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 meanswas 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.
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
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 meanswas 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.
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
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