STORE GIRLS.
_Their Fascinations, Foibles and Temptations._
Since the time when Mary Rogers, the beautiful cigar girl of Broadway,
met her sad fate over in Hoboken, the pretty shop girls of New York have
contributed more than their full quota to the city's contemporaneous
history. They have figured in connection with many of its social
romances and domestic infelicities, as well as with its scandals and its
crimes--secret and revealed. In Gotham's grave and gay aspects--in its
comedy, its tragedy, and its melo-drama, we are perpetually running
across the charming face, graceful form, and easy, gay demeanor of the
pretty shop girl.
As a rule, the temptress of the store is pretty--frequently quite
beautiful, and almost invariably handsomer than those fortunate
daughters of Mammon whom she is called upon to serve, and who often
treat her with such top-lofty hauteur. And how stylish she frequently
is, and how difficult it is to describe this incommunicable quality of
_style_, which those artful setters of baits--the dealers in ready-made
fabrics--understand so well! Who has not noticed how the tall,
slender-framed girls, with their graceful movements and flexible spines,
their long, smooth throats and curved waists, are drafted off to stand
as veritable decoy-ducks? Who has not observed the grace and ease with
which they wear risky patterns and unusual _facons_, and so delude the
arrogant but ungraceful customer into buying, in the belief that she
will look just as well as the pretty model? The average well-to-do
woman, with some pretensions to good looks, sees a beautiful young
creature with Junoesque air parading before her in bold
color-combinations and doubtful harmonies, and she imagines she can
venture the same thing with like effect. But alas! what a travesty the
experiment frequently is!
Many of the New Yorkers who read this page will recall the Original
Dollar Store on Broadway and its fascinating young salesladies. Some of
these were perfect sirens with their loveliness of feature and delicacy
of color; their luxuriant hair, made amenable to the discipline of the
prevailing fashion; the gown stylish and perfect, and frequently not at
all reticent in its revelations of form; the countenance calm, watchful
and intelligent--frequently mischievous; the walk something akin to the
serene consciousness of power which we are told that Phryne exemplified
before her judges, and accompanied with that grace which is the
birthright of beauty in every age and under any circumstances.
For many reasons the tone of morality, in some instances, among store
girls in this city is not high. A variety of obvious causes contribute
to this result, among which may be mentioned their generally poor
salaries: their natural levity, and the example of their companions;
their love of dress and display, coupled with a natural desire for
masculine attentions; long hours in close, impure air; sensational
literature; frequent absence of healthy or adequate home influence; and
the many temptations which beset an attractive girl in such a position.
Many of them enter stores as mere children in the capacity of cash
girls. They are the children of poor parents, and as they grow up to
young maidenhood, they acquire a sort of superficial polish in the
store, and are brightened without being educated. Some grow up and take
their places as full-blown salesladies, and begin to sigh for the gayety
of the streets, for freedom from restraint, and for amusements that are
not within their reach. Naturally _au fait_ in style, with taste and
clever fingers, they dress in an attractive manner, with the hope of
beguiling the ideal hero they have constructed from the pages of the
trashy story paper. It is a sort of voluntary species of sacrifice on
their part--a kind of suicidal decking with flowers, and making
preparation for immolation. Full of pernicious sentimentality, they are
open to the first promising flirtation. They see elegantly-dressed and
diamonded ladies, and their imagination is fed from the fountains of
vulgar literature until they dream that they, too, are destined to be
won by some splendid cavalier of fabulous wealth. Learning from the
wishy-washy literature that their face is their fortune, and so, reading
what happened to others, and how perfectly lovely and romantic it all
was, they are ready for the wiles of the first gay deceiver. Waiting in
vain for their god-like ideal, they are finally content to look a little
lower, and favorably receive the immodest addresses of some clerk in
their own store, or succeed in making a street "mash."
Sometimes the pretty girl rushes impetuously into marriage, repents and
separates from her husband. She is still good looking, and her marital
experience has given her an air of easy assurance, and she readily finds
employment as a saleslady. Her influence afterwards, among girls
comparatively innocent and without her experience, cannot but be
pernicious, and at the same time must exert a certain formative and
shaping process in determing the peculiar character of the whole class
of girls in the store.
