Bachelor Girl (37 page)

Store and office culture:

Susan Porter Benson,
Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); “‘The Customers Ain’t God’: The World Culture of Department-Store Saleswomen,” in Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds.,
Working-Class America
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); John William Ferry,
The History of the Department Store
(New York: Macmillan, 1960); Robert Hendrickson,
The Grand Emporiums: The Illustrated History of America’s Great Department Stores
(New York: Stein and Day, 1979); Lisa M. Fine,
The Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870–1930
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Helen Woodward, a successful advertising woman who began as a secretary, argued that stenography was “a woman’s short
est cut to a big job,” in
Through Many Windows
(New York: Harper Brothers, 1926); Grace Dodge,
A Bundle of Letters
(New York/London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1887); Florence Wenderoth Saunders,
Letters to a Business Girl: A Woman in the World of Business (“…replete with Practical Information Regarding the Perplexing Problems of a Girl Stenographer…”)
(Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1908); Mary S. Fergusson,
Boarding Homes and Clubs for Working Women, Bulletin No. 15
(The U.S. Bureau of Labor, 1898).

Working-girl novels:

Dorothy Richardson,
The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl
(1905; Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990): the controversy surrounding the authenticity of the author’s account was never officially resolved, although it seems she likely did as she said: had some early experiences as a working girl, then later in life went back as an undercover reporter. The sticking point was how much time she could possibly have spent as a young penniless girl in the factories. In her hometown, she worked for the
Pittsburgh Dispatch;
in New York she wrote for many publications, including Eugene Debb’s
Social Democrat,
and in 1899 she began a ten-year engagement at the
New York Herald
. That’s when she did her research for what’s been called—and I think, accurately—an autobiographical novel. Richardson published another novel in 1924,
The Book of Blanche,
this one about a single woman, a musician, trying to establish herself in New York City. The book, less socially conscious, had more traditionally romantic and sexual concerns, but as in
The Long Day,
the heroine never marries.

Sinclair Lewis,
The Job,
3d ed. (1917; Omaha: Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press, 1994),
Main Street
(1920; New York: Dover, 1999), and
Ann Vickers
(New York: P. F. Collier, 1933); Christopher Morley,
Human Being
(New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1932) and
Kitty Foyle
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1939); Theodore Dreiser,
Sister Carrie
(1900; New York: Penguin Classics, 1986) and
Jennie Gerhardt
(1910; New York: Penguin, 1994); Anzia Yezierska:
The Breadgivers
(1925; New York: Persea, 1999) and
The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection
(New York: Persea, 1999).

Prostitution:

Ned Buntline,
G’hals of New York
(New York: Dewitt and Davenport, 1850); Ruth Rosen,
The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Kathy Peiss, “Charity Girls and City Pleasures,” in
Pow ers of Desire,
Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983); George Ellington,
Women of New York
(New York: New York Books, 1869).

Periodicals:

Edgar Fawcett, “Woes of the New York Working Girl,”
Arena
(Dec. 1891); Lillian W. Betts, “Tenement-House Life and Recreation” (
Outlook
61, Dec. 11, 1899); Mary Gay
Humphreys, “The New York Working Girl,” (
Scribner’s
20, Oct. 1896); Barbara Schreier, “Becoming American: Jewish Women Immigrants, 1880–1920,”
History Today
(Mar. 1994); Mark K. Maule, “What Is a Shop-Girl’s Life?”
World’s Work
(Sept. 1907); “A Salesgirl’s Story,”
Independent
(July 1902); “The Shopgirl,”
Outlook
(Feb. 1908); “After Business Hours, What?—Pleasure!”
Ladies’ Home Journal
(Feb. 1907); “What It Means to Be a Department Store Girl,”
Ladies’ Home Journal
(June 1913); “Glimpses at the Mind of a Waitress” (
American Journal of Sociology
13, July, 1907); Belle Lindners Israel’s “The Way of the Girl” (
Survey
22, July 3, 1909).

