“Most of the girls I knew in those years were typists or bookkeepers who had their jobs because they were the only ones who knew how some cigar-reeker of a slob kept his files,” recalled Bess, now seventy-nine and herself a bookkeeper who worked until 1997. “Women weren’t taking over men’s places. What man do you know who wants to cross his legs and take dictation?”
This was still an age of classifieds listing “Jobs—male” and “Jobs—female.” (In fact, this age would last until the late 1960s, when protests and sit-ins inspired newspapers to blend the job offerings.) And it was “Jobs—male,” the jobs in heavy industry, that took the biggest hits during the thirties. Clerical jobs, like all others, thinned out but never to the point where there was nothing. Women who held these jobs both hated and cherished them. There was little else out there and, for the city emigrants, nothing at all to return to.
But there were a few positions beyond typist, telephone operator, unwed teacher, and a handful of actress jobs. The biggest professional openings were in journalism, specifically, in the women’s sections, what were known well into the 1970s as “4F” for “food, furnishings, fashion, and family.” From the 1935 handbook “So You Want to Be a Reporter: A Hard-Boiled Look at the Profession for Eager Cubs,” we learn just how difficult a challenge it will be. A wizened Chicago newspaperman, or someone imitating one, says:
Most of you perusing this little pamphlet have in all probability given many of your youthful Saturdays to the movies. In the films you have seen, there have been women who find work as reporters and go on to break the big story. Fairy dust, ladies, fairy dust. Let’s set the record straight up top…. The majority of reporters are men, many with military records and other distinguished accomplishments to back them up…. But there is a place for the modern woman, if she is well educated, properly bred… but if you imagine in your dreams that’ll be you covering the presidential press conference, take a good deep breath and remember that you are a Susie. “Susie?” Didn’t I mention Susie? All the gang call the new female recruits “Susie” until they do something outstanding and earn themselves another nickname.
It goes on to describe a life so grueling one might be reading a publication of the U.S. military. Yet by 1934, the Labor Department estimated that there were 15,000 “girl reporters” (compared with a total of only 7,105 in 1920), including several hundred editors across the country. Although most of these young women found themselves on the casserole-and-sweater beats, they kept at it, and by 1950, there were 28,595 female journalists.
Within a few years, the existence of so many reporters would inspire a rush of “girl-reporter” movies as well as the birth of comic-strip perennial Brenda Starr. But at the time, books and movie serials featured reporter like snoops, detectives with blond hair, nice manners, and remarkable powers of deduction. Nancy Drew, who debuted in 1930, drove a blue coupe and with her two girl pals, Bess and George, solved community mysteries. Detective Judy Bolton went to work in 1932, and that same year Joan Blondell, best known for playing sardonic chorines with a past, became Miss Pinkerton, a nurse who investigates a murder on the large estate where she lives and works.
These fantasies tried to pull struggling women into small mysteries and story lines more captivating than those of their own lives. But plenty of women were out there having real-life wild adventures of their own.
ON THE ROAD, FEMALE EDITION
There were always a few women reporters who published more than their recipes. Many of these writers had been encouraged by Eleanor Roosevelt, who held a weekly woman-only press conference, inviting prominent journalists including Lorena Hickok of the Associated Press; Genevieve Forbes Herrick of the
During the mid-thirties, Hutchins spent two years traveling the country in search of the Forgotten Woman. She found a great one: Miss Bertha Thompson, aka Boxcar Bertha, the famed lifelong female hobo. At age thirty or thirty-two—she wasn’t quite sure—Bertha told Hutchins her life story. How her family had hit the road in desperation years earlier. How she’d learned to read and spell by sounding out the words painted on the sides of passing freight cars. Her mother taught her the rest of what she needed to know, a body of knowledge that might be entitled “Don’t Count on Men.”
At the time Hutchins met her, Bertha had established a chain of female “transient bureaus” that functioned as M.A.S.H. units and impromptu wilderness kaffeeklatsches. She described her fellow travelers as a “great army of women, all motivated by the same things… no work, family barely on relief… no prospect of marriage, the need for a lark, for sex, freedom, living and the great urge to know what other women were doing.”
Bertha couldn’t possibly have kept up with the traffic. According to Hutchins, there were between 100,000 and 150,000 homeless women wandering around, many of them teenaged runaways who slept outside. The YWCA estimated in its 1933 Christmas message that there were 145,000 women who “very well could be” described as “home-less and footloose… at dangerous odds.” In 1935 the Salvation Army reported that in eight hundred cities across America there were 10,000 women a night asking for shelter. Another source of information about transient women was social scientist Thomas Menehin, who wrote of his travels “hoboing” his way around the country in 1936. His estimates: One out of every twenty tramps was a “girl,” although many, like Veronica Lake in
Or so it was assumed. Menehin, like others, did not have any hard data on what homeless women did at night or, for that matter, by day. Did they band together, or was it a rule of the road to trust no one? Where did they sleep? “The Forgotten Man” became a vivid national icon in part because he turned up in newsreels. With the colorful exception of Boxcar Bertha, Forgotten Women were invisible. Writer Meridel LeSueur asked, point-blank, in a 1932 issue of
Where do they go when they are out of work and hungry?… they are not on the breadlines. There are no flophouses for women…you don’t see women lying on the floor of the mission in the free flops… or under newspapers in the park and trying to get into the Y without any money or looking down at the heel. Charities take… only those called “deserving.” The lone girl is under suspicion by the virgin women who dispense charity…. Where do these women go?
One read about these women on very slow news days, in stories that often seemed more like public-service announcements. Women who made the news were valorous like Eleanor Roosevelt, brave and spunky like Anne Morrow Lindbergh, glamorous—the duchess of Windsor, Marlene Dietrich—or extraordinary, like Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the mega-sportswoman. (At a time when there were no organized women’s sports, Zaharias served as a one-woman Olympic team. Asked once if there was anything she didn’t play, she answered, “Dolls.”) But the average single woman wasn’t asked very often what she thought or did. And when someone—a man, an official— happened to ask, certain assumptions about her character seemed always to creep their way into the questions.
THE CASE OF THE MISSING HEART
One of the key single-female motifs in Depression-era America was the heartless woman. She stole jobs from men. She stole herself away from men who needed her. She even stole cosmetics from stores. She could not
