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By Root 1461 0

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.* 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