Authors: Betsy Israel
Tags: #Social Science, #Women's Studies, #History, #United States, #20th Century, #Media Studies
No matter how comfortable she felt out promenading, the Bowery girl, like any woman on the streets, was likely to be viewed as a “vagabond,” a potential prostitute dressed not for an evening out but for work. The associations between prostitution and lone women were so deeply embedded in the culture that women themselves often assumed that their peers, other gals they happened to pass on the street, were on the make. Even a girl stuck at home, guarded by a tyrannical father, could easily adopt that view
based on the stories she read. Novels and magazines were filled with tales of prostitutional woe; periodicals seemed to run entire tales-of-woe sections. Here, from a newspaper account, is the testimony of one landlady who’d lost a tenant to the streets:
I seen her. ’A tiltin’ off her head, to sees up and back on the street…this girl, ’corse, she’d ’a lived in my old house. I felt turrible about her leaving…a house that she know’d was decent and where she could manage to live within her means…she was good when she came to this house. When I seen her that day I tried to get her to come. Coffee. She looked almost grateful…but she saw a man…and turned on me and raced to do what she would.
In fact, it was extremely difficult to assess who was a real sex professional. During the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth, prostitution fell under the criminal heading of “vagrancy.” Vagrancy, as then defined, meant loitering—standing or else walking up and back along a stretch of sidewalk. (Mothers, waiting to cross streets, were anxious to keep their girls moving lest they seem “loitery.”) Vagrancy arrests more than doubled between 1850 and 1860, but how many of these related to prostitution and how many were the result of more girls simply out on the street, it’s hard to say.
Like other cities, New York had a long tradition of hysterical estimates. In 1832 the evangelical Magdalene Society wrote in its annual report: “We have satisfactorily ascertained the fact that the numbers of females in this city, who abandon themselves to prostitution is not less than 10,000!” Throughout the mid-nineteenth century the Ladies’ Industrial Association, an early union, with almost all the city papers concurring, would claim that poor girls were turning in desperation to the street or low houses at rates approaching, roughly, 50,000 to 100,000 per year. The Justice Department predicted that by 1910 the figures would rise to 200,000 nationwide, and New York City, of course, would hold its own.
The obvious fact was that no one could live on two dollars a week—the typical salary—or even on a generous raise to four dollars or, if she was
very lucky, seven. In 1870 the
Herald
estimated that 5 to 10 percent of all young working women made extra money by hooking, treating it as an adjunct to their jobs, although most sources, the
Herald
included, believed that the majority did not take it up as a career. But so hopeful a conclusion was open to ongoing debate.
In
The Women of New York, or Social Life in the Great City
(1870, “with numerous engravings”), George Ellington, wealthy man-about-town and writer, told the whole story, cold. In a chapter entitled “Women of Pleasure,” he ran through what a girl could earn for sex in all kinds of situations. On the street, if she survived, she could make per session what a factory girl made during a week, roughly three to four dollars. In the “disorderly” houses, usually down by the seaport, arrangements were made on the spot, while at the merely down-at-the-heels parlor houses, pay ran at ten dollars a week and at the cleaner ones reached twenty to twenty-five. More respectable parlor houses paid live-in girls up to seventy dollars a week. At the elite houses the women—white women, usually actresses, showgirls, other out-of-work performers—started at two hundred per week and were known in some cases to marry their clients.
Prostitution was a major slice of the underground economy, a fact well known to politicians and the police, who accepted regular payoffs. Many landlords preferred hookers over working-class tenants because they obviously made much more money. (And under common law, owners were not regarded as accessories to a criminal act that happened to take place on their properties.) For a percentage, theater owners allowed prostitutes to see clients in the third-tier balcony. Several of the city’s most exclusive bordellos were run out of luxurious brownstones owned by the Catholic church.
As hierarchical, almost organized as this sounds, there was a randomness to sex work. Women never knew exactly when they’d need to go out there, and many were so terrified by the prospect that they postponed it as long as possible. Here is a recounting of a first time out, an act of enormous desperation, taken from a novel called
The G’Hals of New York
by Ned Buntline (1850). The story: Mary and Susan, the oldest of several or
phaned sisters, are broke and about to be evicted. As a last resort, Mary has miserably agreed to an assignation. It’s dusk when she leaves. Susan waits. And waits.
