Historian Alice Kessler-Harris has long argued that the division of women into workers and nonworkers is ideology, not reality, and that women have always worked, whether or not they have received a salary. It was only when the self-contained homestead, as a site of labor and production, gave way to factories, stores, and offices, that women’s domestic work was separated and sidelined. Running a household and raising children were reconfigured as a blend of moral duty, pleasure, and spiritual fulfillment—a blessing set against the curse of “real,” paid work. The veneration of the domestic sphere cast a long shadow over the labor of women who wanted or needed to earn a wage; the so-called “Mommy Wars” remain a convenient shorthand for the way women are encouraged to face off against one another’s choices with a mixture of envy, pity, and contempt. The cultural divide between “stay-at-home” and “working” mothers obscures the larger structural reality: that women’s “free” domestic labor has always had an economic value, and is fundamental to the working of capitalism.18
Marjorie’s approach to the still-vexed question of “work-life balance” was forward thinking in that she refused to frame it as a trade-off between work and “life.” Instead, she called women who worked outside the home “two-job women,” for whom the variety—if they were efficient—could make both jobs more enjoyable. Men who insist on their wives staying home are portrayed in her books as old-fashioned fogies, who fail to appreciate the benefits of a wife’s job to both partners: “Our personal opinion is that the average wage-earning woman is more interesting and keeps younger and handsomer than if she stayed home, whether she really likes working or not.” Her advice for women in the workforce who were there by necessity rather than choice was refreshingly straightforward: “don’t worry too much.” Being in an office all day would only make home feel more charming—and the children would be fine.19
But in this blithe opinion she was swimming against the tide. Married working women faced discrimination and negative public opinion throughout the 1930s, not to mention outright bans on their participation in several states and industries—and the notion that working women were taking jobs from unemployed men was persistent throughout the Depression. But despite this, the number of women working outside the home grew steadily over the course of the decade, and included many who had families. In Orchids on Your Budget Marjorie cites a figure of “something like ten and a half million” women in the workforce, which by the 1940 census had climbed to 13 million, or a little over 25 percent of all women over the age of fourteen.20 The proportion of married women working increased nearly 50 percent over the course of the decade.
We might assume that for these women, working was not a choice but a necessity. Yet a surprisingly large proportion of them (40 percent in 1940) had husbands who were bringing home a reasonable income, more than a thousand dollars a year. How far that stretched depended on many different factors, particularly how many mouths there were to feed, but it suggests that a significant number of women were following Marjorie’s advice and looking for work in order to get a little extra pleasure in their lives, hoping to earn enough to allow for more “trimmings” than their husband’s salary would cover by itself. However, we should be wary of this notion of women’s work as supplementary—Marjorie only had to look in the mirror to know how essential it was to her sense of self, even though she could have survived quite well on the inheritance from her family. The roots of the entrenched gender-based pay gap lie in this idea that wage work for women is a choice, not essential to their identity as it is for men. In the Depression, as in the wake of the 2008 recession, it was women who gathered up the scraps from the shattered economy, piecing together part-time and temporary work that men couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Because the jobs that are always there—tending to the sick, the elderly, and small children; cleaning private or public spaces; soothing and managing the needs of wealthier people, travelers, or restaurant diners—are the jobs for which women are presumed to have natural aptitude, even desire.
