“Taking your M.R.S.?” asked a regular ad. “Do your cramming with
Modern Bride.”
Recruitment notices were limited to those for Katherine Gibbs secretarial school (“the best way to get started in any field”); Braniff flight hostesses (“wear world-famous Pucci fashions as you fly in the most fascinating career of women today. You must be under 27, single and weigh less than 135 pounds”); and the CIA.
Outside of Wellesley, there was little more encouragement. Nearly half the women in America were working in 1965, but three quarters of them held clerical, sales, or household jobs. A report that year by the President’s Commission on the Status of Women detailed widespread wage discrimination and a rapidly declining ratio of women in professional and executive jobs. Though in 1966 NOW condemned the custom that men carry the sole burden of supporting a family—“for a girl as for a boy, education can only be serious when there is an expectation that itwill be used in society”—and launched lawsuits against employment discrimination, not until 1973 would the Supreme Court bar help-wanted ads listed by sex. In sum, the working world offered little but frustration to the college girl. As Radcliffe graduate Julie Hayden wrote in a 1965
Atlantic Monthly
essay that was excerpted in the
Wellesley News:
“We wind up the Kafka readers in the typists’ pool, the seekers after truth making coffee.”
The “experts” were just as discouraging about work as they had been about education, diagnosing a woman with career aspirations as neurotic and unfeminine and a danger to society. The panel of male doctors gathered by
Life
magazine warned that “the disease of working women leads to children who become juvenile delinquents, atheists, Communists, and homosexuals. Daddy understands business. Mommy understands children.” Even anthropologist Margaret Mead, who inspired numerous feminists with her argument that “personality traits we call masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to gender as are the clothing, manners and form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex,” also argued that a girl’s flickering ambition toward “compensatory achievement” dies down with the certainty of maternity. “It is of doubtful value to enlist the gifts of women if bringing them into fields defined as male frightens the men, and unsexes the women.”
The popular culture offered few depictions of women at work, except for those unfortunates who had so far failed to snare a man. The secretary setting a trap for the promising young executive was a stock character of the time, in films like
The Apartment
and stories like John Cheever’s “The Five Forty-Eight.” The “organization bimbo,”
Newsweek
called her. “Miss B.A., who has failed to catch a husband, is in New York seeking men,” reported
Look
magazine in 1966. “She will be asked just one thing. ‘How’s your steno, dear?’ Nimble fingers are of more interest than her nimble mind.” Burdened with aspirations stirred up by college, she’ll likely find herself “beaten out for jobs by docile high school grads, who win secretarial desks because college women grow restless too soon.” The lucky ones will “end up typing letters, watering the boss’s rubber plant and earning $65 a week.” But never mind, the editors consoled, defying the conventional wisdom that a girl educated herself out of the marriage market. “The college girl holds one advantage. While theKatie Gibbs grad lands the higher pay, it’s the B.A. who succeeds with the college man.”
Even women who had committed to serious work voiced ambivalence at the price. In her essay “Silences,” published in
Harper’s Magazine
in 1965, Tillie Olsen demonstrated how nearly impossible it was for a woman to do creative work and also be a mother and wife: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf—all had remained childless throughout their
Modern Bride.”
Recruitment notices were limited to those for Katherine Gibbs secretarial school (“the best way to get started in any field”); Braniff flight hostesses (“wear world-famous Pucci fashions as you fly in the most fascinating career of women today. You must be under 27, single and weigh less than 135 pounds”); and the CIA.
Outside of Wellesley, there was little more encouragement. Nearly half the women in America were working in 1965, but three quarters of them held clerical, sales, or household jobs. A report that year by the President’s Commission on the Status of Women detailed widespread wage discrimination and a rapidly declining ratio of women in professional and executive jobs. Though in 1966 NOW condemned the custom that men carry the sole burden of supporting a family—“for a girl as for a boy, education can only be serious when there is an expectation that itwill be used in society”—and launched lawsuits against employment discrimination, not until 1973 would the Supreme Court bar help-wanted ads listed by sex. In sum, the working world offered little but frustration to the college girl. As Radcliffe graduate Julie Hayden wrote in a 1965
Atlantic Monthly
essay that was excerpted in the
Wellesley News:
“We wind up the Kafka readers in the typists’ pool, the seekers after truth making coffee.”
The “experts” were just as discouraging about work as they had been about education, diagnosing a woman with career aspirations as neurotic and unfeminine and a danger to society. The panel of male doctors gathered by
Life
magazine warned that “the disease of working women leads to children who become juvenile delinquents, atheists, Communists, and homosexuals. Daddy understands business. Mommy understands children.” Even anthropologist Margaret Mead, who inspired numerous feminists with her argument that “personality traits we call masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to gender as are the clothing, manners and form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex,” also argued that a girl’s flickering ambition toward “compensatory achievement” dies down with the certainty of maternity. “It is of doubtful value to enlist the gifts of women if bringing them into fields defined as male frightens the men, and unsexes the women.”
The popular culture offered few depictions of women at work, except for those unfortunates who had so far failed to snare a man. The secretary setting a trap for the promising young executive was a stock character of the time, in films like
The Apartment
and stories like John Cheever’s “The Five Forty-Eight.” The “organization bimbo,”
Newsweek
called her. “Miss B.A., who has failed to catch a husband, is in New York seeking men,” reported
Look
magazine in 1966. “She will be asked just one thing. ‘How’s your steno, dear?’ Nimble fingers are of more interest than her nimble mind.” Burdened with aspirations stirred up by college, she’ll likely find herself “beaten out for jobs by docile high school grads, who win secretarial desks because college women grow restless too soon.” The lucky ones will “end up typing letters, watering the boss’s rubber plant and earning $65 a week.” But never mind, the editors consoled, defying the conventional wisdom that a girl educated herself out of the marriage market. “The college girl holds one advantage. While theKatie Gibbs grad lands the higher pay, it’s the B.A. who succeeds with the college man.”
Even women who had committed to serious work voiced ambivalence at the price. In her essay “Silences,” published in
Harper’s Magazine
in 1965, Tillie Olsen demonstrated how nearly impossible it was for a woman to do creative work and also be a mother and wife: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf—all had remained childless throughout their
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