Girls on the Streets

Mapping the Leisure and Labour of Working-Class Girls in Late-Victorian Hamilton

Imagine a Victorian cityscape. What does it look like? Do you picture wide promenades and carefully cultivated public parks? Do you see dark alleyways, billowing factories, and crowded tenements? While we are familiar with these popular depictions of the Victorian city, these dichotomous environments sit uncomfortably alongside one another, their meeting points fuzzy and unmapped. Now populate these cityscapes with people. Where are the girls? At the park, wealthy white girls sit daintily on picnic blankets. It is simple enough to picture these girls at leisure. Lessons of morality, behaviour, and responsibility are learned through appropriate play and socialization, sanctifying these activities [1]. Picturing the poor girl at leisure is more difficult. It is easier to do if she is young, or in a rural setting—a little girl cradling a corncob doll à la Laura Ingalls [2].

Our cultural touchpoints for poor teenaged girls at leisure in the Victorian city are few. These girls, if they are not busy with domestic employment, are often portrayed as prostitutes, like Oliver Twist’s Nancy, who, despite her good nature, invokes criminality and sexual delinquency, and whose demise serves a moralizing purpose for the narrative [3]. For girls like Nancy, the line between work and leisure is blurred—her labour is an unacceptable sort, out on the streets, beyond the bounds of morality ensuring that the labour of the working class serves the economies of the rich and that her occupation of space does not disrupt social stability. In the dirty street outside the tenement, the poor girl wanders. What is she doing, lurking in the shadows there? Who is she with? She is not simply at leisure, she is idling—she is probably committing a crime. 

The leisure that is idyllic when applied to middle- and upper-class girls becomes the crime of vagrancy when pursued by working-class girls. In the nineteenth century, colonies and countries through the British Empire and beyond used vagrancy laws to police the social behaviours of working-class people [4]. In the latter decades of the Victorian era, vagrant girls specifically became an increasingly pressing concern. To illustrate the operations of this, we will map policed space and behaviour along the intersections of gender, age, race, and class in an industrializing Canadian city in southern Ontario.

“What Shall We Do With Our Girls?”

Hamilton, Ontario saw rapid urban development from the mid- until the late Victorian period. In 1861, Hamilton had a population of about 19,000 people [5]. By the early 1890s, this had more than doubled to about 50,000, and Hamilton had become Canada’s fourth largest city (Figure 1) [6]. In these later years, which here we will consider, Hamilton was becoming an industrial hub, as its mills and factories employed thousands of working-class people. Among those employed in Hamilton were hundreds of teenaged girls, who were increasingly shunning domestic work in the homes of the middle and upper classes in favour of working in shops, hotels, the cotton mills or tobacco and canning factories [7]. Working girls were typically 14 years of age and older—by 1891, school was compulsory for children in Canada under this age [8]. Parents who needed help with household expenses, or whose children refused to continue school, viewed factory work as a convenient way to keep their children “off the streets” [9]. For critics, however, this type of work was not nearly confining enough to accomplish this goal.

Figure 1: Bird’s Eye View of Hamilton, 1893. McMaster University Lloyd Reeds Map Collection and HPL Local History and Archives, I-4-1893/1.

Amongst social reformers and concerned members of the public, domestic service was the ideal occupation for poor girls. It was seen as uniquely wholesome, not least because it was innately restrictive—domestic servants worked long days which began and ended under the roof of their employer and therefore under the moral authority of the respectable mistress of the home, and opportunity for street-bound leisure time was highly limited [10]. For girls not in domestic service, indulgence in the world beyond the home was viewed by critics as a glaring social issue. Work in factories or shops was less ideal than work in the home—how could a poor girl ever learn to “ape the lady” when she had not been instructed by one? [11] However, it was the leisurely stroll through the city after the factory or shop closed that became a real source of consternation in Hamilton during the early 1890s. “Many of them,” complained a woman who identified herself as Emeline in 1891, “as soon as their work day is over, dress themselves in their best and are on the street when they ought to be lightening the cares of mother at home”[12]. Emeline’s disgruntled letter-to-the-editor sparked a months-long back and forth in the Hamilton Spectator, with working-class women and labour organizations coming to the defence of working girls. “If, after the close confinement of the day our girls do venture to take a walk, is it fair or just to infer that they are on the streets for an immoral or bad purpose?” [13]

