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The Working Girls Vacation Society: Keeping the ‘Sin’ Out of ‘Single’

During the Gilded Age, hundreds of thousands of young women worked long hours for low pay in sweat shops and factories. Some couldn’t get enough to eat, and some contracted tuberculosis in the crowded, dirty workplaces. Upper-class women came up with a way to help them: The Working Girls Vacation Society. It gave certain girls a two-week, supervised vacation in the country.

Unchaperoned co-ed bathing at Coney Island, 1897. Not the kind of vacation sanctioned by the Working Girls Vacation Society.

The rich ladies were as concerned about the morality of the working girls as much as their health. They worried the girls, once outside the home, would succumb to the blandishments of men or, worse, turn to prostitution. Getting them away from the temptations of the city and into the wholesome countryside seemed like a good way to prevent that.

And so in Boston and New York they started working girls vacation societies or clubs. They then sent the girls for two weeks to one of more than a dozen country homes — in rural Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and New Jersey. There they got three square meals a day, fresh air and in some cases medical attention.

They could read and knit and learn how to make paper flowers. On Sunday they went to church. They helped with the housework, a nod to the rich ladies’ preference that they find a morally safer line of work as domestic servants.

Doubtful Attractions

Led by copper heiress Grace Dodge, wealthy women philanthropists after the Civil War started the YWCA and a network of working girls clubs. The reformers then saw a need to to keep the girls from going unchaperoned to vaudeville shows, amusement parks, dance halls and sporting events. In 1894, Edith A. Sawyer described in The Churchman the horrors of a such a places, “where crowds congregate, and where there are electric lights, cheap music, pink lemonade and ‘merry-go-rounds’.”

The horror!

In such public places, they believed, the working girls could succumb to sinful temptations presented by men.

“There being so few week-end resources, the public amusement places with their doubtful attractions are all that is left,” reported Far and Near, the journal of the national coalition of working girls’ clubs, in 1890.

The Working Girls Vacation Society

Katharine W.D. Herbert, wife of a wealthy stockbroker, founded the Working Girls Vacation Society in 1883 as an offshoot of the New York Working Girls Club. She was a philanthropist known for donating thousands of pieces of carved jade to the Museum of Natural History in New York.

Herbert was “struck with the monotony of their ceaseless toil year in and out.”

To start the vacation club, she and her wealthy friends held a bazaar and raised nearly $1,000. She set up an advisory board that consisted of prominent men and half a dozen ministers.

The Society then found homes. In East Haddam, Conn., three houses and three barns once owned by the Working Girls Vacation Society is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1890, the Society’s social worker, Annie White Strathern, furnished one of the farmhouses as a vacation home for young working women.

Phebe Howell House 1834 aka Rose Cottage of the Working Girls’ Vacation Society

The Getaway Spots

Other vacation clubs and houses formed in Boston and New York during the Gilded Age, offshoots of the YWCA, the Working Girls Club in New York and the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in Boston.

The New York Working Girls Vacation Society eventually had 10 houses. Uplands and Hillcrest in the Adirondacks, for example, were gifts of George Dodge, Grace Dodge’s uncle.

Girls could go to Connecticut, to Farmington Lodge in Farmington, Breezy Cottage at Penfield Beach in Fairfield, and to two in Westport, including Green Cottage in Green’s Farms. Or they could stay at lodgings in New York: at Elmcote in Chester or Neversink Manse in Huguenot.

New York’s Jewish Working Girls Vacation Society had two vacation houses, one in Bellport, Long Island, and one at Big Indian in the Catskills.

Boston’s working girls went to Fernside in Princeton, Mass., Good Rest in Lancaster, Mass., The Homestead Inn in the Temple Hills of New Hampshire and one in Methuen, Mass., called The Girls Boarding House.

Churches and settlement houses also maintained vacation homes for working girls; so did Bloomingdale’s, which had a vacation house in Long Branch, N.J., for its employees.

The Working Girls Vacation Society Vacation

The wealthy ladies realized some working girls didn’t like to accept charity, so they charged a nominal fee – about $3 – for a two weeks’ vacation. They’d lend money to those who couldn’t afford it. Some got a free ride.

But you couldn’t go if you had a reputation as a floozy. Harriet Comstock in the Christian Observer in 1907 made it clear that girls with loose morals weren’t welcome. The society sent “the better class of working girls to beautiful country homes for pure fun,” she wrote. [Emphasis added.]

