The Sad Ballad of Phyllis and Betty

You know, reader, when I want well-informed, thought-provoking, responsible essays on gender as it pertains to literature (or literature as it pertains to gender) there is one publication to which I turn: the New York Times Book Review. KIDDING! Ha ha ha, woo boy, sometimes I crack myself up.

I read Bitch, of course, which published an article roughly nine billion years ago about NYTBR's tendency to ignore major new feminist works or assign them to obviously hostile reviewers, and its tendency to assign more space to writers who embrace feminist backlash (because that's "edgy" now; think of it as the old-people version of Vice) than to writers who embrace actual feminism. Bitch will no doubt be pleased to note that its article, despite being nine billion years old, is still totally true! For what did NYTBR publish, in this week's edition, but an essay on the life and work of Phyllis McGinley?

They published several other things, actually, some of which might have been good. I couldn't tell! I was unable to read them, because I had been blinded by the terrible, terrible essay on Phyllis McGinley!

Who is Phyllis McGinley? Why is there an essay about her in the New York Times Book Review? Why are she, and the essay, and the essay's author, all so crazy? I will let the essay's crazy author, noted television critic Ginia Bellafante, explain it in her own creepily approving words:

[McGinley lived] contentedly for a number of years as a wife, mother and well-known poet in Larchmont, N.Y., writing reverentially of lush lawns and country-club Sundays in The New Yorker, Harper’s and elsewhere... McGinley’s light verse sought to convey the ecstatic peace of suburban ritual, the delight in greeting a husband, in appointing a room, in going to the butcher. Anticipation pervades her work, the feeling of something quietly joyful about to happen — beloved friends coming for dessert, perhaps.

Have you barfed yet? Get it out of the way now, because this essay ("Suburban Rapture!" Is its title!) is dead set on sickening you, being as it is about how mind-blowingly great it was to be a suburban housewife in the 1950s. History students among you may recall the 1950s, along with most of the 20th century, as a time when women had precious few viable options other than becoming housewives, and even the ones that did work (or had to work, due to social marginalization and corresponding poverty - I'm not discounting that) were relegated to menial, low-paying positions with little to no hope of advancement, due to pervasive, unchecked, institutionalized sexism and racism, which were of course inextricably bound to each other and also to class! Ginia Bellafante, apparently not into this whole "history and also actual well-documented fact" thing, seems to recall the 1950s differently: as a blissful Eden, from which women were expelled when they ate from the Tree of Wanting an Actual Freaking Choice. To demonstrate how very lovely it all was (we grow good people in our small towns!) and how the elitist lib'rul media (referred to here as the "contemptuous... literary and intellectual class") just doesn't get it, she has chosen to utilize the marginal and deservedly forgotten McGinley.

The facts of McGinley's career are as such: the lady churned out a lot of crap. It was extremely commercial crap, mind you - so very commercial, in fact, that some of it was used in actual commercials, as in her many catchy jingles. She was your basic ladyhack (not to be confused with your basic Ladyhawke) and, as a ladyhack myself, I cannot judge her for cranking out women's magazine articles, children's books, and light verse that was... well, about what you would expect from a writer of commercial jingles. I can, however, judge the Pulitzer committee for awarding her a prize in 1961, a gesture which I can only interpret as proof that the nascent second wave was making a great deal of gentlemen very uncomfortable, and that they felt the need to placate the bevaginad masses by rewarding a token female who knew her place and stuck to it - er, I mean, "exhibited a uniquely feminine sensibility." For here is a sampling of the timeless, Pulitzer-worthy verse of Phyllis McGinley:

A lady is smarter than a gentleman, maybe,
She can sew a fine seam, she can have a baby,
She can use her intuition instead of her brain

... She can write sexist poems that drive you insane!

