Like Carrie Bradshaw in the 2000s, “Kitty Foyle” became, for the next twenty years, shorthand for a particular type of girl: independent but still romantic, a young striver who dissects and debates her own life even as she’s living it. Formulating her theories along with her best friend Molly, who works in the furniture section of a large Chicago department store, Kitty becomes an observer, a sympathizer, and eventually—at least in her imagination—a spokeswoman for the wrongs done to young women in the name of modernity and progress. The WCG is underpaid and undervalued, and her long work hours leave her too exhausted to create the life she wants, with room for pleasure, love, and a sense of purpose. Kitty and Molly come up with a working sketch: “There’s millions of them, getting maybe 15 to 30 a week, they’ve got to dress themselves right up to the hilt, naturally they have a yen for social pleasure, need to be a complete woman with all a woman’s satisfactions, and they need a chance to be creating and doing.”30 But the hours they work mean that their private life is a “rat-race,” and they see themselves as “sharecroppers”—a loaded comparison to make at the tail end of the Depression. It wouldn’t be so bad if they had a share in the profits, or thought the crop worth raising: “it must be nice to feel some of that ground you sweat on belongs to yourself.”31
With no money to spare for a meal at a diner or even a slice of pie at the Automat, the career girls get by on coffee and cigarettes. No cream, Kitty notes, “because that adds just one more complication; and no sugar because it’s fattening.” They take their coffee black, simple and strong, but its bitterness has affected them. “Something of the strong taste of black coffee has got into our thinking.”32 And when caffeine won’t cut it, there are stronger drugs available, Kitty shrugs. “Lots of career girls have got raises for their ambition that was really benzedrine sulphate.”33
But despite Kitty’s—or Morley’s—bleak view of the plight of the WCG, the professional opportunities open to young single women during the Depression were abundant. For the women who were able to access the office—who were white, educated, and able to speak unaccented English—they were not just a paycheck but a source of pride and identity. They were also some of the opportunities least affected by the downturn. This was partly because women could be paid less, as it was assumed they had no family to support, and partly because the nature of work was changing, and the white-collar sector was expanding enormously. As companies grew and merged in the early twentieth century, the logistical challenges of managing production and distribution of goods called into being a whole new class of managers and organizers, whose job it was to issue instructions to those below them and report to those above. Once a place where a boss would have had worked side by side with a small, all-male group of trusted clerks and secretaries, offices were now vast hives, in which the multiple tasks of the clerks were separated out and divvied up by gender. But even if the work inside them was rote and repetitive, offices were desirable places to work: they were clean, safe, respectable, and offered the opportunity to meet eligible men.
Given the growing dominance of the corporate office, Kitty is a somewhat unlikely representative of the WCG. She works for a glamorous woman in a small office marketing luxury cosmetics, getting to exercise creativity and her own kind of power by persuading her shoppers that they’re making their own choices, “when actually they’re simply falling in line with what some smart person has doped out for them.”34 Her boss, Delphine, understands the feminine economics of the Depression quite plainly—“when people are not sure of necessity they crave for luxury.” Or in Kitty’s plainer words, “There won’t never be a slump in a business that makes people feel pleased about themselves.”35
It’s through her friends and acquaintances that Kitty formulates her darker theories about the WCG’s fate. One friend gets a short-lived job in a small office that’s more typical of the kind of work young women were doing in huge numbers in the 1930s: “It was one of those jobs where you are stenographer and switchboard and receptionist all at the same desk, and probably have to teach the billing clerk to take No for an answer.”36 The sexual menace implied here is lightly presented, but it was a reality for working girls. What found its way into popular culture as the “office romance”—with the office girl usually positioned as the temptress, luring the boss away from his stay-at-home wife—was more often a daily battle against sexual harassment—a concept that wouldn’t enter the law or the lexicon until the 1970s.37
At the end of the novel, Kitty has a dream that reveals the wider importance of her WCG theories. She’s at a White House press conference near the president, though sitting hidden under a piano. Undaunted, she gets up to make a speech, seizing her “everlasting chance” to tell the world “how the White Collar Girl feels about things and what a bloody mess and etcetra [sic].” She tells Molly later that she did want to speak for them—“your poor damn sharecroppers in the Dust Bowl of business.” She wanted to tell the president about their courage, as they move around the city, “putting up a good fight in their pretty clothes and keeping their heebyjeebies [sic] to themselves.” But she finds that when it comes to the crunch, she can’t pronounce the crucial words, “White Collar Girl.”38
Even without getting the words out, Kitty Foyle managed to speak for her courageous, neglected sisters. The novel was a smash hit. In April 1940 the publisher Lippincott took out an ad in the Saturday Review touting the book’s fifteenth printing, upcoming movie adaptation, and a seven-page photo spread in Life magazine. This spread posed a model who resembled the film’s star, Ginger Rogers, around New York City: in a drab diner and at her desk, outside her all-women residence and dressed up for a night out, leading the reader through the daily grind of (a spectacularly glamorous) WCG. Kitty Foyle was hailed “Not a Book but a Woman”—like the Live-Aloner, a symbol of the times who quickly outgrew her pages.
