Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

the acts didn’t cover laundries. And some thought they shouldn’t. They reasoned that since the acts applied only to women and children, under the logic that they needed special protection, laundry jobs would go to men. So part of Banks’s mission was to see how the women felt about Factory Act protections, and whether they wanted them applied to their industry.

So here she was at the laundry, with wet boots and a hacking cough, taking it all down.

Though Banks’s refusal to link her work to a noble cause made her unpopular at parties, it paid off on the page. Another writer might have painted poor lame Janie as a pathetic victim with the scar on her forehead from falling into a fireplace and a finger mashed by chopping wood, a tool to a reform end, but Banks let her be complicated.

Highly competent, Janie kept the laundry running, staying late, solving problems, and facing irate clients to explain mistakes. Banks found the laundry miserable, but Janie appeared to like it. Sundays are boring, Janie said. She’d rather work.

Janie is a fully fleshed-out nonfiction character, like Tillie Mayard, the sick woman Bly met at the asylum. They are nuanced, well drawn, giving their stories lasting power in a way that transcends a more straightforward news article about debates over the Factory Act or asylum funding. “I was beginning to get intensely interested in this strange species of laundry-girl,” Banks told her readers. And her interest was contagious.

When Banks wanted to learn something besides stitching numerals into shirts, Janie convinced the boss to let Banks try ironing. In an effort to be chatty with the chief ironer, Mrs. Bruckerstone, known to be a prodigious gossip, Banks found herself embroidering the tapestry of her fictional life, adding in a soldier boyfriend named James, who was, alas, in Australia, her home country.

At the end of three hours of ironing, Banks’s skin smarted with burns and she’d pressed only thirty-four handkerchiefs, which, at “a penny a dozen” would have earned her less than a cent an hour. She tried her hand at pinafores where she was competent but slow. One took two hours with frequent breaks.

For her part, Janie was starting to wonder what was to be done with this delicate, well-spoken, yet dismayingly uneducated (by her own account) woman who seemed so very bad at laundry work. Her incompetence worried the other women, too. If she failed at laundering, what would she do? They set to finding her a job. An accountant? A server in a coffeehouse? A barmaid? A nurse?

“Hospital patients are too cross and fidgety. I wouldn’t like to be a nurse,” Banks declared.

Mrs. Bruckerstone lost her temper at this, insisting that if she was too weak for the laundry and too bad at math for accounting, nursing was the only option.

Finally, Janie announced she had the perfect position for this odd, weak Australian who’d washed up on the shores of the laundry: a clerk at a candy store, pushing peppermint sticks and caramels.

After a few more days, Banks quit before she was fired, telling the owner, “I’m afraid I’m not strong enough for this sort of thing, Mrs. Morris.”

“Miss Barnes is going to a confectioner’s,” Janie added, in an effort to make everyone feel better.

But Banks didn’t bury herself in chocolate creams. She dug in and pursued all angles. To flesh out first-person experience, she dressed as a journalist again and visited Acton, nicknamed “Soap Suds Island” because it had so many laundries, and interviewed female workers about Factory Act amendments. She visited smaller establishments in the East End, where Banks found that the laundrywomen married young to keep from being old maids, but then continued working. Like Janie, they liked it, though they were eager to hear about changes that might better their situation. (Their mothers, on the other hand, often approved of long work hours as a way to keep their daughters out of trouble.)

After a meeting of the Working Girls Club, a gaggle of young women walked Banks to the train station. The lively pack offered safety in numbers that the few women in any given newspaper office weren’t able to provide, along with a constant stream of conversation. When boys outside a bar threw pebbles at them, they yelled and hurled one back. It might not have been ladylike, but it was effective, and Banks admired their nerve.

As the train pulled away, one hollered after her, “Say, miss, don’t forget to make them give us that Act you told us about.”

There was plenty of room for improvement, Banks reflected. Water could be drained from the floor, fans could provide circulation, machinery could be fenced so it wouldn’t catch skirts. Working six a.m. to nine p.m., as some did, made for a long, wearying day, even for those heartier than Banks claimed to be. She mused: “If the hours of the young girls, at least, could be reduced so that their day would commence at eight and end at six, then night-schools might be established in the neighbourhoods of the large laundries, and from eight until ten the girls could be instructed and amused.”

One might have thought she was trying to do some good.

Chapter 12

1894–1895

Girl No More

“She pulled out a small notebook and with a dainty pencil put down the memorandum in a rather shy way as I thought. But that is what I liked about her—nothing mannish, not the least. Though it’s deuced rare among girl reporters.”

“Why don’t you say women reporters?” put in Bunzie, on whose fine ear “girl” grated.

“Because this one was nothing but a girl, and a slip of a girl at that. And then you never heard of a woman reporter did you?

They’re all girls.”

—Frank Bailey Millard, “The ‘Shield’s’ Girl Reporter,” 1892

The panic of 1893 bled into 1894, increasing unemployment, depressing wages. Back in Chicago, those who had hired on at the Columbian Exposition now paced the sidewalks looking for work or, homeless, took refuge in remnants of the glorious White City.