How much fun? Certainly not too much.

In East Haddam, the girls’ supervisor carefully noted their weight gains and the amount of milk they drank as measures of their health improvement. The responsibilities of the trained resident social worker included “instruction in crafts such as making paper flowers and tooled leather purses, and leading hikes and motoring excursions to local sites.”

Every Friday evening the girls came up with their own entertainment, and they went to dances held in the recreation center.

At Fernside in western Massachusetts they could read, sew, walk, take a drive in a wagon or do nothing. At least the old mansion had a theater where they could put on amateur theatricals.

In 1890, Far and Near described a typical vacation, perhaps overselling the “fun” part.

How the girls enjoy the complete change from work and worry to good country air, the tramping to the mountains and the places of interest, or, if at the seaside, the bathing; the dances in the barn, the games and the music. On rainy days fancywork, crocheting, knitting, and reading make the time fly as if on wings.

Prayers Twice a Day

In 1913, Hugh Thompson reported the working girls chafed at the restrictions during their getaways. Thompson wrote in “The Vacation Savings Movement,” in Munsey’s Magazine:

[T]hey were unpopular because of the restrictions imposed on the inmates. In most of them the girls had to live by rigid rule; there was no freedom of action. The situation was summed up by a saleswoman who told an investigator: “Why, you can’t even look at a man if you go there! I do not want to be bound to go to prayers twice a day.

The general feeling, Thompson wrote, was that the self-supporting women who worked so hard wanted absolute freedom to rest or seek innocent amusement.

A U.S. sweatshop, around 1890.

They also may have resented their benefactress’ condescension. Harriet Comstock, who promoted the Working Girls Vacation Society in her writing for church magazines, described a missive from the society’s secretary. The secretary had written to a vacation home supervisor about a working woman:

“I am sending you a little forlornity; try to make her think she is in heaven.”

2-1/2 Percent

The 1900 census reported 261,081 unmarried working women between the ages of 10 and 35 living in the state of New York. By 1909, the New York vacation societies hosted about 1400 working girls a year, according to Amy E. Spingarn. “A trifle over 2-1/2 percent are provided for,” she wrote.

Springarn had conducted a survey on vacation resources for working girls and reported her findings in “Summer Vacations for Working Girls” in the The Survey.

A 15-year-old girl punching sheets at the Boston Index Card Co. in 1917. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

Their income, she wrote, ranged from $1 a week to $16 a week, and their average age about 20. The vacation societies charged a few dollars, but most come free. The girls are factory workers, sales clerks, teachers, dressmakers and stenographers. Sometimes the girls didn’t have clothes, and sometimes the Society repaid the family for lost wages.

Tuberculosis

“Do the people of New York City realize how many working girls have tubercular and cardiac trouble?” the New York Vacation Club Society asked the editor of the New York Times in 1923.

Some of the girls with symptoms of tuberculosis went to the Adirondacks for treatment. They could stay at Hillcrest year-round for treatment.

Article from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 21, 1907

Anna Buchanan, the assistant treasurer of the Working Girls’ Vacation Society, in 1891 gave an example of a working girl helped by a visit to Santa Clara in a letter to The Christian Union.

One of these was a young dressmaker, who was very feeble and had a bad cough. She was sent to the mountains, where she not only gained strength, but her cough disappeared, and she came home comparatively well, and ready for her winter’s work.

Dining room at “Uplands,” Santa Clara. The caption read, “The good fellowship among the girls here makes it seem more like a school than a sanitarium.”
The Circle, volume VIII, No. 1, July-August, 1910, p. 9

In 1945, the Working Girls Vacation Society of New York shut down. Katharine Herbert died that same year.

The New York Working Girls’ Vacation Society mission continues as a successor organization, the Stony Wold-Herbert Fund, which provides grants for study and research in pulmonary diseases.

In East Haddam, the owner of the Phebe Howell House is undertaking a historically accurate restoration of the Phebe Howell House, aka Rose Cottage. You can see pictures at Facebook.com/WorkingGirlsVacationSociety.

