Going to Business

When will trad wives discover the career girl?

I’ve been neck-deep in research on trad wives recently (more on that wherever you get your podcasts) and I find myself almost wistful that today’s trads are ignoring a rich potential cosplay genre just waiting to be mined for content: the midcentury career girl. There was a phrase for a certain kind of career girl’s labor in the middle decades of the 20th century. It didn’t connote any work that a woman might do, but specifically to the kind of pink collar labor that a female high school graduate could undertake before she married, or perhaps forever: going to business. Going to business was a term of art for office work, but it didn’t specify what kind of office or what kind of work. The site of “business” could be the government, a small company, a large company, a public utility, a department store, an airline, an ad agency, really any place with paperwork and a phone ringing for someone who’s on the other line.

Hope Lange as Caroline Bender in “The Best of Everything,” directed by Jean Negulesco and based on the novel by Rona Jaffe, 20th Century Studios, 1959.

In the mid-1950s, if someone called the house hoping to reach my aunt Eileen and she happened to be at work, my grandmother might have said “Eileen is not at home, she goes to business,” or something to that effect. “Business” did not connote blue collar labor, nor did it encompass anything executive in nature or a profession like medicine or law. Those people went to work. The girls who labor under Joan Crawford in The Best of Everything are temporarily perched on the border between going to business and going to work; they’re highly educated, but also low-level and poorly paid. The clearest class distinction at play seems to have been that business was for women who didn’t attend college, while the hope of work or a career was for Vassar girls and their compatriots.

A Charm cover from 1951, courtesy of Robert Newman.

For women who read the magazine Charm: the Magazine for Women Who Work, going to business meant a measure of independence, growing authority, an identity distinct from that of one’s family or boyfriend, the chance to live with roommates in the city, to travel, take night classes, and save up for investment wardrobe staples.

In a way, my very first real job was an early 2000’s iteration of going to business, and as it happened I worked for someone who had, as a young woman, worked at Charm. The couple who ran the small antiques firm where I landed after college had specifically asked the temp agency that found me (which specialized in staffing non-profits) for someone who “wasn’t salesy.” I turned up with suitably little experience in retail and robust training in the close reading of various rich texts, which seemed very important at the time and sometimes still does.

The best way to describe the wife? Little Edie Beale would have called her a “staunch character,” something like a Protestant Elaine Stritch who didn't drink. As we chatted about my background and education when I came in for an interview, she allowed as how I seemed “awfully nice for someone who went to Spence,” and this immediately endeared her to me even more. It was like finding a spicy kitten in adult human form. Then she discovered that like her, I had lost my father at a young age, and after that we were thick as thieves.

A Charm cover from 1953, courtesy of Robert Newman.

I had never heard of Charm at the time, but I was immediately fascinated and asked her to tell me all about it; it was run by a group of women editors and graphic designers, “by and for” women, specifically those with jobs, in the 1950s. (For context: at the time that I worked for her and her husband, my boss was in her mid-70s and referred to second-wave feminism as “women’s lib.”) I had stumbled upon the remains of a facet of 1950s life that seemed almost fictional somehow. It wasn’t Levittown, and it wasn’t Black Mountain College, but a secret third thing, like Sex and the City half a century before its time. Charm launched in the 1940s as a title not unlike Mademoiselle, offering readers (particularly those taking part in the war effort) advice about matters of concern to young women, but it wasn’t designed as a manual for the career girl. Legendary creative director, graphic designer and editor Cipe Pineles, late of Glamour and Seventeen, reimagined Charm in 1950 as a magazine for the young, urban female professional under the rubric “The Magazine for Women Who Work.”

Covers from Pineles’s tenure pose questions that seem timely and urgent even now, and it’s mind-blowing to contemplate that these examples (from Robert Newman’s wonderful online trove) all date from the first half of the 1950s. “Should you work while pregnant?” Who gets the TV jobs?” “Are we substituting speed for serenity?” “What are you working for: Because you have to? Because you want to?” Then there are countless smart options on offer for vacation clothes and evening dresses, advice about how to cook in a closet kitchen, and more.

From these headlines and their attendant articles, it’s possible to piece together a sense of Charm’s demographic and cultural footprint, a curious place where women who went to business shared the concerns, hopes, dreams, desires, and worries of “women who work.” One especially striking cover from 1951 offers fashion ideas for “nurses, teachers, office workers, saleswomen, and executives.” A sophisticated, dark-haired woman balances a telephone and a red pencil against the glamour of her matching red lipstick. In needing advice, being a new kind of woman in the world, the Vassar girls and the high school grads both needed the wisdom and inspiration of Charm.

A Charm cover from 1955, courtesy of Robert Newman.

Condé Nast shuttered Charm in the late 1950s, and by that time, it had nearly advocated itself out of a job. Other women’s titles—Vogue, Glamour—that had previously been devoted to the concerns of home, family, fashion, and beauty, were now catching up to the new reality that lots of American women had jobs. About 35% of American women worked at least part time in 1960, which wasn’t a majority, but was enough to change the ecosystem of magazine publishing. If the stalwart advertisers of women’s magazines had long been the traditional constellation of household soaps, jellied foods, and domestic appliances, there was a now a growing group of readers who were buying clothes for the office, or record players for their apartments, navigating their dating lives, and planning their own vacations. Detergent? A new dishwasher? Aspic? No. They were not at home; they went to business.