Ginia Bellafante insists (and insists, and insists) Phyllis McGinley loved being a suburban housewife, and so did lots of people, so it's just plain silly that people keep insisting that women who became housewives when it was the only economically rewarding, unstigmatized choice for women did so because it was the only economically rewarding, unstigmatized choice for women. Ginia Bellafante just doesn't understand why Betty Friedan "dismissed" McGinley as "one of the housewife writers." I mean, as Ginia Bellafante points out in her own piece, her entire career and aesthetic was about being a housewife, so you can see why that was a completely unmerited attack!

This piece is really miraculous, in that any given line has the capacity to inspire epileptic rage fits, as in, "Having married happily at 33, she loved domesticity the way a woman can only when it has come late to find her," which manages to imply within a mere 22 words that (a) "domesticity," meaning marriage and babies, is the only thing that can make a woman complete and happy, (b) women who don't have it are failures, and women who get it should be simperingly grateful, (c) THIRTY-FUCKING-THREE is late to find it, or, I'm sorry, to be found by it, since we obviously don't have any choice in the matter and can only hope to be chosen by that one very special boy, who can evaluate and reject women as if we were avocados he were squeezing for ripeness in the fucking supermarket, for he is Man, Master of All Things. Jesus, and they wonder why we drink. However, I would rather skip right over most of the piece, and deliver to you its creamy, poisonous center, which goes like this:

“A liberal arts education is not a tool like a hoe . . . or an electric mixer,” McGinley wrote, dismayed at a world she thought was conspiring to make women feel as though any acquired erudition would be wasted in a life of riffling through recipe cards. “It is a true and precious stone which can glow as wholesomely on a kitchen table as when it is put on exhibition in a jeweler’s window or bartered for bread and butter.” She went on to dismiss the already benighted suggestion that Bryn Mawr was a threat to what ought to get done in a kitchen. “Surely the ability to enjoy Heine’s exquisite melancholy in the original German,” she wrote, “will not cripple a girl’s talent for making chocolate brownies.”

McGinley’s point, an eternally divisive one, was clear: a woman who enjoyed herself as a wife and mother should not submit to imposed ambitions.

Fair enough! If you have absolutely no goals in life other than to get married and have babies, no-one should force you to discover a cure for cancer, or to make any use whatsoever of your education. However, if you do have other goals, a life spent doing nothing but making chocolate brownies would be pretty goddamn tragic. That, one suspects - and hears, from women who survived the era - was the more common scenario. And, hey, good news for ladies whose brains are capable of comprehending something other than the fine points of selecting lawn furniture: it turns out that having ambition does not automatically make you barren or unlovable! You can, in fact, have a career, a marriage, and a baby, or a career and marriage with no baby, or a baby and career with no marriage, or whatever else your heart desires. It's just strange that the women who tell us otherwise, the women who insist and insist and insist that being a wife and mother to the exclusion of all other things is an honorable and beautiful route that is not in any way limiting or likely to drive you out of your mind - women like Phyllis Schlafly, Phyllis McGinley, Caitlyn Flanagan, and the woman who seems to just love them all, or at least to be unable to frame an incisive and well-merited critique of their message, TV critic Ginia Bellafante - are only able to reach us with this message because they have, well, jobs.

--- AND NOW, THE SECRET PRIZE ---

I know, right? This post was freaking huge! I've decided that whenever I write a bonkers nutso long-winded thing like this, I should reward people who make it all the way through, as with the Cracker Jack prizes which are maybe the only reason on Earth to eat Cracker Jack, which is sticky and gross. Therefore, I present to you: women's education in the McGinley Age. Strangely, none of them seems to be studying Heine!

Sense and Sensibility: It Is Not Everyone Who Has Your Passion For Dead Leaves

Anyone who takes it upon herself to write lady business book reviews must, sooner or later, file a piece on Jane Austen. (It is a truth universally acknowledged! Ha, NO.) Austen seems to be the ultimate Chick Writer: canonical, virtuosic, indisputably important in terms of both technique and influence, yet widely mocked or ignored outside her circle of avid fans, simply because she wrote about, well, girly stuff. When I tell people that the three writers I admire most, as Voices, are (a) Joan Didion, (b) David Foster Wallace, and (c) Jane Austen, people who know Didion and Wallace tend to agree, or at least to respect the sentiment, but Austen... she's some sort of proto-chick-lit writer, isn't she? And: I'm surprised to know you read her. I always thought that she wrote sappy romance stuff.