Very frequently she does not attain even to the questionable dignity of
a marriage ceremony. Flattered by the attentions of some swell, the
pretty shop girl will be induced to accompany him to the theatre and to
supper in a concert saloon. Her vanity is kindled by his appearance. She
rejoices in the style of his clothes, in the magnificence of his
jewelry, and she thinks her mission in life is to walk beside the
splendid swell, amid rose gardens, theatres and supper rooms, for the
remainder of her life. Finally she yields to his soft solicitations, and
her prospects are forever blighted. She becomes an incorrigible flirt,
meets her "fellows" on the corner of the street near the store, spends a
certain number of evenings and nights with them at hotels where no
course of catechism takes place at the clerk's desk. She goes to Coney
Island or local beer gardens on Sundays, manifesting a vivid animal
pleasure in her enjoyment, with little manifestation of gratitude
towards her escort who is supplying the money.
Sometimes, again, an exceptionally pretty girl will fall a victim to the
proprietor, the manager or some of the superintendents of the store; and
there have been cases of this kind heard in the courts, in one of which
the proprietor not only seduced the girl, but married her, afterwards
obtaining a divorce because of her incontinence. Sometimes the lapse of
these girls from the paths of virtue is accompanied with exceptional
hardships. The young lady is beautiful as well as good perhaps, and the
pride of her idolizing parents, who have taught her that she is fit to
be the wife of a duke. She attracts the eye of a man about town, and the
process of courting and flattery--of sapping and mining--begins, with
the result that he has had in view since the inception of the
acquaintance. He is not a bad fellow as the world goes; but providence
and society have made it very hard for single men to show kindness to
single women in any way but one. He is sorry at her situation; but she
is hardly the person for him to marry, even with her blooming,
flower-like face. In such a situation--and such situations are far too
common with the class--Byron's lines, slightly altered, seem peculiarly
applicable to the pretty shop girl:
"'Twas thine own beauty gave the fatal blow,
And help'd to plant the wound that laid thee low."
Sometimes it happens that the pretty girl, wearied of waiting for her
knightly deliverer, comes across the advertisement of a gifted
seeress--the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, perchance, or "the
only English prophetess who has the genuine Roman and Arabian talismans
for love, good luck, and all business affairs;" or the wonderful
clairvoyant who can be "consulted on absent friends, love, courtship and
marriage." Not infrequently she falls into the toils of those
advertising frauds, who frequently combine the vile trade of procuress
with the ostensible trade of fortune-telling. When the girl is drawn to
this den, the trump card offered her is, of course, the young gentleman,
rich as Croesus and handsome as Adonis, with whom she is to fall in
love. He is generally described with considerable minuteness, and the
time and place of meeting foretold. This may be fictitious, and it is
fortunate for her if it is so. Rut the seeress too frequently needs no
powers of clairvoyance or ratiocination to make these disclosures, for
some _roue_; who has exhausted the ordinary rounds of dissipation, or
some fast young fellow seeking a change, has made a bargain with the
prophetess for a new and innocent victim--the amount of the fee to
depend on the means and liberality of the libertine and the
attractiveness of the victim. The vain, silly girl is dazzled with the
wily woman's story, and readily promises to call again. At her next
visit the man inspects her from some place of concealment, and if she
meets his views, either an introduction takes place or a rendezvous is
perfected. Thus the acquaintance begins, with the result which every
intelligent reader can see for himself. Sometimes the picture of the
scamp is shown, but in every case there is but one end in view on the
part of the seeress, and that end is almost invariably achieved. The
girl thus becomes clandestinely "gay," and spreads the influence of her
evil example and impure associations among her shopmates. Pope has told
us in four immortal lines the effects of a constant contact with vice.
In the second epistle of his Essay on Man, he writes:
"Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace."