In earlier eras it was widely assumed that for white, middle-class women there was a basic trade-off between work and family: you could have one or the other. But during the Depression, American women could look to a new role model in the First Lady. Female voters had played a crucial positoin in President Roosevelt’s 1932 election, and his wife Eleanor represented a version of marriage and work that was unlike anything anybody had seen in that position before. Through her lectures, columns, and books, through her regular all-female press conferences, and through her highly visible public persona, Eleanor Roosevelt set an example to the nation that women’s contributions were valuable. She showed American women that they had the right and responsibility to participate in the economic life of the nation, whether they were married or not. She fought the idea that a wife, mother, or Live-Aloner was a social and economic burden rather than an agent. In 1936, because of the First Lady’s activity outside the home and her engagement with the world, Marjorie Hillis called her the “perfect example of the live-aloner, despite the fact that she has a husband and children.”21
Mrs. Roosevelt regularly drew connections between women’s domestic lives and their political potential. “When we come to finances we realize that after all, all government, whether it is that of village, city, state or nation, is simply glorified housekeeping,” she wrote in 1932.22 Her book It’s Up to the Women, published the following year, expanded this theme and drew on her past efforts as an advocate for women’s suffrage to insist that women could and should play a role in public life. Her notion that women’s ability to manage a family budget qualifies them to be stewards of the national economy has been reiterated by female politicians ever since, even by Sarah Palin, hardly an obvious heir to Roosevelt, during the 2008 presidential campaign.
The 1930s saw women answering the First Lady’s call and taking an unprecedentedly high-profile role in national political life. The most prominent among them was Labor secretary Frances Perkins, the first woman appointed to a cabinet position and a champion of Social Security and minimum-wage laws that transformed the lives of millions. By the time President Roosevelt invited her to join his cabinet, Perkins was a veteran of the fight to improve America’s working conditions. It’s easy to forget how recent, how inconsistent, and how fragile are our supposed rules about work—the regular time off, the predictable schedule, the idea that children and teenagers should be in school, not in the workplace. In the fight to treat workers as people, Perkins faced powerful opposition from captains of industry who had grown rich treating them as machines, and saw no obligation to care for machines that had broken down. Yet even the protections introduced under the New Deal were patchy and piecemeal: Social Security, when it finally arrived, did not extend to domestic or farm laborers—meaning that the benefits were largely unavailable to the African American women and men who were clustered in those jobs. Fixed schedules, fair pay, and a secure future were still privileges determined by race as well as gender.
As a prominent public figure, Frances Perkins was a powerful symbol of what a woman could achieve independently. Unlike the First Lady, whose role remained tied to and contingent upon her husband, Perkins’s husband had no public role. She married economist Paul Caldwell Wilson in 1913, but insisted on keeping her name—a controversial measure at the time. The couple had one daughter, Susanna, and the marriage endured despite Wilson’s increasingly severe bouts of mental illness and frequent spells in institutions. Susanna also suffered from what was probably bipolar disorder, and Perkins supported her family alone.23
Perkins’s decision to keep her birth name on her 1913 marriage certificate anticipated the formation a few years later of the Lucy Stone League, a coalition of women inspired by a nineteenth-century suffragist who kept her name when she married in 1855. The founder of the modern league, Ruth Hale, went to court in 1921 to demand that the government issue her a passport in her own name and not that of her husband, journalist Heywood Broun, who supported her crusade. Hale refused to
accept the compromise of a document that listed both names, and canceled her travel plans, but soon afterward, she succeeded in becoming the first married woman to have a property deed issued in her own name. She was joined in her fight by other prominent literary women, including Jane Grant, cofounder of The New Yorker with her husband Harold Ross, and writers Fannie Hurst, Zona Gale, and Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Thanks to the fame of its members, and of the Algonquin Round Table, to which many of them belonged, the league and its battles achieved cultural prominence in the years just after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, when interest in women’s rights was at its height.24
There were many battles still to fight. A married woman, for much of the twentieth century, could not register at a hotel under her own name, nor open a bank account or a store account. She could not take out an insurance policy or a copyright, could not receive a paycheck or register to vote, and could not get a library card.25 The Lucy Stoners’ fight was rooted in the belief that marriage ought not to mean that a woman disappeared from the public into the private sphere. They battled the remnants of coverture laws that clung on in the modern world, and declared that they could still remain, after marriage, the people they had been before. Their motto made that idea plain: “My name is my identity and must not be lost.” As its scope expanded beyond naming rights to women’s broader civil rights, the Lucy Stone League operated as a precursor to NOW (National Organization for Women) and other influential women’s rights organizations of the second wave.
