Excerpts for Devil in the White City : Murder, Magic, and
Madness at the Fair That Changed America The Black City How easy
it was to disappear: A thousand trains a day entered or left
Chicago. Many of these trains brought single young women who had
never even seen a city but now hoped to make one of the biggest
and toughest their home. Jane Addams, the urban reformer who
founded Chicago's Hull House, wrote, "Never before in
civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly
released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk
unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs."
The women sought work as typewriters, stenographers,
seamstresses, and weavers. The men who hired them were for the
most part moral citizens intent on efficiency and profit. But
not always. On March 30, 1890, an officer of the First National
Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago
Tribune, to inform female stenographers of "our growing
conviction that no thoroughly honorable busine