Whether fair or justified, these inferences were the norm throughout the country—and indeed, throughout the empire, which, from the mid-1880s, there was an international fervor over the protection of girls from sexual danger, concerns which coexisted with moralizing over the behaviour of girls. Negotiations over the boundaries of childhood and the ability of girls to consent to their “ruin” simultaneously increased legal protections and suspicions over girlhood sexuality [14]. Canada was both responsive to and reactive against the trends of the wider world, and in this country, white girls came to represent the moral and racial potential of the new nation. As one Hamiltonian put it, “Canada is the place and a Canadian girl is the person chosen to unfold to the world the truth and beauty of Christianity”[15]. With the weight of the nation and faith on their shoulders, girls who transgressed the famous “angel in the house” ideology of the Victorian period were frequently met with suspicion and censure. 

Emeline’s critique built on a pattern of agonizing, publicized by city officials in the years prior. In 1889, the Spectator reported that at Hamilton police headquarters, Chief McKinnon mused that “the question, What shall we do with our girls? is becoming a pressing matter with us.” His men reported that girls no older than 15 or 16 were often found gathered around tables in rented spaces, drinking. Even more alarming, an officer commented that “there are fully 500 young girls in this city who are regular attendants at the different dance halls, and they’re all in a fair way to become regular prostitutes, if many of them are not so already”[16]. Concerns about prostitution were vague and expansive, and covered a wide range of behaviour by girls that were considered delinquent [17]. To regulate these unwanted behaviours, the police had a powerful tool at their disposal, designed to encompass this useful ambiguity. The charge of vagrancy could be used against girls in public who couldn’t give a good account of themselves, while grouping them together with the likewise ill-defined “common prostitute.” For working-class Hamilton girls whose existence was policed under these laws, the Andrew Mercer Reformatory, also known as the Mercer, in Toronto was their usual destination (Figure 2), where they often received lengthy sentences in excess of those given for other petty crimes, and even for serious crimes, under the guise of moral reform [18].

Figure 2: The Andrew Mercer Reformatory. Annual Report of the Inspector of Asylums, Prisons and Public Charities for the Province of Ontario, 1879.

Mapping the City

Mapping the stratified geography of the city allows us to formulate how divisions of gender, race, class, and age reflect contestation over leisure and labour for working-class girls. The population of the city was predominantly white, mostly Canadian-born or Irish or British immigrants. The city did not institute legal segregation against Black residents (although it did have segregated schools until the mid-nineteenth century), but it was socially divided along the lines of race, with Hamilton’s small Black community mostly living on the mountain near Concession Street or on the outskirts of the city [19]. When Black girls were brought before the magistrate during these years, they were often remanded to the authority of their fathers [20]. This does not indicate that Black residents of Hamilton did not face racist discrimination and policing [21].  Rather, in a society with an ideological investment in the moral upkeep of white girlhood, the exclusion of Black girls from the paternalistic “protection” of the law reflects a broader institutional neglect and exclusion of Black girls and the Black community from the imagined moral nation at the heart of social reform in this period [22]. Indigenous girls, meanwhile, were even fewer in Hamilton. Despite this area being the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe, the provisions of the Indian Act and the reserve system structurally constrained Indigenous people’s ability to reside in the city. The violence of colonialism is visible in the absence of Indigenous girls in city records. 

The divisions of class form a mottled geography. Space in Hamilton’s north-west quadrant was compact and contested, the home of both industry and leisure. The North End was home to factories and businesses, while the neighbouring Strathcona was home to public spaces that nonetheless maintained informal class divisions. The Crystal Palace at Victoria Park and, to the north, Dundurn Castle hosted leisure events including festivals, races, games, shows, and picnics which were open to the public, but strongly policed boundaries of respectability, and admission to events was often costly [23]. The adolescent girls in regular attendance were the daughters of respectable men, and were not the prostitute-adjacent working-class girls described by police (Figure 3) [24]. Following along the shore eastwards, the Royal Hamilton Yacht Club and the Beach Strip signified prime waterfront real estate for leisure, mixed with rougher hotels and housing [25].  Elite social or professional organizations were the domains of white gentlemen, while wealthy women formed their own organizations, all of which were exclusive in practice if not necessarily in policy [26]. The leisure spaces of Hamilton, therefore, were segregated by a mix of social expectation, cost, membership, and in some cases, law. Moreover, these elite locales came and went throughout the late-Victorian period, as use and cost constantly shifted this landscape.

