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:
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, Fortune was still extolling the modern office as a kind of female paradise. As one executive rhapsodized: “…the competent woman at the other end of the buzzer… the four girls pecking out the boss’s initials with pink fingernails on the keyboards of four voluble machines, the half dozen assorted skirts whisking through the filing cases of correspondence, and the elegant miss in the reception room….”
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:
6
The most famous ghettoizing process was under way at the phone company. Telephone operator had been a respectable job, meaning a male job, until corporate expansion created several tiers of more challenging positions. By as early as 1902, the Bell Telephone System employed 37,000 female switchboard operators. Their rationale: Women had “more calming” voices and were “more patient.”