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:
What wonder…beneath the onus of her torments…that their morals, like their clothes and fingers, are sadly stained? Haggard and jaded, they are…robbed of even the physical chance to seek ease through sin…[desirable only to] a Quasimodo of the slums. How should it concern You, Mrs. Fine Lady, to care that girls of the same age of your Carrie and Fannie are starving…walking miles to work in direst weather in thinnest tattered shawls.”
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 aboutghetto life, focused much of her fiction on the tension between frightened, old-world parents and their
What wonder…beneath the onus of her torments…that their morals, like their clothes and fingers, are sadly stained? Haggard and jaded, they are…robbed of even the physical chance to seek ease through sin…[desirable only to] a Quasimodo of the slums. How should it concern You, Mrs. Fine Lady, to care that girls of the same age of your Carrie and Fannie are starving…walking miles to work in direst weather in thinnest tattered shawls.”
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 aboutghetto life, focused much of her fiction on the tension between frightened, old-world parents and their
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