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
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
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
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
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
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