Although the Lucy Stoners were married, they shared a common cause with Marjorie Hillis’s coalition of Live-Aloners, in their determination to take their place in society on their own terms, and define for themselves what marriage or singleness meant. In their different ways, they resisted the long-standing assumption that marriage constituted an absolute divide between women, and that married women ought to retire gracefully from public life once they had crossed over, finding fulfillment and self-expression only in the home. Both Lucy Stoners and Live-Aloners recognized that true independence for women did not simply mean rejecting family ties. It meant standing up for the life you wanted to lead, even if society said you were greedy, that you wanted too much.
On the Side of the Underbitch: Kitty Foyle
Much of the appeal of Marjorie Hillis’s Live-Alone books lay in the author’s ability to cross generational lines, and speak with a voice of authority about single life without sounding like a lecturing aunt. Some of that authority no doubt derived from the generation to which she belonged, along with women like Frances Perkins, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Edna Woolman Chase, that had come of age amid the ferment of the women’s suffrage fight. As a twentysomething working woman in New York, Marjorie would have witnessed firsthand the renewed energy and excitement of the campaign as it surged toward victory in the state in 1917, and the nation in 1920. Her young adulthood mapped a broad progressive journey from the family-centric philosophy her mother articulated in 1911, through the suffrage victory and the reckless years of the flapper, until she arrived in her mid-forties at a point of confidence in women’s abilities but no complacency about their rights and the progress still to be made.
For women of the generation below Marjorie, the age of her nieces who were children when the vote was won, such complacency was more common, as things seemed to be getting better and better, at least for women who enjoyed the privileges of class and race. Their chances of finishing high school and entering college climbed with every passing year—during the 1920s, the number of young Americans enrolled in college shot up an astonishing 84 percent, and at first almost half of them were female. It was not a question of gaining access to the workplace, for these women—it was how to behave when you got there that troubled them. Without a clear goal to fight for, they questioned who they were, and who they might become.
The single girl of this younger generation could learn plenty from Live Alone and Like It and Orchids on Your Budget—from the practical advice of how to decorate and dress on a budget, to the more profound lessons about learning to value her own choices and hold on to her independence. But Marjorie didn’t spend a lot of time on the specific problems of the young white-collar worker, who had to work in close proximity with men who were often married, and needed to navigate the sexual politics of offices regulated only by people’s good behavior, not by any rules or laws designed to protect the vulnerable. She could consult a wealth of new guidebooks like Manners in Business (1936) and How to Be a Successful Secretary (1937), which told her how to dress (modestly) and how to behave around her male boss (efficiently but not flirtatiously). Secretly, though, she yearned to know what was really at stake—how far could a modern girl exercise her freedom, and what was the worst that could happen if she let down her guard around men?
For those questions, she turned to Kitty Foyle.
This quintessential midcentury working girl, a fictional character who became an icon, was created by a man: Christopher Morley, a gregarious writer-about-town in the 1920s and ’30s. Of Marjorie Hillis’s generation, he was born in Haverford, Pennsylvania, in 1890 and worked for most of the major literary and journalistic outposts of the day, but he was unusual for a literary man in being a happily married father of four. Morley loved literature, his family, and Sherlock Holmes, and was one of the founders of the Baker Street Irregulars, a still-thriving semisecret fan club. None of which quite explains how, in 1939, he came to create Kitty Foyle, an outspoken girl of “healthy, lower-class, humorous Irish-American stock,” who became the emblem for an entire generation of the struggles of the independent working girl. A skeptical New Yorker reviewer doubted whether he, or any other male critic, could really judge whether Morley had managed to get inside his heroine’s mind, an effort he nevertheless called “a brilliant stunt.”26 But readers flocked to the novel in their thousands. Something about Morley’s Kitty struck a raw nerve.