Yikes.

***

Austen's fans, it must be said, have not helped her case: the sheer amount of sentimental crap "based on" or "inspired by" Jane would be enough to scare away any serious reader. Even worse, Austen has been accused of inventing chick lit itself. Better clear this up now: like Shakespeare, Jane Austen wrote plots that people felt comfortable "adapting" to suit their own tastes, with mixed results. Shakespeare has Ten Things I Hate About You and She's the Man, amongst others; Austen has Bridget Jones' Diary and Clueless. BJ did, in fact, spawn the current mass of chick lit, but Austen is no more responsible for that than Shakespeare is for Amanda Bynes. In my experience, people don't tend to denigrate or avoid Shakespeare because of She's the Man. They do, however, feel perfectly justified in avoiding Jane Austen because of Bridget Jones.

The saddest thing about this is that the people who are most appalled by contemporary representations of Austen - people who shudder at the cozy, syrupy, suburban, anti-intellectual horseshit on display here,* let's say - are the people who might most enjoy her work. The woman was anything but cozy. Here, for example, is a passage from one of her personal letters:

Mrs. Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright -- I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.

This sentence demonstrates everything that made Jane Austen great. Note, for example, how carefully it's plotted: there is a lengthy, twenty-eight word set-up, during which Austen lulls us into a false sense of security with her proper, subdued, nearly journalistic language ("Mrs. Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday," who what where when), followed by a shockingly brutal four word punch line, the full impact of which is not felt until the final word. See how effortlessly she shifts between the three voices in the sentence: restrained and declarative ("Mrs. Hall of Sherbourn," etc.), breezily conversational ("I suppose she happened"), and stone-cold cruel ("husband"). Note, too, the role of punctuation: the quiet, steady rhythm of the commas, followed by the dash -- like a comedian pausing for a beat before the laugh line -- and then the quick, unresisted rhythm of the payoff. Even at her most casual, Austen was never less than totally in control of her technique.

Also, careful readers will note that this is a dead baby joke. About an actual dead baby. At its father's expense. So, there's that.

***

So, where to start? Pride and Prejudice is Austen's most charming book; Emma represents the perfect balance between her early, goofy work and her later, more serious endeavors. Still, my favorite Austen book has always been Sense & Sensibility. Since it is, among other things, a book about the liabilities of good taste, it seems like a good introduction for a skeptic.

The book opens with a scene that would not be out-of-place in a fairy tale: a father, on his deathbed, makes his son promise to provide for his stepmother and three half-sisters. The son, deeply moved by his father's dying words, pauses only to consort with his wife ("To be sure... [an annuity] is better than parting with fifteen hundred pounds at once. But, then, if Mrs. Dashwood should live fifteen years we shall be completely taken in") before obligingly taking all of their money and kicking them out of their house. Thus disinherited, the mother and daughters move to a dismal little cottage in the middle of nowhere. The four women have only one hope of escape or financial betterment: someone's got to marry a rich dude, quick.

The plot centers, therefore, on the two daughters of marriageable age, Marianne and Elinor. Marianne is passionate, gorgeous, and deeply in thrall to the fashionable Romantic sensibility of her age. Elinor, on the other hand, is smart and funny, and a substantial amount of her time is spent mocking Marianne's exquisite taste. Here are the sisters:

"How does dear, dear Norland look?" cried Marianne.

"Dear, dear Norland," said Elinor, "probably looks much as it always does at this time of the year. The woods and walks thickly covered with dead leaves."

