Harvey Girls

By Kristy McCaffrey

Fred Harvey, an ambitious English immigrant, didn’t initially hire women as waitresses. He only did so after the male waiters he employed at the Harvey House in Raton, New Mexico, engaged in a drunken midnight brawl and were unable to report for work the following day. Harvey was furious and fired them all, including the manager. Tom Gable, the new manager, suggested hiring women, because they were less likely “to get likkered up and go on tears.”

But it wasn’t so simple. At the time, female waitresses were nothing more than “saloon girls,” better known to deliver "something extra" along with food to their customers. Harvey needed to replace that image with a more wholesome appearance. His critics also cautioned that Harvey would never entice women to come west and work for him, leaving civilization behind for the wild frontier. Turned out the critics were wrong. In the 1870’s thousands of women applied, likely due to a shortage of men in the East, and women from lower-income families viewed this as an opportunity to improve their lives.

Harvey Girls

Harvey’s advertisement sought “young women eighteen to forty years of age, of good character, attractive and intelligent” to come work in the West. He was very strict on the requirements. A Harvey Girl had to have finished at least the eighth grade, speak clearly, have good manners, and be neat in appearance. When a woman signed a contract (anywhere from six months to a year), she agreed to learn the Harvey system, follow instructions to the letter, obey employee rules, accept whatever location she was assigned, and abstain from marriage for the duration of her initial contract. If she broke the marriage contract, she forfeited her pay and railroad pass home. Working six days a week, Harvey Girls would become synonymous with superior service.

Wages were $17.50 per month with room and board included. The girls usually lived upstairs in the facility they worked or in a nearby dormitory, chaperoned by Housemothers. They were given a strict curfew and only allowed to visit with men in the parlor. Since many Harvey Girls were the adventurous sort, stories abounded of mischief which usually involved sneaking around.

Harvey Girls were essentially the country’s first group of women who made a decent wage independent from a man, of considerable merit since women didn’t have equal rights at the time. Over the course of 90 years over 100,000 women worked as Harvey Girls.

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