Authors: Betsy Israel
Tags: #Social Science, #Women's Studies, #History, #United States, #20th Century, #Media Studies
These were the words of Grace Dodge, a wealthy, socially conscious woman who “for them alone” opened the first YWCA, on Fifteenth Street. (She meant well, but given the time and place, “them” meant only white non-Jewish women with references and provably good reputations.) She also inaugurated a more inclusive network of clubs meant, and I quote from the cover of her popular book,
A Bundle of Letters to Busy Girls
(1887): “[to help] those girls who have not time or inclination to think and study about the many important things which make up life and living.” Dodge feared girls “had not time for the higher things.” She seems also to have believed they had not time for lower things. At weekly meetings, many held in her downtown apartment, she covered everything, for example: attending work with one’s menstrual period and “the disposal of rags.” Another: the importance of bowel movements and whether it was acceptable to move one’s bowels at work. She discussed clothing, hair, correspondence, and she expressed her belief that far more enjoyable than a racket, a wild dance, was a pleasant tea or reading party. Not all present agreed.
In fact, her “girls” increasingly agreed about very little. And the conflicts among club members became harder for Dodge and the growing number of her imitators to ignore. The better-attired, better-spoken women resented the presence of the immigrant girls Dodge had deliberately sought out and invited. Periodic attempts at unification ended in mild chaos, chair rattling, factions marching out as the “other side” spoke. One famous mêlée broke out over Dodge’s suggestion that club members wear badges. One young woman is reported to have shouted above the others: “Why should we want to tell everyone who rides in the streetcar with us that we
are nothing more than ragged working girls who spend their entire evenings in a club hearing a lecture that is good for us?…Is it necessary to…advertise our status as working girls when that status…is as quickly recognized as that of the wealthy one?”
The clubs split up, despite Dodge’s insistence that girls, together, had so much to learn! Factory girls increasingly had their own very serious concerns—unionization, strike coordination, and the ongoing campaigns for workplace improvements. Shop girls continued, in the words of Mary Gay Humphreys, to “come in at night, nervous and tired, to be confronted by the problem of food, clothes, rent…of forever providing for bare material necessities.” But the shop girls, better dressed, more articulate, had at least a few options.
Store life was not as it would be in the movies: a fun, ducky universe populated by adorable girls like Louise Brooks and Clara Bow, whose signature film,
It
(1927), among many others, was set in a big store (a fishbowl universe perfect for the stationary camera). But real-life shoppies, like their movieland counterparts, had a pretty good chance of finding the exit. That most often meant marriage—but not always. Many girls, supporting themselves, sending money home, would continue to work and live singly. And the more intelligent and ambitious among them might land a very different kind of job.
Some of these young women, often much to their surprise, became teachers. Public education had been compulsory since the 1860s, and as urban life overtook rural, more families, less in need of farmhands, complied with the law. At the turn of the century there were more schools than ever before, more students, and a constant demand for young teachers. Although very few young working women had secondary degrees, many had high school diplomas. (In fact, 60 percent of all high school graduates in 1880 were women.) Because they’d finished high school, and because teaching was associated with child care, many who’d never even contemplated teaching got the job. As early as 1910, 98 percent of all teachers, at all levels of the public-school system, were women.
But many, many more headed into what was known, with a slight hint of exotica, as “the world of business.”
True, there was never the slightest trace of exotica once you got there. But it was better. Better pay. Better people to mix it up with. “Aren’t we all women in business now and more of us as the years pass?” asked film star Mary Pickford in a 1911 movie magazine. Without mentioning her salary, she exulted, “We are all working girls, and I am ever so proud to be among you!”
I AM A TYPEWRITER
In the original single work schematic, office work was about as good as it got. The pay could start as high as ten dollars per week. The work did not require hours of militaristic standing, and the men did not seem as ungentlemanly as they had back in ladies’ shoes. Even the jobs themselves sounded better: sorting “clerk” or file “chief,” positions requiring some rushing around, some work seated at one’s own desk. There was the “typewriter,” the original name for both the machine and its operator. Above them all, to be had through promotion, was the secretary, and best of all, the personal secretary. The boss chose her above all others, allowing her to move freely within the inner sanctum of the business (except at luncheons), and trusting her to be highly skilled and discreet in all matters, including who it was the boss actually took to lunch.