Images: Coney Island bathers Campbell, Alfred S. On the beach, Coney Island. New York, ca. 1897. Elizabeth, N.J.: Alfred S. Campbell, Publisher, April 20. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2005677854/. Fernside By Izzysanime – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21538381. Merry go round Highsmith, Carol M, photographer. The carousel, or merry-go-round, at Richland Carrousel Park opened inin downtown Mansfield, Ohio. United States Ohio Richland County Mansfield, 2016. -10-07. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016632407/. Sweatshop By Unknown – http://americansformorality.com/civilrights/civilrights.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27485325.

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The Connecticut Accent, Or Does Connecticut Even Have One?

Poor old Connecticut, invaded every day by thousands of Noo Yawkers and Bahstonians. Those people who don’t know what to do with their ‘r’s make it nearly impossible for the state to sustain a uniquely Connecticut accent.

You can make a good argument that Fairfield County, parts of New Haven and Litchfield County belong more to the Tri-State Area than to New England. Those places are where New Yorkers buy antiques, keep their weekend home and send their kid to prep school. They take Metro-NORTH trains into Grand Central and get their local news from New York City.

The pride of Westport

The Non-Connecticut Accent

They also tend to speak like New Yorkers, dropped ‘r’ and all. People who live near (or work in or escaped from) Noo Yawk are more likely to talk like Cuba Gooding, Jr. He lives in Greenwich, by the way. A big part of living in Connecticut is knowing which wealthy town which wealthy celebrity lives in.

People who live in Northeast Connecticut tend to talk more like Bostonians. They see ‘Jawdin’s Furnichah’ (Jordan’s Furniture) ads on television. They buy b’daydas at the Stawp & Shawp (potatoes at the Stop & Shop). And they root for the Sawx, the Broons and the Pats and in the summer you’ll find them down the Cape.

So you have two different non-Connecticut accents, both with the dropped ‘r.’ Phonologists call it non-rhotic.

The rest of New England tends to view Connecticut with suspicion. After all, half the state roots for the Yankees and the Giants.

Rich Talk v. Poor Talk

The state’s severe economic inequality also wipes out any possibility of a single, statewide Connecticut accent. It has some of the wealthiest towns in the country just a stone’s throw from the poorest cities.

Latinos make up about 40 percent of the population of Hartford, the fourth poorest city in the U.S. The same goes for Bridgeport and New Britain. They come mostly from Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic and they have distinct dialects and slang. Sometimes phonologists call it New York Latino or East Coast Latino English. It’s evolving, it’s varied and it’s usually spoken by people who grew up speaking English. (Listen to Pedro Martinez, a Dominican, here. He lives in Greenwich.)

Pre-Greenwich Pedro Martinez

Many of Connecticut’s rich residents speak in a neutral, upper-class accent sometimes called ‘Mid-Atlantic.’ People generally have to manufacture that accent, because no one speaks it naturally. Listen to Westport’s Martha Stewart, for example. She once had a heavy Joisey (New Jersey) accent, but worked to get rid of it. You wouldn’t know she’s a Jersey girl to listen to her now.

A young Jacqueline Onassis at Miss Porter’s in Farmingdale

Starting around the 1920s, New England prep schools had taught students to speak with a quasi-British accent. Jacqueline Onassis, for example, developed a serious boarding-school accent at Miss Porter’s in Farmington. Katharine Hepburn got hers at the Oxford School in West Hartford, though her well-to-do Mummy and Daddy probably helped it along. You’ve heard the accent if you’ve watched old movies with upper-class characters. It’s rather stagey to American ears, and it fell out of fashion sometime in the 1960s.

Muddled Dialect Boundaries

So Connecticut has non-rhotic speakers in the northeast and southwest. Throughout the state it has manufactured Mid-Atlantic accents in the tony towns away from the gritty urban East Coast Latino English. Some have ‘r’s, some don’t.

But beyond all those muddled dialect boundaries, there is a place where a Connecticut accent survives: Somewhere from south of Hartford to somewhere north of Springfield (which started out in Connecticut).

Hartford, as pronounced by its inhabitants, has an ‘r.’

Connecticut accent likely pronounced here

T-Glottaling

Unlike most New Englanders, the Central Connecticut Mumbler has no problem with the ‘r.’ It goes in all the right places. ‘Gilmore Girls,’ ‘Waterbury’ and ‘cruller.’ All have ‘r’s in the right places. In Connecticut, lobster rolls have butter. Mark Twain lived in Hartford. Buy a steamed hamburger in Meriden.