In the case of the class of young girls under consideration this truth
is peculiarly applicable. In consequence of their associations they hear
and see things whose influence is almost wholly bad and pernicious.
Those disguised advertisements in the newspapers called "Personals" are
of this evil character. To young girls, with minds imperfectly
disciplined, there is a fatal fascination in the mystery of
surreptitious appointments and meetings. Mystery is so suggestive and
romantic, and the young girl who, from piqued curiosity, is tempted to
dally with a "Matrimonial" or a "Personal," is an object of
commiseration. From dallying and reading and wondering, the step is easy
to answer such notices. She believes that she has a chance of getting a
rich and handsome husband, who will take her to Europe, and, in other
respects, make her life a sort of earthly paradise. The men who write
such advertisements know this besetting female weakness and bait their
trap accordingly. And so a young girl, too frequently, walks alone and
unadvised into the meshes of an acquaintanceship which leads to her
ruin. It is perhaps as useless to ask the men who are base enough to
conceive these things to refrain from publishing them, as it is to urge
the mercenary proprietors of certain newspapers to refrain from printing
them in their columns. Yet it must be perfectly clear to all
right-thinking minds, that it is in vain for parents to warn, parsons to
preach, friends to advise, for the good to deplore, and the ignorant to
wonder, at the increasing deterioration of our metropolitan morals,
while these tempting lures to feminine destruction are so alluringly
displayed.
It would be doing very imperfect justice to this theme did we fail to
record our conviction that some of the salesladies and shop girls of the
city are thoroughly good, virtuous, honest and respectable. Many of
them, amid unhealthy influences and corroding associations, preserve the
white flower of a blameless life, and become the honored wives of
respectable citizens. But these are a small minority. At the same time
it is useless to disguise the fact that there are others whose character
needs stronger colors for proper delineation than have hitherto been
employed. There are those among pretty shop girls who simply give up
their leisure time to surreptitious appointments. This is the worst and
most dangerous form in which this prevalent vice stalks abroad, and it
more clearly stamps the character of a community than does its more open
and brazen manifestations. Many causes may lead to a woman's becoming a
professional harlot, but if a girl "goes wrong" without any very cogent
reason for so doing, there must be something radically unsound in her
composition and inherently bad in her nature to lead her to abandon her
person to the other sex, who are at all times ready to take advantage of
a woman's weakness and a woman's love. Seduction and clandestine
prostitution have made enormous strides in New York, and especially
among the young women and girls connected with stores, within the last
decade.
Not long ago a woman, who then occupied a prominent position in a Sixth
avenue store, was met up-town in the evening. She is very good
looking--strong and lithe and tall, with a cloud of handsome hair that
glistens like bronze; large dreamy eyes that flash and scintillate
witchingly; a handsome, pouting, ruddy mouth; while her neck, white and
statuesque, crowns the full bosom of a goddess. She said that she came
out evenings occasionally to make money, not for the purpose of
subsistence, but to meet debts that her extravagance had caused her to
contract. She said in substance: "You see my appetite is fastidious, and
I like good eating and drinking. I have the most expensive suppers
sometimes. I am engaged to be married to a young fellow who works on a
daily newspaper and who is busy at night. We shall be married some day,
I suppose. He does, not suspect me to be 'fast,' and you don't suppose I
am going to take the trouble to undeceive him. This is not a frequent
practice of mine; I only come out when I want money, and I always have
an appointment before I come out. I always dress well of course, and can
pick up a gentleman anywhere when I like. Yes, I know I have good feet,
and I know how to use them. I have hooked many a fifty dollars by
showing a couple of inches of my ankle. Of course, I hate being in the
store, but my fellow is rather jealous, and I keep going there as a
blind. Will I reform when I am married? Perhaps so--if he gives me heaps
of money. I am no worse than thousands of girls, single and married, who
put on airs of purity and church-going. I know plenty of ladies who pay
five hundred dollars at the store for silks and finery, which they
persuade their husbands they bought for one-fourth of the price. And,
for my part, I am going to eat well, dress well, and enjoy myself as
long as ever I can get the money, by hook or by crook."