Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl

The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl
reviewed on
Helpful Score: 1


[FROM BACK COVER]

The Long Day is a wonderfully readable narrative of the trials and tribulations of "an unskilled, friendless, almost peniless girl of eighteen, utterly alone in the world" who arrives in New York City in 1905 to earn her livlihood.

The book reveals much about the lives of working women in early twentieth-century urban America--the sort of jobs available to women, the ethnic and demographic makeup of the female labor force, the harshness of the conditions, the less-than-satisfactory living arrangements, the physically demanding nature of the work, and the long working hours.

The Long Day is important not only because of the vivid picture it paints of working women in the early 1900s but for what it reveals about the attitudes of its middle-class author. In her introduction, Cindy Sondik Aron examines these attitudes and elaborates on Richardson's story by supplying information on the extent, variety, and problems of female amployment at the turn of the century.