The wind swept hoarsely, in loud wild wailings, up against the windows, as if they were moaning over the sacrifice her sister had that night made…to shield her sisters from absolute want and death…Mary, out on such a cold and fearful night on such a horrid mission…[Susan’s] dreamy fantasies ran…the body of a girl, half naked, stark and cold…A girl who had gone forth from that very house on Essex Street…. the clock struck four and Susan’s heart began to throb heavily and painfully…. Mary had not come home…. [but] the door swung back and Mary, herface flushed and haggard, her eyes fearfully wild and brilliant, and half-glaring like a maniac’s came whirling into the chamber—stretching out her right hand in which she clutched a number of bank notes [and] muttered in a hoarse deep toned voice: “’Tis here, the price of infamy—money! Money! We’ll gorge on’t. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
ONE VERY LONG DAY
There are few extant records of the working girl’s life, whether she spent it working in a brothel, a factory, or both. Because of language barriers, illiteracy, or all-out exhaustion, very few of the earliest single girls took many notes.
It’s a real discovery, then, to come across
The Long Day
(1905), a vivid diary reworked in prose form by a young woman named Dorothy Richardson. Her story begins on a train as she travels from rural Pennsylvania to New York City, where she arrives “an unskilled, friendless, almost penniless girl of 18…a stranger in a strange city.” There is but one thought in her head, which she repeats like a mantra: “work or starve, work or starve.”
Some selections:
DAY ONE
, 6
A.M
.: I had written the YWCA some weeks before as to respectable cheap boarding houses…. Was this it?…I jumped out of bed…there was a little puddle of water in the middle of the floor under the skylight, and the drip had brushed against…my shirtwaist and soaked into the soles of my only pair of shoes.
MEET THE NEIGHBORS:
Breakfast consisted of heterogeneous little dabs of things…[I turned] my observations…to the people at my table…an old woman [who had] difficulty in making food reach the mouth…a little fidgety stupid-looking and very ugly woman…and a young girl who seemed to be dancing in her seat beside me.
HAVE YE WORK?
: Advertisements for cigar and cigarette workers were numerous, accordingly I applied to the foreman of a factory at Avenue A who wanted “bunch makers.” He cut me off, asking to see my working card; when I looked at him blankly, he strode away in disgust. Nothing daunted me for I meant to be very energetic and brave…. I went to the next factory. They wanted labelers…this sounded easy…I approached the foreman…. He asked for my experience. “Sorry we’re not running a Kindergarten here.”
DAY TWO:
“Girls wanted to learn binding and folding—paid while learning!” The address took me to Brooklyn Bridge and down a strange dark thoroughfare…zigzag alleys wrigg[ling] through a great bridge arch into a world of book-binderies…. Supervisor civil. He did not need girls until Monday, but he told me to come back then and bring a bone paper cutter. Might find something better.
DAY THREE:
I found it! Salesladies—experience not necessary—Brooklyn. Lindbloom’s. After much dickering, Mr. L. and wife de
cided I’d do on $3 a week—working from seven until nine in the evening, Saturdays until midnight…if I must Work and Starve, I should not do it in Lindbloom’s.”
In the meantime—day four—the landlady has revealed herself as a religious nut, spying on girls, entering and searching rooms. Our protagonist flees.
TOO DEAD TIRED TO MIND:
I had a chance with the janitress of a fourteenth street lodging house. She had a cleft palate, and all I could understand was [it would cost] one dollar a week with light housekeeping…bedtime arrived. I moved closer to the most…mutilated cook-stove that ever cheered the heart of a…“light housekeeper.”…Its little body [was] cracked and rust-eaten—a bright merry little cripple of a stove…. On its front…in broken letters [it said] “Little Lottie.”…Straightaway, Little Lottie gave me an inspiring example of courage and fortitude. Still precaution prompted me…to drag my mother’s trunk against the door…this was the first journey it had made since it carried her bridal finery to and from the Philadelphia Centennial.
NEW MANTRA:
How different it all was in reality from what I had imagined it would be!