Figure 3: Dundurn Castle, c. 1890s. Charles Cochran Collection. HPL Local History and Archives, https://www.flickr.com/photos/hpllocalhistory/14087919113/.

Girls on the Streets

Working-class people occupied space in the same or adjacent geographic areas where wealthier people leisured, as Hamilton police endeavoured to monitor their behaviour and confine this to appropriate establishments in accordance with the law [27]. Adults could typically unwind at the local tavern without harassment, but working-class adolescents were hard-pressed to find leisure pursuits that wouldn’t be classified as vagrancy. Much like today, young people who gathered in public for the purpose of socializing tended to generate suspicion, despite having few alternatives. Still, while boys were suspected of criminal behaviour like pick-pocketing and disorderly conduct, their potential criminality was less morally-charged than that of girls—no one, after all, was making claims that adolescent Canadian boys were harbingers of Christian moral purity for the whole world. Boys also had a more sanctioned claim to public space. They were generally an accepted part of the workforce having legitimate cause for occupying spaces where girls were seen to have none. 

This is demonstrated starkly by an 1889 incident that took place at the foot of Bay Street, outside of Dewey’s Icehouse. Fifteen-year-old Mary was sitting in the grass outside the factory, chatting with a boy her age as they enjoyed the afternoon sun. The youths were reportedly “looking as innocent as two lambs” as they leisured, the boy having just finished work [28]. But Mary’s behaviour existed within the context of her social construction and relationship with law enforcement. The previous year, she had been sent to the Mercer for a term of six months on a charge of vagrancy. As the youths lingered outside Dewey’s, a community member complained to police, who were familiar with Mary. The boy and girl were brought to the police station. The boy, who explained that he'd simply stopped to chat with Mary after finishing his workday, was discharged. But the police could detect no legitimate cause for Mary to be idling in the industrial zone. She was again sentenced to the Mercer for a year. The police claimed that she’d been known to hang around Dewey’s with men and that her conduct was “not of the best.” Mary, whose initial sentence had apparently failed to “improve her morally,” had been scrutinized since her return to the community—her conviction on rather shaky grounds demonstrates the over-policing of working-class girls, which was compounded by the designated use of this space [29]. While the boy’s presence in this industrialized zone was sanctioned, Mary’s presence was assumed to be symptomatic of moral degradation which required legal intervention. 

In another case, we have Lydia, an English immigrant with a widowed mother and several siblings, who was 14 years old when she came under police and community suspicion in 1891. She had been sexually assaulted by the local mail carrier, and the public trial resulted in only a three-month sentence for the offender, and a significant stain on Lydia’s reputation [30]. In 1892, she was living in a rented room on her own. A few complaints had been made against her, by a local woman and by police: she had apparently abandoned a job as a servant at a home on the Beach Strip and had instead been “roaming the street and enjoying the hospitality of the lake toughs ever since.” In this same period, the Hamilton elite envisioned the Beach Strip as a collection of summer residences, and attempted to transform it into a resort destination, complete with luxury hotels [31]. Her presence in this area, home to both the rough-and-tumble and well-to-do pleasure-seekers, was not tolerated outside of her function in a domestic-labour capacity. In what was apparently a damning recollection, a witness dismayed that they had seen her with her dress wet to her knees, “as if she had meditated taking a bath in the bay but her courage had failed.” She was arrested and charged with vagrancy, for being a “loose, idle and disorderly person,” to which she pleaded not guilty. In the dock with her head hung, she attested, “I’ve been working.” What work she was referring to was unclear, and, for her contemporaries, unimportant. It had not sufficiently confined her to acceptable uses of her time. By seeking leisurely reprieves, Lydia had behaved intolerably [32].

Figure 4: The Beach, sc. 1890s., HPL Local History & Archives, ID 32022189060789.

