Charity Girls and City Pleasures

Abstract

In New York City, between 1880 and 1920, young, unmarried, working-class women experimented with new forms of sexuality and new types of relationships with men very much at odds with our stereotypes of Victorian sexuality and also with middle-class notions of respectability. Most of these women were single wage earners who toiled in the city's factories, shops, and department stores, while devoting their evenings to the lively entertainment of the streets, public dance halls, and other popular amusements. Born or educated in the United States, many adopted a cultural style meant to distance themselves from their immigrant roots and familial traditions. Such women dressed in the latest finery, negotiated city life with ease, and sought intrigue and adventure with male companions. For this group of working women, sexuality became a central dimension of their emergent culture (1). These New York working women frequented amusements in which familiarity and intermingling among strangers, not decorum, defined normal public behavior between the sexes. At one respectable Turnverein ball, for example, a vice investigator described closely the chaotic activity in the barroom between dances: Most of the younger couples were hugging and kissing; there was a general mingling of men and women at the different tables … they were all singing and carrying on, they kept running around the room and acted like a mob of lunatics let lo[o]se (2).