The novel had been snapped up by RKO Pictures as a vehicle for its star, Ginger Rogers, and a way for her to break out of her fleet-footed two-step with Fred Astaire, which was starting to feel like the same old dance. It worked, at least this time: Rogers won a Best Actress Academy Award for her portrayal of Kitty, in an adaptation that waved the wand of Hollywood glamour over the book’s blunt, working-class heroine. Most reviewers saved their praise for Rogers; The New Yorker headlined its review “Ginger’s White Collar,” and hailed her performance for its “air of spanking gaiety” and “promise of piquant insecurity and dainty audacities,” which seems to be a prim way of alerting readers that they wouldn’t get to see screen-Kitty getting up to quite the same sexual antics as the girl in the book.
Laboring under the Hays Code, the film cleaned up Kitty’s romantic backstory, having her marry Wyn and give birth to a legitimate child, only for the baby to die and the couple to divorce. This makes Kitty’s experience far more tragic than her secret but unrepented abortion in the book, and the film ultimately turns the story into a melodramatic love triangle, with Kitty forced to choose between Wyn, who won’t leave his wife but offers her a long-term affair, and Mark, a dull doctor she doesn’t love. Her white-collar life generates no political awareness or determination to share the fate of her sisters with the world. Indeed, the film took the larger concept of the white collar and reduced it to a literal accessory on Rogers’s on-screen outfit, which became known as a “Kitty Foyle dress.” Created by the designer Renié, who went on to win an Oscar for the far more flamboyant costumes of Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, the Kitty Foyle dress became a staple of 1940s wardrobes. A dark, often navy-blue, short-sleeved shirtwaist style, with contrasting touches of white at the cuffs, buttons, and of course, the collar, the dress was enormously popular with working women who could exercise their thrift and ingenuity by adding those fresh white accents to a dress they already owned, and bask in a little of Ginger’s reflected glamour. In a happy coincidence for the film’s producers, the high contrast of the white collar brightened and flattered an actress’s features on screen, giving her a sort of upside-dow
n halo—an irony that might have given Kitty herself a good laugh.
The professional and sexual adventures of working girls like Kitty would remain a staple of popular culture into the 1940s, with twists that could make the stories romantic or tragic depending on the circumstances. Although in most cases her sphere was limited to the office, there was one incarnation of the WCG who was allowed to get out from behind her desk and have adventures in her own right. This was the “girl reporter” turned amateur sleuth, like the titular Torchy Blane, played by three different actresses in a series of nine popular movies released by Warner Brothers between 1936 and 1939, with titles like Smart Blonde and Torchy Gets Her Man. In 1940’s His Girl Friday, Rosalind Russell made her an icon, in her role as Hildy Johnson, the whip-smart reporter who can’t quit her story, the business, or her ex-husband boss. Through Hildy, women could imagine a working world in which they had the respect of male colleagues, made decisions for themselves, and used their wit and brains to make a difference in the world, just like a man—no surprise, as the Hildy character was originally male. The film, and especially Russell’s performance, still offers a potent vision of women’s professional power and potential.
