dayton, a scion of the elite Knickerbocker clan,
recalled that he’d gone down to the Bowery and easily slummed his way into numerous quick-sex encounters. But after the rise of the factory culture, with its rituals of the Friday-night stroll, he warned that “the Broadway exquisite who ventured ‘within the pale,’ was compelled to be…guarded in his advances…any approach…wither by work or look was certain to be visited by instant punishment.”

The Bowery boys, known in their self-created legend as “the b’hoys” (thus making the girls they kept around “the g’hals”), may be viewed as a first modern peer group. It was a time of union instability, so they were not organized as fellow laborers. They had no other political or religious affiliations. But they were linked, generally speaking, as ethnic laborers, an underclass only too aware of the distinctions between Broadway and the Bowery. If they shared no political or union line, they had a sensibility, a posture, a distinct manner of speech and a unique form of dress that marked them as members of an unofficial social club.

The b’hoy, from what’s described, wore his hair in a high combination of pompadour and ducktail. Abram Dayton recalled seeing “black straight broad-brimmed hat[s]…worn with a pitch forward…large shirt collar[s] turned down and loosely fastened…so as to expose the full proportions of a thick, brawny neck; a black frock coat…a flashy satin or velvet vest…pantaloons,” all worn with a lot of jewelry. The final image suggests fifties hoods dressed in drag. Low-life chroniclers characterized the b’hoys as a tough and defensive lot; still, they were so devoted to their “airs,” to their internal code of politesse, that they seemed posed there on the street kind of gallant.

The girls thought so.

As I’ve said, few girls made their way to the Bowery—not at first. (Even the ones who went to gape at Broadway were usually home by eight, telling wholesome lies to parents who could not begin to understand this new scheme.) The bold ones who “walked out” were usually, like the b’hoys, transplanted Irish—tough, independent, a bit hotheaded. An estimated eight out of ten young Irish girls had come, some alone, to the United States as family scouts. They sent for their relatives, as many as they could, using the pay they made as domestics.

Friday nights were a release, and all over the “east end” one might view “a continuous procession,” as George G. Foster wrote, “which loses itself gradually in the innumerable side streets leading…into the unknown regions of Proletarianism.” The girls busily losing themselves had dressed ecstatically. Using magazine illustrations, inexpensive patterns, or improvisation, the Bowery gals put their seamstressing skills to work and made dresses that paid homage to uptown fashions. Then, as if the dress was a cake, they decorated it. They loved notions: fancy buttons, lots of lace, ribbons, bows, fake-silk sashes, any small inexpensive item they could afford. One observer reported that these had no “particular degree of correspondence or relationship in color—indeed [it was common to] see…startling contrasts…a light pink contrasting with a deep blue, a bright yellow with a brighter red, and a green with a dashing purple or maroon.”

The Bowery girl declared her independence from proper female decorum by appearing in public without a hat. All good women wore hats. The only exceptions were prostitutes, who needed open faces to make eye contact with prospective johns. Proper women went further and trimmed their expensive hats with veils and, below, wore heavy clothing to cover every imaginable body part. Skirts were worn so long for a while that it was a class marker, a sign of breeding, to have a strip of mud on one’s hem. (It meant that one had been out, appropriately dressed, promenading, stepping into and out of a coach.)

Excluding the reform set, the suffragists, the bohemians, and the “aberrant” (for example, the Lucy Stoners, women who fought to keep their names after marriage), prominent women went out for walks, or promenades, at appointed hours. They shopped, had their lunches and tea dates, then, as if returning from an afternoon shore leave, scurried home quickly with muddy hems. (That is, unless they had a planned assignation; certain madams in the best, least suspicious of brownstones catered exclusively to upper-class women and their lovers.) Occasionally, through the veil of her hat, a woman caught a glimpse of a g’hal, known to her as a servant, wearing…the Lord knew what.

As one remarked, “The washerwoman’s…attire is now like that of
the merchant’s wife…and the blackboot’s daughter wears a bonnet made like that of the empress of the French.”

The true Bowery g’hal liked to look at least as outlandish as her evening’s companion, the b’hoy, who had a very clear idea of how his date should appear. Those in the Bowery fraternity, it may fairly be said, worshipped themselves. They spent much of their time watching plays and theatricals devoted to their own exploits as firefighting heroes and rulers supreme of the boulevard. Many of these lengthy epics, performed at the Bowery Theater, concerned a legendary firefighting hero called Mose, a John Henry/Paul Bunyan type who could walk through flames and had with him at all times his proportionately sized woman, Lize. Every Bowery girl wanted to be a beloved, tough-looking Lize. Every “reporter” out on the Bowery hoped to find one.

“Her very walk has a swing of mischief and defiance in it,” wrote George G. Foster of the Bowery girl; Abram Dayton noted, “Her gait and swing were studied imitations of her lord and master, and she trips by the side of her beau ideal with an air which plainly says, ‘I know no fear and I ask no favor.’”

One less sympathetic writer characterized the g’hal’s this way: “The Bowery Girl, the ‘cruiser,’…is taught early on that ‘the world is graft.’…She knows that she must take care of herself…she must be shrewd and rely upon herself alone. She drinks very little, saves her money for clothes. Then, when she is gaily attired, she goes…and ‘grafts’ in various ways.”

GETTING HOOKED