Conclusion

What we now see as normal youthful behaviours—making friends, socializing, wandering, working (or perhaps being a bit unreliable with work), dating, and even simply indulging in nature by stepping into the lake or sitting in the grass—was no small matter in the late-nineteenth century. In the wrong social context or geographic location, these simple actions were regular grounds for the arrest and institutionalization of working-class girls. Critics made it clear that there was no need for girls to be out on the streets, and if they needed work, the best place for them was in respectable homes. However, even “good” girls in domestic service could find themselves facing vagrancy charges—one girl who ventured out of the home of her employer at night to report his abusive behaviour found herself sentenced to the Mercer instead [33]. Even asylum-seeking was not a legitimate cause for wandering the streets. Girls were instrumentalized in contemporary discourses over sexual morality and social order which, for many girls, had very little to do with their day-to-day attempts to earn money and, occasionally, venture outside.

Let’s revisit our earlier effort to imagine the working-class girl in the city. Picture the girl outside the crowded tenement. She is fifteen, she has finished working a long day at the mill, and she is heading down the street to meet up with her friends.  She smiles when she sees them and skips over. This time, we can do her the courtesy of imagining that she is not a criminal, but is simply a girl enjoying moments of leisure where they arise.

Endnotes

[1]  Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton University Press, 2007), 65.   

[2] Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods (Harper & Brothers, 1935). 

[3] Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (Richard Bentley, 1838). 

[4] John Weaver, Crimes, Constables, and Courts: Order and Transgression in a Canadian City (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 49. 

[5] Statistics Canada, Year-Book and Almanac of British North America for 1867 (Longmoore & Co. Printing House, 1866), 19.

[6] Statistics Canada, The Statistical Year-Book of Canada for 1892 (Government Printing Bureau, 1893), 97. 

[7] Report of the Royal Commission on the Relations of Capital and Labor in Canada, Vol. 1 (1889), 139–140.

[8] Craig Heron, “The High School and the Household Economy in Working-Class Hamilton, 1890-1940,” Historical Studies in Education 7, no. 2 (1995), 220.

[9] Relations of Capital and Labor in Canada, 743; John Bullen, “Hidden Workers: Child Labour and the Family Economy in Late Nineteenth-Century Urban Ontario,” Labour/Le Travail 18 (1986): 163–187.

[10] Genevieve Leslie, "Domestic Service in Canada, 1880-1920," in Janice Acton, et al., eds., Women at Work: Ontario, 1850-1930 (Toronto 1974), 71-125. 

[11] “A Sensible Girl,” The Hamilton Spectator, 17 March 1891, 5.

[12] “A Sensible Girl.” 

[13] “Miss Emeline Catches It,” The Hamilton Spectator, 26 March 1891, 8.

[14] See Karen Dubinsky, Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929 (University of Chicago Press, 1993); Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (University of Chicago Press, 1992); Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925 (McClelland and Stewart, 1991).

[15] Miss Orrie, “The Canadian Girl,” The Hamilton Spectator, 25 March 1891, 5.

[16] “Should Be Suppressed,” The Hamilton Spectator, 11 January 1889, 4.

[17] Tamara Myers, Caught: Montreal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869-1945 (University of Toronto Press, 2006), 144.

[18] This is evident in the jail registers from Hamilton in this period. Hamilton Jail Registers, Microfilm Reel MS 2751, 72, RG 20-72-1 (1884-1893), AO. See also: Carolyn Strange, Toronto's Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880-1930 (University of Toronto Press, 1995), 133.

[19] Adrienne Shadd, The Journey from Tollgate to Parkway: African Canadians in Hamilton (Natural Heritage Books, 2010), 115-116, 144–149.

[20] For example, “Police Court,” The Hamilton Spectator, 20 August 1889, 3; The Hamilton Spectator, 14 August 1889, 4.

[21] Shadd, The Journey from Tollgate to Parkway, 286.

[22] As an illustration of this logic, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union protested the appointment of a Black woman as police matron in Hamilton in 1894, on the grounds that moral regulation for white girls should be the priority. Shadd, 203.

[23] “Drunk and Disorderly,” The Hamilton Spectator, 4 August 1883, 4; “Parks Committee,” 1 May 1888, The Hamilton Spectator, 4; “Police Court,” The Hamilton Spectator, 14 July 1884, 4.

[24] “O’Connell’s Birthday,” The Hamilton Spectator, 7 April 1885, 4.

