by Betsy Israel
Of course, to keep up a steady supply of applicants, employers portrayed office girls as superbly competent and attractive, the kind of young professional any girl would want to become. Even department stores started playing similar word games. Their new breed of “lady bookkeeper” was, like her office sister, exceptionally crafty, smart, and unusually honest. As one manager stated: “Lady bookkeepers [are] not so likely to appropriate money that don’t belong to them!” Office workers understood that they were supposed to feel lucky—they were, after all, Women of Business—but it was a feeling that one could sustain on most days about as long as it took to reach one’s desk.
By 1910, so many women had arrived in offices with so many questions and complaints—Is this “good” job as bad as it seems? Where can I go after this if I have to?—that new advice guides appeared monthly. Among the most popular, and most serious, was an epistolary volume entitled Letters to a Business Girl: The Personal Letters of a Business Woman to Her Daughter, Replete with Practical Information Regarding the Perplexing Problems… By One Who Knows the Inside Facts of Business and the Office Routine and the Relations of Employer to Employee (1906).
In this book Florence Wenderoth Saunders reveals more about office life and the inherent struggles of office girls than just about any other advice guide, newspaper series, or any realist novel by Sinclair Lewis. Saunders was a middle-aged woman who had worked with great pride in an early office environment, married the boss, then moved with him to the country, where she helped him to run a farm. After his death, she kept at the farm until business plunged—so deeply that she had to send her oldest daughter, just eighteen, off to the city. This was a common enough decision, though still controversial. As Mother writes early on: “I have been severely censured since you left, because I allowed you to leave my protection and care and face the dangers of a business life, particularly in the city.”
Readers skimmed Mother’s tales of her own heroic stoicism, for example, once walking from Delancey Street up to Thirty-fifth, wearing a cloth coat, in a blizzard, all to save ten cents in trolley fare that she badly needed for something else. Beyond the dire autobiography, young female readers found unusually blunt and specific remarks:
You’ll probably hear yourself referred to as a “poor creature” and “the downtrodden working girl” and, even as we used to hear it ourselves, “poor things.” Whatever it is there is a lot of “poor” attached to it… necessarily the girl who is employed has to give up many things… but she gains a far broader knowledge of life than… her sisters of leisure…. The girl who has once earnedher own living knows that if necessary she can earn it again.
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:
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 The Independent: “A [boarding] house like that should be a strictly hotel basis, no Christian stuff, sign this, sign here, be quiet, no guests—oh God, we just want a nice place to live like anybody and not answer questions—where have we been and with who…. How is it their business to know?”
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 déclassé 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 Jacob A. Stamler, owned by businessman John Arbuckle, which had docked for few months, 1907–8, at a Twenty-third Street pier. The offer was to let all rooms on board cheaply and without serious restrictions to “self-respecting girls who’d behave with honor.” This lasted a few happy months until the city needed the pier space and the ship moved on; one newspaper printed an etching of tired-looking girls in dark dresses and hats, standing clustered like mourners, watching it go.
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” bathrooms. (More expensive rooms had the bathrooms in the room itself!) It had laundry facilities.
The latchkey at last.
Some girls wore their spindly keys on long chains that dangled, while others hid theirs inside a boot or a shoe and stood on it all day to be sure it was safe. It was not an engagement ring, but in its way it symbolized a rite of passage; single female life had at last been deemed a grown-up life. In his 1992 film Singles, Cameron Crowe captures the same sort of exultation on the face of Kyra Sedgwick as she holds up her newly acquired garage-door opener. (It’s meaningful, really, because it is her own garage, and that garage is just below her own very first ever condo!)
And once the key, one’s own private space, had been secured? Then came relief, excitement, and a swiftly spreading sense of disappointment. Girls called the arrangements “better,” “more free”—they loved having unsupervised parlor time—but they also used phrases such as “in the overall, small in feeling.” One twenty-one-year-old office clerk told Munsey’s Magazine that the Trowmart and its few imitators had “narrow rooms” with bad lighting and “mincy wardrobes.” Many residents took to the parlors, although these filled up rapidly, and so in all kinds of weather packs of girls were out on walks. Out wandering—swiftl
y wandering so as not to seem vagrant or “loitery”—they often met equally claustrophobic friends, and had marathon teas. A bit later on they escaped to nickelodeons, neighborhood theaters consisting of a small homemade screen and wooden chairs.
There is no document of daily life at the Trowmart Inn. But we can imagine it based on the descriptions of comparable hotels, both the real, for example, the Barbizon—subject of numerous Sunday-magazine features during the 1950s and ’60s—and the fictional. There’s a great section of Kitty Foyle in which she describes her life at the fictitious Pocahontas Residence for Women, a dwelling obviously based on the Barbizon. As always, Kitty narrates in a tart but sympathetic manner:
A neurosis to every room. I can see them yet in the dining room, poor souls with the twice a week chicken croquettes and those rocking little peas, sort of crimped so they wouldn’t skid…. They called them bachelor girls, but a bachelor is that way on purpose. One evening one of them must have gone haywire [because] she yelled out into the courtyard, “there’s a Man in my room!… Now, everybody, they had seen the sinister fellow… but he was nowhere… only… a pale phantom of desire.”
THE BACHELOR GIRL AND THE BOHEMIAN
By the turn of the twentieth century, so many single girls were visibly out there—working, eating in restaurants, dancing—that it became harder to immediately categorize them. (And arranging single girls into identifiable groupings was a necessity not only among editors, writers, and retail merchandisers. State and U.S. government officials frequently organized mass prostitution raids. An increasingly diverse single population made the task much more difficult. At urban rackets and in the newer Broadway cabarets, government agents became famous for “getting the wrong girl wrong,” accusing a shop girl of being a hooker, and “getting whonked for their mistakes,” meaning kicked in the ankle.)