6
MAD ABOUT NEW YORK
Marjorie Hillis wrote Live Alone and Like It for all the girls and women who, like Kitty Foyle, dared to leave their hometowns for the thrilling, anonymous city, a city that was an idea more than a place. The book’s case studies might play out in Chicago, Boston, or St. Louis, but the arc of each story remained the same: a young, or not-so-young, single woman escapes the scrutiny and expectations of her family by moving to a place where her unfortunate singleness can be made over into a lifestyle choice. Wherever they actually lived, the myth of urban reinvention, the city as a place of opportunity and anonymity, resonated with readers. But it was New York where the pattern was laid. As a hybrid of New World energy and Old World glamour, New York shaped the look and the ethos of the twentieth-century American city. During the Gilded Age it was defined by the extremes of fabulous wealth and the abject poverty into which it crammed its dreaming newcomers, who came in waves from Europe and China, the Caribbean, and the rural South, fleeing abuse or exclusion or poverty, or simply chasing a dream. For those women who were allowed through the door, the city’s proliferating offices, factories, schools, hospitals, and department stores held out a chance at respectable work, romance, and reinvention.
During the 1930s, the physical appearance of New York City changed dramatically, and was captured in the photographer Berenice Abbott’s 1939 book Changing New York—a striking record of new buildings under construction, older structures awaiting demolition, and the men and women who witnessed the changes without, perhaps, quite seeing them. The city’s first skyscrapers, like the Flatiron and Woolworth buildings, had been built in the neo-Gothic style, with its frills and adornments in stone. But when the Chrysler Building’s gleaming Art Deco arches rose above the city, heralding the new decade, its aesthetic was triumphant. In the cabarets designed to look like cruise ships, in cars and women’s dresses, in the fourteen buildings that made up Rockefeller Center and finally opened at the end of the 1930s, the new New York style—sleek, steely, and streamlined—was visible everywhere. New bridges spanned the rivers; new subway lines linked far-flung neighborhoods, and a sense of expansive growth marked the city—even as, at street level, its citizens still struggled to get by.
The World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Park ran from April 1939 to October 1940 and formed a capstone to the disparities of the 1930s. Attended by forty million people over eighteen months, it was planned as a triumphant sign that the city was emerging from the Depression, under its slogan “Building the World of Tomorrow.” At the same time, it looked backward at the nation’s founding, and the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration on Wall Street, with an enormous statue of the first president looming over the grounds. The twelve-hundred-acre grounds in Queens were, Marjorie Hillis wrote, “crammed with inventions and discoveries and designs and theories to make the future a better and more exciting and beautiful place.”1 Divided into seven zones separated by sculptures, reflecting pools, and fountains, the fair showcased everything from food and amusement to examples of scientific, business, and technological advances. President Roosevelt’s opening of the fair was the country’s first television broadcast, an appropriate marker for this fantasia of global innovation and harmony, shadowed by the approach of global war.
The Woman Vacationist
In January 1939, Marjorie had written to Laurance Chambers with the news that “I find myself, all of a sudden, in the midst of another book and one over which I’m quite excited.” She hastened to reassure him it wasn’t another book of poetry. This would be a practical book, the size and format of Live Alone, featuring case histories and advice. Explaining that during her extensive lecture travels, she’d heard from “business women and teachers all over the country” that they planned to visit the upcoming World’s Fair in New York, the new book could be pegged to the grand opening at the end of April. She enclosed chapter outlines and had the title ready to go: New York, Fair or No Fair: A Guide for the Woman Vacationist.