"Oh," cried Marianne, "with what transporting sensation have I formerly seen them fall! How have I delighted, as I walked, to see them driven in showers about me by the wind! What feelings have they, the season, the air altogether inspired! Now there is no one to regard them. They are seen only as a nuisance, swept hastily off, and driven as much as possible from the sight."

"It is not every one," said Elinor, "who has your passion for dead leaves."

"No," Marianne replies, "my feelings are not often shared, not often understood." It is this statement, infuriating as it may be, which provides a key to the novel. Marianne, like every teenager, hipster, and/or LiveJournal user who ever walked the earth, believes that her feelings are unique and special, though they are anything but; because she's not polite enough to conceal or control them, she assumes that those who do have no feelings at all.

On to the marrying. Elinor falls for the dependable, kind-hearted, deeply boring Edward Ferrars, whereas Marianne falls for the not-at-all-boring Willoughby, whom she meets when he arrives in the rain (!) on a stallion (!!) after she has taken a fall (!!!) and carries her in his arms (!!!!!!infinity!) back to her house. After a promising start with Elinor, Ferrars becomes unaccountably cold and distant, which is just oh so much fun for Elinor, especially considering the fact that Willoughby and Marianne are by that point so passionately, demonstratively in love they might as well be fucking in the town square. It gets even better when Elinor learns the reason for Edward's coolness: he is, in fact, secretly engaged to someone else. But while Elinor is forging bravely ahead with her broken heart, like the good little soldier that she is, Marianne learns that Willoughby is - you guessed it - secretly engaged to someone else. At this point, Marianne loses her shit entirely, and the novel's true theme comes to the forefront.

Sense & Sensibility is not a comedy about marriage, although marriage is involved. It is not even a comedy about money, although money, as always, has a lot to do with it. It is simply this: a comedy about sadness, and how to get through it intact.

***

By this point, I have written some words that may freak you out: marrying, in love, secretly engaged. This, you are thinking, is that sappy romance stuff! Fear not, good reader: Austen's characters, much like actual humans, do in fact care for each other, struggle to find committed relationships, and fuck up as much or more than they succeed. However, Austen - that lifelong virgin - never takes a particularly sentimental view.

Austen was a comic genius precisely because she combined a freakishly keen understanding of human nature with an icy detachment. Unrestrained passion, in Austen's work, is always either a moral failing or a lapse in judgment. Like Shakespeare, she wrote happy engagements, but no happy marriages; her novels end, tellingly, with her protagonists' weddings, and one always gets the sense that, if her protagonists stay happy together, it will be an exceptional accomplishment. Witness this charming little scene from Sense & Sensibility, between husband, wife, and mother-in-law:

"You and I, Sir John," said Mrs. Jennings, "should not stand upon such ceremony."

"Then you would be very ill-bred," cried Mr. Palmer.

"My love you contradict every body," said his wife with her usual laugh. "Do you know that you are quite rude?"

"I did not know I contradicted any body in calling your mother ill-bred."**

"Ay, you may abuse me as you please," said the good-natured old lady, "you have taken Charlotte off my hands, and cannot give her back again. So there I have the whip hand of you."

Charlotte laughed heartily to think that her husband could not get rid of her; and exultingly said, she did not care how cross he was to her, as they must live together.

So that's marriage. What about babies - dear, sweet little babies? Well, as we've established, if they're dead, they're fair game. On the living-baby front, the Dashwoods are initially disinherited, through a baroque, typically Austenian system of entailments and endowments, due to their great-uncle's fondness for just such a creature, who possessed "such attractions as are by no means unusual in children of two or three years old; an imperfect articulation, an earnest desire of having his own way, many cunning tricks, and a great deal of noise." The affection of mothers for small children is also a frequent object of derision. One gets the sense that Austen had no patience for anyone who couldn't keep up a steady stream of sparkling banter, and that children were therefore beneath her notice.

So, marriage, out; babies, out likewise. How did she feel about puppies?

Oh, dear God, let's not even get into how she felt about puppies.

SPOILER: It wasn't good.


***

So, as the men fade out of the picture, to be regained or replaced as necessary, we are left with the two sisters - Elinor and Marianne, Sense and Sensibility - and their ongoing argument about the nature of sorrow.

This dialogue has been going on since the first pages of the book, actually, ever since that weirdly bracing passage in which Marianne and her mother respond to Mr. Dashwood's death by "[giving] themselves up wholly to their sorrow, seeking increase of wretchedness in every reflection that could afford it, and resolv[ing] against ever admitting consolation in future." You have a choice, Austen is saying. Master your grief, or else it will master you.

Elinor, who believes there is honor in fighting through the pain, conceals not only her sadness, but its cause: she tells no-one about Edward's engagement, and befriends his loathsome fiance. Marianne, faced with the same problems, stops eating, sleeping, and even speaking. Here, Elinor finally confronts her:

Elinor could no longer witness this torrent of unresisted grief in silence.

"Exert yourself, dear Marianne," she cried, "if you would not kill yourself and all who love you. Think of your mother; think of her misery while YOU suffer: for her sake you must exert yourself."

"I cannot, I cannot," cried Marianne; "leave me, leave me, if I distress you; leave me, hate me, forget me! but do not torture me so. Oh! how easy for those, who have no sorrow of their own to talk of exertion! Happy, happy Elinor, YOU cannot have an idea of what I suffer."

But, of course, she does. Everyone, in fact, has some idea of suffering: Elinor, obviously, but also Mrs. Palmer, whose husband cannot get rid of her, and Mr. Palmer, who cannot get rid of his wife, and Mrs. Dashwood, who is allowed about three pages to grieve for her husband, and even Edward and Willoughby, engaged to women they don't love, out of duty (in Edward's case) or for money (in Willoughby's). For most of the book, in fact, Marianne scorns the advances of one Colonel Brandon, who turns out to have survived not only the forced severance of his first engagement, but his first love's pregnancy by another man, her early death, and her daughter's subsequent seduction and impregnation by Willoughby, who of course also happens to be dating the girl he has a crush on, all of which he is too much of a gentleman to mention. In this context, what stands out is not Marianne's pain, but her selfishness. This, however, is something you can never communicate to Marianne, or to anyone like her. This is also the reason that, as the book winds to a close, Elinor is in a sickroom, tending to Marianne, whereas Marianne is in a coma, nearing death.

***

At this point, there are the obvious questions: whether Marianne lives, whether Edward is ever loosed from the clutches of his dread fiance, whether Willoughby is punished for his actions (which are really the same as Edward's, but we the readers historically do not care - Willoughby is a dick!), and whether the surprisingly attractive Brandon ever gets his rocks off with a lady half his age. To these, I say: THIS IS JANE AUSTEN, DUH. Comedies are tragedies that don't happen. Jane Austen wrote comedies. This, I trust, you know. But here, in one of the most delicate and quietly devastating conclusions of any novel I've read, she revisits Willoughby - and all the blind youthful love he represents - shortly after Marianne marries someone else:

That he was for ever inconsolable, that he fled from society, or contracted an habitual gloom of temper, or died of a broken heart, must not be depended on—for he did neither. He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.

For Marianne, however—in spite of his incivility in surviving her loss—he always retained that decided regard which interested him in every thing that befell her...

And among the merits and the happiness of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked as the least considerable, that though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands.

So, there you have it. Love fades, or you learn to live without it, and everyone - villains, heroines, stoics and Romantics - ends up sort of, kind of happy, or at least not that sad. There is the real beauty: Jane Austen, notorious writer of sappy, girly, sticky romance, ends her novel, not with a wedding, but by saying, basically, You can get over anything - and, hey, it could be worse.

* Oh, God, don't click on that link. I have to include it, if only to address the fact that it exists, but I fear anyone who sees it will be forced, as I have been, to scream, cry, or vomit up his or her intestines.

**So, for the record, Austen can pull off not only a dead baby joke, but also a "yo momma" joke, when called upon to do so. And, okay, Jane Austen film adaptations invariably suck, because the actors overplay everything (it's deadpan humor, people, DEADPAN!) and the writers sap and sex the books up beyond recognition, but there is one golden exception to that rule, which is that Mr. "Your Mother Can Suck My Ass, Dear" Palmer is played in Emma Thompson's S&S by... Hugh Laurie. Fucking House. He's unsurprisingly perfect in the role. Probably not so very perfect that you should actually watch the movie, which does tend to blow, but hey: want to see a picture of Hugh Laurie wearing a silly hat? I know you do! Here goes:

Linking Time! Also: I Will Bring Shame Upon My Family

This morning, I woke up full of dread and shame. Bleary and haggard, I stumbled toward my computer screen.

"No," I muttered. "I didn't do that. I would never do that. I must have dreamed it."

But I was wrong. There, before my eyes, was a pale-blue Safari window, glowing with menace.

"Holy fuck," I said. "I just wrote 3,000 words about Valley of the Dolls."

On that note: it's Linking Time! My most favorite time of all! (Note: this is a lie. My most favorite time is actually Smoking Time, but I am going to give that up - again - in approximately 48 hours. I will be in Ohio, so you won't have to witness my Neely O'Hara-like withdrawal unless you are a member of my immediate family. If you are, well, sucks to be you, I guess!) Here are some people who are much better at blogging than I am:

Man Madness is the single greatest use of the Internet, whether or not you live in DC. Which is manlier - the FBI or the CIA? Place your bets now!

Mainstreaming feminism: it turns out that's a problem! This is because it allows Sarah Palin to cuddle and/or cash in on the movement like it's an adorable Downsy baby. Also, things only get absorbed into the mainstream if they're not that threatening in the first place, so feminism is selectively mainstreamed? And the good stuff about the movement then becomes invisible? See also: sex-positive movement, relationship of Sex & the City to.

You guys, the military is sad and scary. (Have you read Our Guys yet? If not, do it. Warning: it is the only book that ever made me vomit. Aside from Atlas Shrugged, I mean.)

Other things that are sad and scary include: violence against sex workers. The Good Guys trial reports are fascinating. It's like watching a really good procedural, except that Amanda Hess actually writes about strip club workers like they're people, instead of Symbols of Decadence and/or body-count increasing devices. Revolutionary!

Oh, hey, sheep people!

I read Emily Gould's blog. This rambling, ambivalent, occasionally mean, often sad piece - which touches on Emma Goldman,* "Song for Sharon," Prop 8, love, solitude, and that damn Beyonce song - is a good example of why I do that.

Some other people, who are funny and smart, are complaining about the Beyonce song, because they think it's kind of regressive, what with the forcing men to marry you and give you presents for sex and whatnot. Personally, I feel that the song's main theme ("don't be mad when you see that he want it / if you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it") is simply another way of saying, "if you were really that invested in our relationship, perhaps you could have made that clear BEFORE WE BROKE UP AND I STARTED MAKING OUT WITH OTHER PEOPLE," which is a sentiment for the ages.

Now that I'm defending Beyonce, I must also tell you that I read a Bukowski poem that I liked! What has become of my standards, I ask you?

* However, I must respectfully point out that quoting the Goldman piece without qualifying it is objectively kind of bonkers. People do this a lot! Often in Women's Studies classes! Goldman made quite a few points in that piece, many of which were specific to her day and age. For example, she writes that marriage may come about because of love, whereas love does not come about because of marriage, a point which is no longer even vaguely controversial, and which is the precise reason that people tend to live together before getting hitched. She also argues against compulsory marriage, marriage as the goal of a woman's life, and prohibitions against sex outside of marriage - and all of these pressures still exist, but are considerably less powerful now, given the fact that all but the most conservative people resist or ignore them. Goldman also speaks out against marriage as an economic arrangement while completely undervaluing the presence of women in the workplace. If you have no income of your own, you might have to stay with someone who treats you badly out of sheer financial necessity; if you have a job, an income, and savings, however, then you get to stay for precisely as long as the marriage meets your needs. (Hopefully it lasts forever, but, you know, things happen.) At the time Goldman wrote this piece - when you were expected to marry someone without sleeping with him, living with him, or even knowing him very well, and were also encouraged to give up your entire career once the wedding had taken place - some of what she had to say was smart and relevant, if overblown; now, however, people tend to quote the piece as a support for their vague "marriage-is-bad" arguments, which rest mostly on the fact that their parents were fucked up or their exes were mean and they're consequently scared of commitment. This is quite another thing. Anyway, end of post derailment.

Places That Are Better Than My Apartment: An Ongoing Series

You know, it's not often that I feel nostalgic for the days before suffrage. Today, however, it occurs to me that, were I living in that day and age, I could at least have an apartment in Manhattan - namely, the Trowmart Inn.

According to Ephemeral New York (and this article, thanks for linking, guy) it was a "handsome hostelry" for ladies "of the class who [labor] for a small wage, and whose parents have no home within the city." Why, that's me! What sort of accomodations were provided for such ladies, pray tell?

For $4 a week, a girl could have a single room containing a bed, washstand, and table, plus breakfast and dinner.

You also got a library, a "good-sized laundry with porcelain tubs," access to a "medical woman" who worked on the first floor, and, as the Times points out, plumbing which was thoroughly "modern and scientific." In addition to this, there was no curfew, so you could gallivant around at all hours in a manner most unbecoming.

Furthermore, the building's owner, William Martin, was a man with a mission: to improve your love life through superior real estate.

"Girls who work long hours in factory, shop, and store, and whose leisure is spent within the dull confines of a cheap lodging or boarding house, have few opportunities for making and pursuing the acquaintance of desirable young men."

Yeah, tell me about it.

"Girls of gentleness and refinement do not care to be courted upon the open highway, nor in public parks, and thus the world is filling with spinsters, who, according to Mr. Martin, had they a proper place in which to entertain their admirers, would develop into happy, excellent wives."

Well, maybe. At the very least, they could develop into people who could say "come over to my place" without feeling the blush of housing-related shame.

There were apparently lots of lodging houses for working girls scattered throughout the city, but, as one letter to the Times points out, they had a significant problem: women who earned "too much" couldn't get rooms there, even if they couldn't really afford anything else.

"It has long been evident to those interested in the subject that girls earning from $7 to $9 per week were worse off than those who earn $5 or $6... Any one who has tried to find board from $4 to $5 knows from sad experience that the person who obtains it is to be congratulated. One may succeed if one goes far uptown or into the suburbs, but there carfare will bring it up to a higher figure."

Old-timey ladies: they're just like us! If by "us," you mostly mean "me!" And that is usually what I mean! Also, are you interested in hearing about economic and social disincentives for working women? Because this girl has some for you:

"It must be remembered that the more a girl earns the more she will have to spend on clothes. The clothes worn by the writer when she was earning $4.50 a week would not be suitable to wear in a first-class office, nor can she bring a luncheon and eat it in the office, as she did then. Her present salary is much larger than the former, yet she does not save much more in proportion, and she is not at all extravagant. This state of affairs often tends to crush ambition and make a girl regret an increase in her salary, since she must leave her comfortable quarters and probably in sheer desperation resort to doing her own cooking in a small furnished room. Dozens of girls ruin their health in this way, and almost starve in the effort to make 'both ends meet.'"

How much do I love this woman? Smart, ambitious, contrary, not above telling a Times writer what is what - I kind of want to build a time machine just so that I can hang out with her. Of course, she doesn't sign her name; she's just "A GIRL WHO WORKS."