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.
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| 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,
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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