Whether or not she’s an entirely plausible woman, Kitty is a great storyteller. The novel is the story of her life, told in a backward glance from the ripe old age of twenty-eight, and laced with morbid bitterness. At the time of telling it she’s a Live-Aloner, but she most decidedly doesn’t like it, spending her evenings reminiscing and “pacing round this damned apartment until I’m glad it’s not a penthouse, I might have taken a dive.” Her melodramatic tone is often unintentionally funny, crying out for a husky Joan Crawford voiceover, but her unhappiness is real, and believably darkened by the state of the wider world in 1939. That world presses in insistently through the newspapers and the radio, two of the things Kitty says are guaranteed to get her “jittered,” along with business, liquor, cigarettes, and sex.27
Kitty is a decidedly modern creature, who has come a long way from her roots in old-fashioned Philadelphia, the daughter of a respectable working-class Irish family. Her widowed father relies on the labor and goodwill of Myrtle, the family’s African American housekeeper, a stock figure who dispenses homespun wisdom in painfully rendered dialect. Kitty, immersed in the racism of her day, cherishes her while still treating her as fundamentally other, a member of a kindly but less-than-human species who thinks and feels and knows things quite differently from white folks. Morley never suggests that Kitty ought to recognize a shared identity with Myrtle as a put-upon working woman—no gendered connection can transcend the gulf of race and class.
At the heart of the novel is Kitty’s long-drawn-out and doomed love affair with Wynford Strafford VI, the scion of an Old Philadelphia banking family and a cricketing acquaintance of Kitty’s father. Wyn is a directionless charmer in the mold of Cary Grant’s C. K. Dexter Haven in The Philadelphia Story, also set amid the fabulously wealthy and snobbish aristocrats of the Philadelphia Main Line. Taking a shine to Kitty, Wyn enlists her in an effort to start his own local version of The New Yorker, but the magazine fails in the face of Philadelphia society’s total lack of interest in the sophisticated modern world. Kitty gets a new job in New York, and Wyn reluctantly e
nters the banking business as he’s been expected to all along—and marries, in the end, a girl of his own class. Wyn’s wealthy relatives speak of girls like Kitty rather as she herself thinks of Myrtle, as a different species: “The modern girls are so courageous, I think it’s wonderful how enterprising they are,” says Wyn’s mother at one point. But it’s clear she doesn’t want one in the house.28
Despite the barrier of class, Kitty decides not to hold back from a sexual relationship with Wyn, fueled by his money and a lot of bootleg liquor. When she discovers that she’s in trouble (“Female plumbing is just one big burglar alarm”), she plans to tell Wyn, until discovering that he’s engaged to a more socially suitable girl. Luckily, her glamorous, female French boss knows exactly what to do. Once she’s on the other side of the abortion, Kitty’s emotions are mixed but unrepentant. “I felt sorry, and selfish maybe, and like I’d lost something beautiful and real, but I couldn’t feel any kind of wrongness, I did what I had to do.”29
It was not Kitty’s doomed romance with the milquetoast Wyn that made the book a cultural phenomenon. Instead, it was her outspoken defence of the life and morals of the “White Collar Girl”—a phrase Morley did not coin but which his character came to embody. The “WCG,” as Kitty calls her, was a stock cultural figure in the 1930s, beset on all sides by advice, suspicion, fantasy, and warning. The popular novelist Faith Baldwin made a fortune writing stories about white-collar girls who were torn between professional independence and romantic happiness. Many of her stories were made into movies, like 1936’s Wife vs. Secretary, starring Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, and she took pains to twist the clichés about working girls to interesting, if not exactly feminist, ends. 1932’s Self-Made Woman, for example, features a single thirty-year-old woman who is torn between two men as well as her career, and has to ask herself, “Is it worth sacrificing a man of your own and children to be a successful business woman?” When Live Alone and Like It was sold to Universal Pictures in 1936, it was Faith Baldwin who was contracted to write the screenplay.
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