The early bohemian periodicals:

Mary Gay Humphreys, “Women Bachelors in New York,”
Scribner’s
(Aug. 1896) and “Women Bachelors in London” (
Scribner’s,
Aug. 1896) in which we learn “Women are everywhere; climbing down from omnibuses; coming up in processions from the under ground stations. They are hurrying along Fleet Street…Chelsea and South Kensing ton are peopled with petticoats…. This new figure has no place in fiction. That is why we know so little of her….”; “Feminine Bachelorism,”
Scribner’s
(Oct. 1896); Olga Stanley, “Some Reflections on the Life of a Bachelor Girl,”
Outlook
(Nov. 1896); Winifred Sothern, “The Truth About the Bachelor Girl,”
Munsey’s
(May, 1901); “The Matinee Girls,”
Metropolitan
(June 1900). For the origins of the Trilby character, see Lois Banner,
American Beauty
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

Novels:

From
The Folks
(1934; Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), the “Margaret” section: I. “The Hidden Time,” II. “Basement Apartment,” III. “And It Had a Green Door,” IV. “After the End of the Story.” Ruth McKenney,
My Sister Eileen
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1938). Enormously popular novel turned play and musical film featuring two sisters who daringly take a basement apartment in the Village. Tragically, just after publication, Eileen, the pretty, adventurous sister, was killed in a car accident with her husband, Nathanael West, who was the author of
Miss Lonelyhearts
and other novels.

CHAPTER
3:
THIN AND RAGING THINGS

Social crusaders:

Jane Addams,
The Spirit of Youth and City Streets
(New York: Macmillan, 1909),
Twenty Years at Hull House
(New York: Macmillan, 1910), and
The Second Twenty Years at Hull House
(New York: Macmillan, 1930). For more general information, Allen Davis,
American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams
(London: Oxford University
Press, 1973); the section on Hull House in Roy Lubove,
The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965); Karen J. Blair,
The Club Woman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914
(New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1980); William Dean Howells,
The Minister’s Charge
(Boston: Ticknor, 1887).

New women:

Judith Schwarz,
The Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy
(Lebanon, N.H.: New Victoria, 1982); Elaine Showalter,
These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties
(Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1978); Lila Rose McCabe,
The American Girl at College
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1893); June Sochen,
The New Woman: Feminism in Greenwich Village, 1910–1920
(New York: Quadrangle, 1972); Leslie Fishbein,
Rebels in Bohemia
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Ellen Trimberger,
“Feminism, Men and Modern Love: Greenwich Village, 1900–1925,”
in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds.,
Powers of Desire
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983); Lewis A. Erenberg,
Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture,
1890–1930 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981) provides an overview of attitudes among middle-class urban kids in the teens; Terry Miller,
Greenwich Village and How It Got That Way
(New York: Crown, 1990); Lillian Federman,
Odd Girls and Twilight Ladies: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Lydia Kingsmill Commander, “An American Idea: Does the National Tendency Toward a Small Family Point to Race Suicide or Race Development?”
The American Idea
(1907; New York: Arno Press, 1972).

The tea-dancing modern girl, circa 1913:

Susanne Wilcox, “The Unrest of Modern Women,”
Independent
(July 8, 1909); “Why Educated Young Women Don’t Marry,”
Independent
(Nov. 25, 1909); Juliet Wilbor Tompkins, “Why Women Don’t Marry,”
Cosmopolitan
(Feb. 1907); “The Passing of the Home Daughter,”
Independent
(July 13, 1911); Margaret Deland, “The Change in the Feminine Ideal,”
Atlantic Monthly
(Mar. 1914);
Ethel W. Mumford,
“Where Is Your Daughter This Afternoon?”
Harper’s
(Jan. 17, 1914); “New Reflections on the Dancing Mania,”
Current Opinion
(Oct. 13, 1915); “Turkey Trot and Tango—A Disease or a Remedy?
Current Opinion
55 (Sept. 1913); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The New Generation of Women,”
Current History
(Aug. 18, 1923).