Chambers was delighted, and even though he thought the competition for similar books would be stiff, he was confident that Marjorie’s slant would be unique, and that the interest in the fair would sell the book widely. His readers’ reports were generally positive, accompanied by the now-familiar gentle eye roll at her financial optimism: “As usual Miss Hillis is fooling no one with her contention that she is outlining an economical vacation because there is nothing economical about it,” wrote one reader. “However, economy and dullness often go hand in hand and there is nothing dull about this guide.”2 The book’s sales approach was to capitalize on the fantasy that the book offered—so central to the appeal of Marjorie’s earlier books—and to suggest that reading it was almost as much fun as a trip to the city.
New York, Fair or No Fair is a hymn to the city where Marjorie was not born, but made. Although intended as a practical guide for visitors, it was as much a celebration of a New Yorker’s love for her home, full of Marjorie’s personal voice, her memories and her prejudices, and her exhilaration when faced with the sheer fact of the city. “Its air has a zest and sparkle that make my mind tingle,” she wrote in the jubilant introduction. “Its hum starts a rhythm of thought in my brain. An idea floats in every puff of wind, a picture shapes itself in every spot of sun or shadow, an adventure waits around every corner and beckons down every street.” The city can be champagne and the striking-up of the band, or it can be whisky and curling up by the fire: “Nowhere else, except perhaps on a mountaintop, can one feel so securely snug and remote, so sure of being able to live one’s life as one wants to, as in a New York apartment where you never see your neighbor and choose your friends because you like them and not because they live around the corner.”3
Although the city typically allowed newcomers to escape their families, Marjorie’s curiosity and love for New York were closely bound up with memories of her father. Writing more personally than she had in any previous book, she describes her father’s embrace of his adopted city after their move from Illinois, his unflagging energy and curiosity, and his determination to show the city off to his children. When she directs her readers to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk, she recalls taking the same walk in reverse with her father, through the Lower East Side and back to their neighborhood under the shadow of the bridge on the Brooklyn side. They would always pause in the Jewish quarter of lower Manhattan, she writes, “to peer into the windows of a synagogue, where the men wore hats, the women shawls, at their devotions.” For the middle-class daughter of a Presbyterian minister, both the religion and the poverty were foreign and fascinating: “We walked down the Bowery, under the clattering El, passed pawnshops and missions and cheap rooming houses, to the dreary entrance to Brooklyn Bridge.” Once up on the bridge, the view of the city opens up into “t
he loveliest panorama.”4 This sigh of longing is typical of a book that presents New York as, like that panorama, at once dazzling in its beauty and frustrating in its scale. “I’ve had space only for the Musts—and they are all that you’ll have time for in any short vacation . . .” Marjorie laments at the end of the book, hoping only that her readers will come to feel as she does, simply “mad” about “this amazing, fast-moving, exciting, beautiful, colorful, Arabian Nights city.”5
Firmly aimed at the well-to-do female visitor, New York, Fair or No Fair doesn’t offer much more than a curious glance at the parts of the city populated by people without the means to get lunch at Hampshire House, a taxi to the theater, or a jaunty silk turban at a Lexington Avenue boutique. But Marjorie did make a few concessions to travelers on a budget, and to those out-of-town solo women who might feel wary of staying in a hotel room alone. She advised staying at one of several “feminine hostelries” that were an affordable place to live for a week or two: the Allerton on East Fifty-Seventh Street; the American Woman’s Club a little farther west; or, most famously, the Barbizon, on Lexington at Sixty-Third Street. At the Barbizon, the visitor would encounter an “attractive clientele made up largely of bright young things in search of a career.”6 For several decades it was a coveted address for a young woman on her way—provided she had the references and connections to get in. Applicants were judged by their family, but also their appearance, demeanor, and wardrobe. On the twenty-second floor of the hotel was the national headquarters of the Junior League, an organization of upper-class young girls twenty thousand strong, united by their social status “and an urge, sometimes vague, toward charity.”7 Dorothy Draper, not yet the famous tastemaker of the city’s leading hotels, had made over the headquarters as a tropical retreat in the Manhattan sky, with whitewashed walls, blue carpet, glossy-leaved rubber plants, and orange velvet chairs, the acid-bright scheme that would become her signature. The Junior League was indicative of the status of the girls the Barbizon wanted; both Hillis daughters were members.
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