As newly self-defined professionals, young women worked to master their jobs, and worked, too, to overlook the feeling that these tasks were as tiresome as the ones they’d performed in stores. Typewriters began their day by grooming their machines, a process that, in photos, suggests a row of well-dressed young women picking inky nits off large black armadillos. Others ran letter presses, primitive copying devices that required inking and hand pressing and left copiers weak-wristed, while the all-purpose clerks had to manipulate tall ladders that slid on tracks. The hours were long, the “lounge” facilities minimal. As one worker told
Collier’s
magazine: “Your chair is given as your chair and there isn’t much point in asking for one that fits beneath the desk or anything else that does not fit.”
Of course, to keep up a steady supply of applicants, employers portrayed office girls as superbly competent and attractive, the kind of young professional any girl would want to become. Even department stores started playing similar word games. Their new breed of “lady bookkeeper” was, like her office sister, exceptionally crafty, smart, and unusually honest. As one manager stated: “Lady bookkeepers [are] not so likely to appropriate money that don’t belong to them!” Office workers understood that they were supposed to feel lucky—they were, after all, Women of Business—but it was a feeling that one could sustain on most days about as long as it took to reach one’s desk.
By 1910, so many women had arrived in offices with so many questions and complaints—Is this “good” job as bad as it seems? Where can I go after this if I have to?—that new advice guides appeared monthly. Among the most popular, and most serious, was an epistolary volume entitled
Letters to a Business Girl: The Personal Letters of a Business Woman to Her Daughter, Replete with Practical Information Regarding the Perplexing Problems…By One Who Knows the Inside Facts of Business and the Office Routine and the Relations of Employer to Employee
(1906).
In this book Florence Wenderoth Saunders reveals more about office life and the inherent struggles of office girls than just about any other advice guide, newspaper series, or any realist novel by Sinclair Lewis. Saunders was a middle-aged woman who had worked with great pride in an early office environment, married the boss, then moved with him to the country, where she helped him to run a farm. After his death, she kept at the farm until business plunged—so deeply that she had to send her oldest daughter, just eighteen, off to the city. This was a common enough decision, though still controversial. As Mother writes early on: “I have been severely censured since you left, because I allowed you to leave my protection and care and face the dangers of a business life, particularly in the city.”
Readers skimmed Mother’s tales of her own heroic stoicism, for example, once walking from Delancey Street up to Thirty-fifth, wearing a cloth coat, in a blizzard, all to save ten cents in trolley fare that she badly needed for something else. Beyond the dire autobiography, young female readers found unusually blunt and specific remarks:
You’ll probably hear yourself referred to as a “poor creature” and “the downtrodden working girl” and, even as we used to hear it ourselves, “poor things.” Whatever it is there is a lot of “poor” attached to it…necessarily the girl who is employed has to give up many things…but she gains a far broader knowledge of life than…her sisters of leisure…. The girl who has once earnedher own living knows that if necessary she can earn it again.
And the author had strong views on how that girl, member of an elite female working corps, should conduct herself.
I never saw a businessman’s desk that was loaded with the trifles that some of the girls in my office used to have on theirs; photographs, flowers…like knickknacks they kept because they were cute…. Remember, men have the advantage in business; they have been accustomed to work for generations…if [a girl] expects to take her place by [his] side and eventually command the same salary, she must profit from his example…keep [your] desk cleared of every article
which is not absolutely essential in the performance of your work.