White slaving:

“Five White Slave Trade Investigations,
McClure’s
(May 1910); “The White Slave Films”
Outlook
(Jan. 17, 1914); “The White Slave Films: A Review,”
Outlook
(Feb. 14, 1914); John Stanley, “Traffic in Souls: The Horror of White Slavery,”
San Francisco Chronicle
(Oct. 21, 1990).

The Gibson girl:

Ann O’Hagen, “The Athletic Girl,”
Munsey’s
(Aug. 1901); Richard Harding Davis, “The Origin of a Type of the American Girl,”
Quarterly Illustrator,
vol. III (winter 1895); “Charles Dana Gibson, the Man and His Art,”
Collier’s
(Dec. 1902); Winifred Scott Moody, “Daisy Miller and the Gibson Girl,”
Ladies’ Home Journal
(Sept. 1904); “Gibson Girl Would Fit in Fine in the ’90s,”
Roanoke Times and World News
(Apr. 9, 1995).

The flapper and 1920s youth:

Ann Douglas,
Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995); Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrill Lynd,
Middletown: A Study in Con temporary American Culture
(New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929) was cited routinely for decades as the preeminent microcosmic view of American middle-class society; Paula Fass,
The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Anita Loos,
A Girl Like I
(New York: Viking, 1966); John Keats,
You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970); Eric Partridge,
A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English,
7th ed. (New York: MacMillan, 1970);
A Flapper’s Dictionary, as Compiled by One of Them
(Pittsburgh: Imperial, 1922).

Periodicals:

George Ade, “Today’s Amazing Crop of 18-Year-Old Roues and 19-Year-Old Vamps,”
American Magazine
(March 1922); “Says Flapper Aids Church,”
New York Times
(Sept. 2, 1922); “An Interview with a Young Lady,”
New Republic
(Jan. 1925); “A Doctor’s Warning to Flappers,”
Literary Digest
(Oct. 1926); Judge William McAdoo, “Young Women and Crime,”
Ladies’ Home Journal
(Nov. 1927); Zelda Fitzgerald, “Eulogy on the Flapper,”
Metropolitan
(1929); Ruth Hooper, “Flapping Not Repented Of,”
New York Times Book Review
(July 16, 1926).

The new spinster:

We know the former flapper “new spinster”—her frustrations, joys, successes, snipey conversations with wives, and wardrobe changes—from articles published in magazines and newspapers. Primary information about her sex life—and she apparently had one—is found in
Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-two Hundred Women
(1935, a privately funded study, Vassar College) and in Daniel Scott Smith,
The Dating of the American Sexual Revolution,
part of the collection
The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective,
Michael Gordon, ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973). Also Ellen Rothman,
Hand and Hearts: The History of Courtship in America
(New York: Basic Books, 1984); and portions of Beth L. Bailey’s highly enjoyable
From Front Porch to Backseat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1986); there are wonderfully frightening images of the late flapper down and out in two Jean Rhys novels:
After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie
(New York: Harper & Row, 1931) and
Quartet
(1928; New York: Vintage, 1974).

Periodicals:

Grace M. Johnson, “The New Old Maids” (
Women Beautiful,
May 1909); Elizabeth Jordan, “On Being a Spinster,”
Saturday Evening Post
(Apr. 1926); Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, “Feminist—New Style,”
Harper’s
(Oct. 1927); Lillian Bell, “Old Maids of the Last Generation and This,”
Saturday Evening Post
(Dec. 1926); “Feminism and Jane Smith,”
Harper’s
(June 1927); Lorine Pruette, “Should Men Be Protected?”
Nation
(Aug. 1927); Lillian Symes, “Still a Man’s Game: Reflections of a Slightly Tired Feminist,”
Harper’s
(May 1929) and “The New Masculinism,”
Harper’s
(June 1930); “And Now the Siren Eclipses the Flapper”
New York Times Magazine
(July 28, 1929); Margaret Culkin Ban ning, “The Plight of the Spinster,”
Harper’s
(June 1929); Mrs. Virginia Kirk, “A Tale of Not So Flaming Youth,”
Literary Digest,
no. 105 (Oct. 10, 1930).