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,
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:
So many girls look upon their business experiences merely as unpleasant incidents in their lives; to be gotten through, with as little exertion to themselves, and with as great haste as possible…. They wed the first man that asks them, for fear that another chance might not come along; whether they love him or not, or whether his salary can be stretched to meet the requirements of two people, are questions that do not trouble them, all they want is to get away from the office, store or factory and stop working.
For all of Saunders’s enthusiasm—her pride in watching her daughter accept a big new job in Washington, D.C.—it’s easy to understand how tired and betrayed office workers felt. Far from advancing beyond “shop girl,” they had landed in a parallel universe. And one with its own publicity mill. As late as 1935,
That may have been visual bliss for the men. The “assorted skirts” had their own views. Like the smarter shop girl, the office worker came to understand that “women’s” jobs meant those that men had done until they’d moved into a new managerial class. In 1870, less than 1 percent of all clerical workers were women. By 1900, tallying figures received from a thousand or more national employment agencies, the Labor Department estimated that more than 100,000 women worked as stenographers, typists, and secretaries. By 1920, more than 25 percent of all secretaries were women, and by 1965, the figure was 92 percent.[6] As sociologist C. Wright Mills would later famously state, offices had become “modern nunneries.”
Still, like all working single women, the office gal had to make the most of her situation, and enjoy what small amount of time she spent away from her job. Many reported having little energy for rackets and other noisy parties. The time between 10 P.M. and 6 A.M. was on most days devoted to hanging about with roommates or friends from the office and then to sleep. Kitty Foyle, though an invention, provides us with an excellent single-girl scenario:
Molly and Pat and me had so much fun together evenings, going over the day’s roughage, we wouldn’t even mind we couldn’t afford to go out often. Sometimes we had dinner at the wop joint in the yard… the one who ate the meatballs slept on the davenport. Then if she wakes at two a.m…. she can sit on the edge of the bed and smoke a cigarette without disturbing the others.
In the best cases, an office girl overlooked the obvious, somewhat pathetic obstacles and learned to hustle. Strategize. She looked for the breaks. That meant seeking out a boss she could influence, pushing for overtime pay and promotions, keeping a running tab of better jobs elsewhere, and, of course, considering seriously all marriage proposals.
Kitty Foyle, who’d go on to become a cosmetics-industry executive, agreed that the business girl had to play all the angles. And that strategy was often a more complicated, exhausting business than the business itself. As she says offhandedly, “Lots of career girls have got raises for their ambition that was really Benzedrine sulphate.”
LUST FOR A LATCHKEY
All early working girls, regardless of what they did or where they did it, had similar problems. And the greatest of all could be summarized in three words: where to live. The fantasy solution could be summed up in one word: latchkey.
The latchkey, a four-or five-inch-long skeleton key, served for tired, exasperated girls as an amulet, a totem, an admission ticket inside. A key signaled the vanquishing of all boardinghouse breakfasts, the Y, and the landlady, her lieutenants and spies. In 1910 there were an estimated fifteen thousand boarding and furnished rooming houses, where girls were not so much chaperoned but placed on a permanent parole. Wrote one linen saleswoman in
Mary Gay Humphreys reported that sixty-eight thousand of the girls who boarded worked as salesladies (their updated term) and hoped to find a place where they might be free of all inquisition. As one male journalist wrote in their defense: “What right has the world to decide that working women must be treated as declasse until they prove themselves otherwise?”
The working girl understood that like car keys in the 1920s—or car keys now for that matter—the latchkey would guarantee some measure of freedom. But it seemed all apartment keys had been reserved for men. Until the early twentieth century there were no apartments for women. They didn’t exist.
There had been interim solutions. The most famous was perhaps the large ocean liner the
No single woman, working or not, had ever been presumed trustworthy, economically solid, or discreet enough to make a desirable tenant. These qualities, if she learned them at all, she would presumably learn from her husband. And she was always suspected of prostitution. But given the statistics, the sheer visual evidence of girls out there, some builders and owners drew up plans for small hotels and apartment houses. Almost every plan, however, was scrapped in the discussion phase; no girl could afford such amenities, and who’d invest?
So it was big news, covered everywhere, when in 1910 the Trowmart Inn, looking for “self-supporting girls tired of the tawdry lodging room and sick of the miserable little rookery,” opened its doors. The Trowmart, brainchild of a successful New York merchant, welcomed young women who could prove they held a job earning no more than fifteen dollars per week. They also had to be provably under the age of thirty-five (meaning they were not likely to become indigent spinsters and never leave). A bed inside one of the 228 dormlike rooms cost fifty cents per week. To live with just several others in more private rooms cost $4.50, and for a dollar more per week, a working woman could have a room all to herself. No one had to give references unless she planned to live there permanently. And with no marriage prospects and the age “thirty-five” years away, well, it didn’t sound all that bad. The Trowmart served food described as “reasonable” and “pleasant.” It was renowned for its “well-appointed”
