The Fate of a Girl in Male Attire

Image from the New York Correction History Society

The Fate of a Girl in Male Attire.

Several years ago, Jennie Westbrook of New York, who had been earning $7 a week as a saleswoman in a dry goods store in that city, concluded to do better. So she donned male apparel, and passing for a good looking young man, acted as waiter in a restaurant for $15 a week, and finally became book-keeper and confidential clerk for a firm who paid her $1,500 a year.

Somehow or other, her secret became known to those embodiments of Truth and Purity, the bummer police of New York, and she was arrested, tried, and sentenced to imprisonment for the awful crime of wearing male attire and honestly working for a man’s pay.

She went to Blackwell’s Island prison, therefore; but it is a pleasure to state that in a day or two, the outrageous foolishness of her punishment had created such a fussing in the great city that she was released.

The Standard (Albert Lea, Minnesota) Mar 23, 1882