The Merri’

It’s the ‘t’ that Central Connecticut Mumblers can’t deal with. Phonologists call what they do ‘t-glottaling.’ Or ‘gloh-a-ling.’

Ask someone from Connecticut to say “kitten from New Britain.” You might hear “kih-en from New Brih-en.” ‘Mou-en’ for ‘mountain,’ ‘bo-el’ for ‘bottle’ and ‘Kah-neh’uhkit’ for ‘Connecticut.’

The ‘t’ also tends to fall off the end of words. So if a word ends with a ‘t,’ that word duh-zen have a consonan’ a’ the end.

And Now for the Mumble

The Central Connecticut accent has a distinct mumble. People who have it rush through the syllables, especially in the middle of a sentence, mushing them into incomprehensibility. They eat their consonants and flatten out their pitch.

A student newscaster at Central Connecticut State University and his interviewee in New Britain had it bad. (Listen to them here.)

On the video we learn that because of the parking problems at CCSU, students risk getting a ticket or showing up to class late. Or in the Central Connecticut Mumble, it becomes ‘geh-in a tickeh orshowinuptclss late.’

“Sawdonsee …” equals “So I don’t see.”

Meg Ryan, who grew up in Fairfield, sometimes lapses into the Central Connecticut Mumble. In an interview with Ellen DeGeneres, she describes how she took ‘something like a six hour flight’ to pick up her adopted daughter. Only it comes out ‘tsngthin’ like a six-hour flight.’ “You’d think she’d be upset” turns into ‘you’d think she’d bempset.’

It can’t be a coincidence that Scrabble was invented in Connecticut. A game where people try to turn jumbled letters into intelligible words.

The Northern Cities Vowel Shift

Ironically, network newscasters used to talk as if they grew up in Hartford or Springfield. Those city accents resembled those of such Great Lakes cities as Buffalo, Rochester or Cleveland (which used to belong to Connecticut).

NBC news anchor John Chancellor grew up in Chicago, for example, but he spoke NBC standard. Phonologists call it Inland Northern American English.

Recently they’ve identified a trend: more people using the Northern Cities Vowel Shift – in Cleveland, in Hartford and in Springfield. Vowel shifters replace ‘o’ sounds with ‘a’ sounds and vice versa.

Instead of block they say black. Instead of busses they say bosses. And instead of more they say mawhr.

From Connecticut?

One easy way to tell if someone grew up in Connecticut: ask them to identify a submarine sandwich and a yard sale. Bingo! If they say grinder or tag sale.

Or ask someone to complete this series: 84, 91, 95. Correct answer: The Merritt, as in the terrifying Merri’ Parkway.

Ask where Yukon is and if they say Storrs they grew up in Connecticut; if they say Canada, they didn’t.

UConn Huskies logo in the ’60s

You can also tell someone isn’t from Connecticut if he calls himself a Nutmegger. It’s something no self-respecting Connecticut native would ever say. Or if they say NEW Haven. It’s New HA-ven.

You can get them going in whatever Connecticut accent they prefer by saying one word: Taxes. Connecticut has the worst taxes in the world, yes sir.

And if you want to talk to someone from Connecticut about pizza, just don’t.

Want to speak like a Bostonian? Click here. For New Hampshire, click here, for Maine, click here, and for Rhode Island, click here.

With thanks to Ana Celia Zentella, “Spanish Language in the Northeast,” from Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-first Century edited by Edward Finegan, John R. Rickford.

Images Tag sale By Jim Chute – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17010593; Grinder By jeffreyw – mmm…sammichesUploaded by Fæ, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23097562; Martha Stewart By David Shankbone – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15049241. This story was updated in 2023.

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Ten Facts About Dorothy Quincy – John Hancock’s Wife

Dorothy Quincy portrait by John Singleton Copley. On display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

In 1775 at age 38, John Hancock was one of the most eligible bachelors among the Boston rebels. Made wealthy by his uncle, Hancock was a smuggler and a rising political star in the uncertain Patriot cause. Dorothy Quincy, 10 years younger, didn’t win the approval of all her family when she married him.