BOXED IN:
The office of E. Springer & Co. was in pleasant contrast…A portly young man who sat behind a glass partition acknowledged my entrance by glancing up…. The man opened the glass door…. Possibly he had seen my chin quiver…and knew that I was ready to cry…. The foreman sent word that No. 105 had not rung up that morning, and that I could have her key. The pay was $3 a week to learners, but Miss Price, the superintendent, thought I could learn in a week’s time…the portly gentleman gave me the key, showed me how to “ring up,” in the register…. henceforth I should be known as “105.”
FIRST DAY OF WORK:
Sickly gas jet, and in its flicker a horde of loud-mouthed girls were making frantic efforts to insert their keys into the time-register…. Everyone was late…. I was pushed and punched unmercifully by the crowding elbows, until I found myself squeezed tight against the wall…thread[ing] a narrow passageway in and out the stamping, throbbing machinery…. By the light that filtered through the grimy windows, I got vague confused glimpses of girl faces shining like stars out of this dark, fearful chaos of revolving belts and wheels…through the ramparts of machinery, we entered…Phoebe, a tall girl in tortoise earrings and curl papers, was assigned to “learn” me.
WHAT PHOEBE SAYS:
“No apron!…Turn your skirt! The ladies I’m used to working with likes to walk home looking decent and respectable, no difference what they’re like other times.”
WHAT PHOEBE SAYS TO ANY REMARK, MADE BY ANYONE:
“HOT A-I-R!”
WHAT THEY DO:
…paste slippery strips of muslin over the corners of the rough brown boxes that were piled high about us in frail, tottering towers reaching to the ceiling.
AFTER DOING IT FIVE MINUTES:
shoving and shifting and lifting. In order that we not be walled in completely by our cumbersome materials, every few minutes we bore tottering piles across the floor to the “strippers.”
TEN HOURS LATER:
Dead tired. The awful noise and confusion, the terrific heat [and] foul smell of the glue, and the agony of breaking ankles and blistered hands seemed almost unendurable.
NUMBER
105
ARRIVES HOME:
I stopped myself dead. An older woman said, “Youse didn’t live there, too?” I stood before the mass of red embers…dazed…stupefied…and watched the firemen pour
their quenching streams upon the ashes of my lodging house…. Nobody knew anything definite. “Five, ten dead.”
IN A WOMEN’S SHELTER:
Whatever is going to become of me? Why in the name of all common sense, had I ever come to New York City? Why was I not content to remain a country school-m’am?
Henrietta, a religious, industrious coworker, hears the story and offers our girl a room. Other workers advise against it; they say Henrietta is strange, not as she seems. But our heroine decides that they, as lazy dopey girls, resent Henrietta for her excellent work habits. Later, walking “home,” our girl begins to suspect that Henrietta does indeed have things to hide. Her house, far to the other side of town, is a squalid firetrap. And there’s a man waiting for them in the room. A religious friend, says Henrietta, though the pious man is…drinking. Our heroine feels as if she’s wandered into an opium den and, terrified, finds that she can barely speak. Henrietta and the pious drinking man go out on an “errand,” leaving our nervous heroine alone to look under the bed, in the closet—where she finds liquor—and finally out the window, where she sees Henrietta walking back now with
two
men.
Panicked, she flees and in her rush trips over an old woman lying half asleep on the stairs. The woman says she lives there (on the stairs, at least) and sympathizes with the story. In her view, Henrietta is indeed a drunk, a religious nut, and a whore. The old woman and our heroine, “two strange compatriots,” decide to leave the building in search of food, shelter, anything more comforting than where they are. For hours they wander the city, at last reaching Bleecker Street, where they find an all-night cafeteria willing to accept such shabby females. Our heroine uneasily spies a mirror.
THE GIRL AND THE LOOKING GLASS:
Truly I was a sorry-looking object. Had not been well washed or combed since the last morning…I had forgotten my gloves, a brand-new pair, too; my handkerchief, and most needful of all else, my ribbon stock collar,
without which my neck rose horribly long and thin above my dusty jacket…. I began to feel for the first time what was for meat least the quintessence of poverty—the absolute impossibility of personal cleanliness and of decent raiment…. I was combing my heavy hair using a small side comb I wore to keep it up.