Thursday, July 17, 2008

the office, circa. 1959

Seeing Bette Davis double feature at a theater the other night reminded me of how much better women of a certain economic strata had it in the old days: afternoon "beauty naps", closetsful of great looking "outfits" (no mom jeans), handsome hardbox luggage to haul the outfits around whenever you travelled, (of course, plenty of willing others to do the actual hauling, for coin tips), a maid AND a housekeeper being de rigueur, even if it was just you and a spouse living in a tiny house in Vermont.

For working women (meaning women without husbands), it was a different story. Only a few jobs were actually open to you: nurse, teacher, domestic labor, sales clerk, secretary. And just one business countenanced female execs--publishing. The only way to break in was as a secretary (NOT an admin) which basically meant being slave to your boss' whims and idiosyncrasies. This could be most daunting in the rare event your boss was a woman as illustrated by Joan Crawford in The Best of Everything who supposedly was the model Streep followed for The Devil Wears Prada. Anything that requires a personal reply goes here... not here, or here, but.. here...

3 comments:

Alan Wolk said...

Great clip.

On a more macro level, one of the societal changes we seem to gloss over is that it now often takes two incomes to match the lifestyle people lived on one income back then. Which has probably does as much to speed the acceptance of women in the workforce and in professional jobs as anything.

Ad Broad, oldest working writer in advertising said...

Good point, Alan. Hard to believe now, but in those days, women turned down for well-paying jobs were told "you'd be taking income away from a man who needed it to support a family."

Joker said...

To a bitch of said magnitude a more appropriate reply would be to toss my salad here... not here or here... but here.

Wow what a wench.