[25] Ken Cruikshank and Nancy Bouchier, "‘The Heritage of the People Closed Against Them’: Class, Environment, and the Shaping of Burlington Beach, 1870s–1980s,” Urban History Review 30, no. 1 (2001): 40–55.

[26] John Weaver, Hamilton: An Illustrated History (James Lorimer & Company, 1982), 74, 120.

[27]  Weaver, Crimes, Constables, and Courts, 49, 200; James L. Sturgis, “‘Whiskey Detectives’ in Town: The Enforcement of the Liquor Laws in Hamilton, Ontario, c. 1870-1900,” in Policing the Empire: Government, Authority, and Control, 1830–1940, ed. David M. Anderson and David Killingray (Manchester University Press, 1991), 202–18.

[28] “A Girlish Vagrant,” The Hamilton Spectator, 6 August 1889, 4.

[29] “A Term in the Mercer,” The Hamilton Spectator, 6 August 1889, 4.

[30] “M’Donald Gets Off Easy,” The Hamilton Spectator, 16 September 1891, 8.

[31] Cruikshank and Bouchier, "The Heritage of the People Closed Against Them," 44–45.

[32] “Wasted Life,” The Hamilton Spectator, 26 July 1892, 8.

[33] The Hamilton Spectator, 31 October 1888, 1.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. Richard Bentley, 1838.

The Hamilton Spectator. Accessed through Newspapers.com.

Hamilton Jail Registers. Microfilm Reel MS 2751, RG 20-72-1 (1884–1893). Archives of Ontario.

Report of the Royal Commission on the Relations of Capital and Labor in Canada. Vol. 1. 1889.

Statistics Canada. The Statistical Year-Book of Canada for 1892. Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1893.

Statistics Canada. Year-Book and Almanac of British North America for 1867. Montreal: Longmoore & Co. Printing House, 1866.

Wilder, Laura Ingalls. Little House in the Big Woods. Harper & Brothers, 1935.

Secondary Sources

Bullen, John. “Hidden Workers: Child Labour and the Family Economy in Late Nineteenth-Century Urban Ontario.” Labour/Le Travail 18 (1986): 163–187.

Cruikshank, Ken, and Nancy Bouchier. “‘The Heritage of the People Closed Against Them:’ Class, Environment, and the Shaping of Burlington Beach, 1870s-1980s.” Urban History Review 30, no. 1 (2001): 40–55.

Dubinsky, Karen. Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929. University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Heron, Craig. “The High School and the Household Economy in Working-Class Hamilton, 1890-1940.” Historical Studies in Education 7, no. 2 (1995): 217–240.

Leslie, Genevieve. “Domestic Service in Canada, 1880-1920.” In Women at Work: Ontario, 1850-1930, edited by Janice Acton, Penny Goldsmith, and Bonnie Shepard, 71–125. Women’s Press, 1974.

Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton University Press, 2007.

Myers, Tamara. Caught: Montreal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869-1945. University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Shadd, Adrienne. The Journey from Tollgate to Parkway: African Canadians in Hamilton. Natural Heritage Books, 2010.

Strange, Carolyn. Toronto's Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880-1930. University of Toronto Press, 1995.

Sturgis, James L. “‘Whiskey Detectives’ in Town: The Enforcement of the Liquor Laws in Hamilton, Ontario, c. 1870-1900.” In Policing the Empire: Government, Authority, and Control, 1830-1940, edited by David M. Anderson and David Killingray, 202–218. Manchester University Press, 1991.

Valverde, Mariana. The Age of Light, Soap and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925. McClelland and Stewart, 1991.

Weaver, John. Crimes, Constables, and Courts: Order and Transgression in a Canadian City. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995.

Weaver, John. Hamilton: An Illustrated History. James Lorimer & Company, 1982.

Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Figures

Bird’s Eye View of Hamilton, 1893. McMaster University Lloyd Reeds Map Collection and HPL Local History and Archives, I-4-1893/1

The Andrew Mercer Reformatory. Annual Report of the Inspector of Asylums, Prisons and Public Charities for the Province of Ontario, 1879.

Dundurn Castle, c. 1890s. Charles Cochran Collection. HPL Local History and Archives, https://www.flickr.com/photos/hpllocalhistory/14087919113/.

The Beach, c. 1890s. HPL Local History & Archives, ID 32022189060789.