Right. Hello all! Long time no see. I'll keep this short today.
This was written for the 1st circulation of Season 2 of the Newsies Pape Selling Competition. I'm so excited it's started up again!
As always, thanks to Charlotte and sonicblue99. You're both dears and I couldn't do this with out you. (well, I suppose I could but then my stories would be filled with all sorts of issues)
Requirements
Task: Assignment Two: Write about a newsie who is trapped by an incident in their lives and can't get away from it. Any newsie can be used here, and any situation you feel is needed can be used to be their "chains
Word count: 588
My sister once read me an editorial she'd found about how the United States was going to the dogs. The writer filled up a whole column ranting about how, if the government didn't fix things soon, the entire country would go the way of Wyoming and grant women suffrage.
At the time, I'd been ecstatic. I spent days picturing it. Imagine: A world where women had equal rights with men. If Wyoming could do it, so could the rest of the country. Now, I know better. Wyoming is an oddity. There's no way the rest of the country will follow in its footsteps.
You know why?
It's because it's a man's world out there, and women have no say in anything.
When I stand on my corner, selling, I see the working women go to the factories. They spend hours in cramped spaces sewing, or operating heavy equipment. Not long after the rest come out to go to market, where they haggle over prices while balancing children on their hips. Around noon the 'little mothers' come out and settle on stoops to gossip, minding babies and keeping an eye on playing siblings. By nightfall, the factory workers come trudging back home, backs cramping from the day's work. Everyone returns to their homes to eat dinner and go to bed.
Every day is the same thing. It's all they do. Because it's all these women and girls are allowed to do. They're trapped in their lives just because they aren't men, and the men want to remind them of that fact. The few that break the mold are subject to ridicule and slander.
As a female newsie I'm just as trapped as the rest of them.
When you're a girl on the street, you're twice as likely to be picked up by a reformer. You have to be constantly aware of your surroundings. Most girls sell in neighborhoods where people assume you belong to a family on that street. But there's less traffic in neighborhoods, and fewer people who have the time or money to buy a pape.
People are also less likely to buy a pape from a girl. They think it's disgraceful, a girl running around the city shouting headlines at the top of her lungs. Newsboys are seen as little businessmen. Newsgirls are seen as wild creatures who should be at home helping their mothers.
The older you get, the worse things become. People start to expect you to settle down, find a real job or a husband. And once you get a bust, you can't sell with the newsboys at bars and vaudeville halls. I've tried twice. Both times, I was treated to jeers and catcalls and propositions.
I know one day I'll get so sick of it that I'll give up. I'll accept defeat and go and get a job at a factory, with the overseer breathing down my neck and the light bulbs flickering above me. I'll go home each night to cook dinner, put my children to bed, and do my finishing work by candlelight. Because that's one of the only paths available to me and so many other women. It's the way it is, and it's the way it'll always be.
Just like women will never get the right to vote, they'll never get a respectable job as anything more than a mother or a teacher or a factory worker. We'll never getter treated as anything but less than men. And there's nothing I, or anyone else can do about it.
So I didn't do much research for this as I wrote it on Friday after realizing that the story I was going to use for this didn't fit the prompt.
Nonetheless:
1) The territory of Wyoming was the first to give women the vote in 1869. Other western states and territories followed.
2) 'Little mothers' as a noun refers to the girls from working class families who were the primary care givers of their younger siblings. I have no idea who coined the term, but I do know that sometime at the turn of the 20th century the Board of Health for the Lower East Side of Manhattan organized a "Little Mothers League" to instruct the girls in the care of "their" babies.