The Forgotten Women of the Lodging-Houses
A sympathetic, if patronizing, look into the harsh, itinerant lives of women surviving in the depths of Seattle’s 19th-century urban poverty.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
There is a girl—let us call her Snowball—who lives in the lodging-houses. She is not a bad individual; you cannot call her immoral; she is merely amoral. Snowball can lie splendidly and cunningly; she is untidy; her hair is unpleasant; she has no useful accomplishment, and she could not cook a meal. If you try to befriend her you must not expect gratitude; she may talk in endearing terms, but she always mind your back. Often, she sits in an attitude expressive of utter despondency. She is at that stage when men have grown shy of giving her food or drink. She tries to work, but her strength is small, and any effort galls her. Sometimes when the lodgers gather in the kitchen a cadger may give Snowball some broken meat, but she has to live on boiled tea and dry crusts of bread. When the fatal night comes when she cannot enter the lodging-house, she limps away into the streets. On these nights the galloping squalls come roaring along the roads, and the whistles of wind whistle into the side entrances. Snowball has nothing save her crumpled gown, and with the tawdry shawl in her numb, wet hands, she waits for the morning. It is an aching, long-drawn-out misery. There is not a soul or sinner of the lowest class who will offer Snowball a shelter, for she is 'out of luck.'
“You cannot call her immoral; she is merely amoral, and you might as well talk about the immorality of a lower animal.”
While written in the condescending language of the 1880s, this account highlights the persistent struggle of housing insecurity and the extreme vulnerability of women in Seattle’s transient population—a struggle that remains central to the city's modern housing crisis.
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