Born May 21, 1747, she was the youngest of 10 children from a prominent family. Though her relatives largely sympathized with the Patriots, one of her brothers-in-law, a staunch Loyalist, likened Hancock to the devil. He saw him as a traitor to his class.

Dorothy Quincy Hancock, by John Singleton Copley. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

Nevertheless, Dorothy Quincy and John Hancock married in August of 1775, making them one of Massachusetts’ first political celebrity couples. Here are 10 facts about the lovely Dorothy Quincy.

1. She was adopted by John Hancock’s aunt.

When Dorothy’s mother died in 1769, Lydia Hancock – John’s aunt – took a special interest in her. Lydia was the widow of Thomas Hancock, who founded the fortune that John would nurture. She had a special affection for Dorothy Quincy and took her under her wing, serving as chaperone and also urging on her romance with John.

Lydia Hancock

2. She witnessed the Battle of Lexington.

When the Battle of Lexington broke out, Dorothy Quincy was staying in Lexington with friends, along with John. When Paul Revere arrived with his news of the British coming, Dorothy was doubtless among those awakened. While John, a wanted man, ran off into hiding, Dorothy witnessed the battle and comforted two wounded soldiers in the aftermath.

The Battle of Lexington.

3. Dorothy Quincy was no doormat.

She told John to get stuffed at least once. In the wake of the Battle of Lexington, Dorothy Quincy intended to return to Boston to be by her father’s side. John told her she could not go, and she gave him an earful: “Recollect, Mr. Hancock, that I am not under your control yet. I shall go to my father tomorrow.”

4. She lost two children.

John and Dorothy had two children together, but neither would reach adulthood. Their first daughter, named Lydia for his aunt, died in infancy. Their second, a son named John, died at age 8. He fell through the ice while skating on a pond in Milton, Mass., and drowned.

John Singleton Copley painted this portrait of John Hancock around 1771. Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society.

5. Her feet won John’s heart.

Dorothy was, by all accounts, pretty, smart and poised. But Hancock family tradition holds that John’s first romantic thoughts about Dorothy came while attending a particularly tedious church service. John happened to glance at Dorothy’s feet while the service was underway and found them very attractive.

6. She had a crush on Aaron Burr.

For much of 1775, Dorothy Quincy and John’s Aunt Lydia stayed in Fairfield, Conn., with family friends. While there, Aaron Burr joined the household for a visit. The young Burr captured Dorothy’s attention. Aunt Lydia, who was planning the wedding of John and Dorothy, watched Dorothy like a hawk and never allowed them to be alone together. Lydia probably brought about an abrupt end to cousin Aaron’s visit. Of Aaron, Dorothy noted: “He was a handsome young man, with a pretty property.”

Aaron Burr

7. Dorothy Quincy, first presidential secretary.

Following their marriage, Dorothy and John lived together in Philadelphia. She found that society duties were largely replaced by secretarial ones. So Dorothy installed herself as her husband’s, assistant, trimming the rough edges off bills of credit issued by the Continental Congress, of which he was president, and organizing much of the paperwork that John had to deal with himself since he had no staff.

Independence Hall

8. She stole her neighbor’s milk.

In 1776, John Hancock invited the officers of the French fleet in Boston to visit his home, expecting a crowd of about 30 men. When the entire crews began arriving – a crowd of more than 100 – Dorothy scrambled to feed them. She used all the household’s bread and dispatched servants to the neighbors with orders to milk every cow they could find. Dorothy told them she would explain later.

9. She gave to the state, and gave, and gave.

Following the Revolution, John Hancock governed Massachusetts for 11 years. His health and his fortune suffered greatly as he paid for a never-ending series of dinners, hosted by Dorothy, for both state purposes and charitable purposes. Hancock instructed Dorothy to submit the expenses for his funeral to the state — $1,800 – but the Legislature declined to pay them, so she did.

Boston’s Old Statehouse

10. She shocked her relatives with her second marriage.

After John Hancock died in 1793, Dorothy relied on one of his old friends, James Scott, to manage her affairs. For three years Scott, a widower, courted her. And for three years she brushed him off. When she finally accepted his proposal, many of her relatives were dismayed, though many in the family came to accept the marriage. Dorothy Quincy Hancock and James Scott were married and lived in Portsmouth, N.H., from 1795 until his death in 1809. She returned to Boston for the remainder of her life, which ended in 1830.

This story was updated in 2022.

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