The office girl needed a firm, stalwart supporter. Not only was she underpaid and often bored, she also became from time to time a target for paranoid commentators. She had emerged as a new working type just as concern about so-called political and social deviants—suffrage supporters, free-lovers, childless women, Bolsheviks, anarchist bombers—had reached a new high. The unavoidable movement of young women, troops of them, heading off to jobs seemed increasingly suspect. In the minds of certain commentators, a working single woman was by nature uncooperative, potentially radical, and un-American. Why wasn’t she at home having babies? Because office girls seemed more serious, more professional, the most hysterical queries were often tossed their way. Was the average typist now spending lunch enmeshed in the works of Hegel, Marx, and Susan B. Anthony? Did she read “lurid fiction”?
Certainly some working girls had read poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, or at least had heard of her. There were probably some who’d seen a copy of
The Masses
or been taken on an edifying date to some kind of socialist or literary lecture. But the average girl was not trying to reshape the world according to socialist or any other precepts; she was trying, for the time being, to advance in the office and earn more money. And that meant one thing: stenography. Only with this skill might she move her way through the rows of hulking typewriters into the semiprivate outer office of the boss. All she had to do was raise the money for night school. Then she’d add the three hours in classes onto her workday. Then she’d survive it.
Most of what we know about early “business” school—life inside the dry overheated rooms eight flights up—derives from characters like Kitty Foyle, heroine of the eponymous novel by Christopher Morley (1939) and later a film starring Ginger Rogers. Like Tess McGill, the baby-voiced secretary who brilliantly outmaneuvered her corrupt boss in
Working Girl
(1988), Kitty is perceived by the world as all…wrong. Wrong address. Wrong accent. Wrong clothes. Wrong man.
In Kitty’s case, that’s the beautiful son of an old-line WASP family. He sees in Kitty what others are blind to: sharp, sardonic intellect; kindness; and genuine bravery. And not only because she has tolerated the snubs of his family. Despite their involvement, Kitty moves alone to New York City, in order to better support her widowed father. After many visits back and forth, she concludes sadly that she cannot live in his world, nor he in hers, and breaks it off. Soon after, the boy’s parents force him into marriage with a suitable girl; Kitty reads about it in the society columns on the same day she has aborted his baby. (Not something that made it into the 1940 Ginger Rogers movie.)
Hoping to move on and to make a better life, Kitty enrolls in night school. “We were pretty serious about it all,” she says. “Also pretty damned discouraged by the time we got to diphthongs and disjointed suffixes. That’s when you find yourself dreaming shorthand and wake up figuring out the symbol for Indianapolis or San Francisco.” The girls in her class form a kind of sorority, pooling resources, going out to movies and occasional dinners and treating themselves to their favorite team
drink. (“Every way of life seems to have its own drink,” she says; “our shorthand squad specialized on black-and-white sodas.”) Together they hunt for jobs, celebrate, and try to assuage their disappointment when shorthand doesn’t prove to be the answer to even one or two of life’s great difficulties.
Business school works for Kitty Foyle. She “makes her way,” gets a better job, and meets a man who, like her employers, finds her personal qualities, not to mention her shorthand skills, truly impressive. For some women, however, business school was not a chance to advance, if slightly, in the world but a means to retreat. It was the place you went when you did not get married. This sad conclusion is best evoked in another novel,
Alice Adams
by Booth Tarkington (1921), the story of an awkward, groping young woman, played in the 1935 film version by a young Katharine Hepburn. Alice is single and poor but nonetheless a determined society aspirant out to “win” a local rich guy played in the film by Fred MacMurray. She attempts this feat by cornering the man on the street, in stores, at parties she wasn’t invited to, then maneuvering him out onto a balcony and chattering nervously. In the novel it doesn’t work, and with no money and no marital prospects, Alice is last seen climbing the wooden steps of her local business school, up “into the smoky darkness,” as if trudging to the guillotine.
As she views her “ominous” prospects: “Pretty girls turn…into old maids ‘taking dictation’—old maids of a dozen different types, yet all looking a little like herself.” (In the movie adaptation Alice triumphs, becoming a wife despite her social gaffes, thus narrowly avoiding slow clerical death.) Florence Wenderoth Saunders would have shaken her head in disgust. As she’d written: