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This is it. Our last Sex and the Office Summer Friday. Time for one more pre-Labor Day installment in our romp through Helen Gurley Brown’s 1965 classic, Sex and the Office. The definitive, comprehensive guide to working life for an entire generation of women. Want to know what it was really like to be a working girl in the early days of feminism? Read on—for the final Sex and the Office Summer Friday excerpt.
HOW DO YOU SWITCH over to the job with the taffeta-rustle sound?
One of my successful friends says that from tiny tothood straight through all your slavey jobs, you have to imagine yourself opulent. While transferring files to the basement in sneakers and coveralls, you have to keep feeling mink around your shoulders and smelling Shalimar rising from the valley of your bosom. That way, she says, you inexorably slither toward a high-powered job.
She’s not kidding me. Annie is talking about Positive Thinking (and it worked for her—she’s a department store wheel now). I, however, couldn’t positive-think myself out of bed in the morning if the mattress were on fire.
Are you too a molasses-foot? Do you have so little vision or confidence you think the gods would roll over and die laughing if you aspired to a fancier job? Join the club! We meet Tuesdays and Fridays, have the secret handshake, and then pass around a pitcher of martinis. Our trouble is that we’re ready for the bigger job every way but emotionally.
There is hope for us molasses-feet, however. First, no matter how modest and un-go-gettum you are, a far-sighted management may literally force you to do something bigger if it thinks you’re capable. (It happened to me.) Also, there are other helpers—a few bouts with a psychiatrist, for example!
I’m not bouncing this psychiatry recommendation around lightly. I know you don’t drop in to be shrunk as casually as you would visit your friendly neighborhood saloon, but it is possible to talk with a psychiatrist without signing away years of your life.
When I was plucked from my secretarial post to write copy at Foote, Cone & Belding, a major advertising agency, I was utterly terrified. Though I could afford just one half-hour session a week, a patient, adorable psychiatrist used to prop me up and spoon-feed me my ego ration every Saturday morning until I’d begun to score a few points in my new job.
Why am I plumping for a better job for you if I found taking one so painful myself? Because the only thing painful about it was the fear of failing. Aside from that, the better job, with its new men, more money and more prestige was a pleasure dome.
There’s another route you can take. Perhaps you have a little money saved, quite a lot of courage and would like to take the plunge into something that has nothing to do with secretarial work. Just on the chance these ideas may spark others for you, here are some possibilities. (Incidentally, each one of them has been tried by somebody I know and it worked.)
Approach the new venture with the idea that if you fail, it isn’t the end of the world. A chap named Ed Howe—I don’t know who he is, but he sounds wise—said in Forbes magazine recently, “I try to have no plans the failure of which would greatly annoy me. Half the unhappiness in the world is due to the failure of plans which were never reasonable and often impossible.”
With this in mind:
1. Get a job selling a product—not in a store where they come to you and commissions are paltry but door to door, office to office or by telephone from leads supplied by a company. Your product could be reducing equipment, insurance, freezers, encyclopedias … anything. Maybe the company you’re in would let you take a whack at their product—or you may have to track down a new one. Some firms will take you with virtually no experience if you’re eager. The prestige may not be great, but the money could be, and someday you may have salesmen who work for you.
2. Be a decorator. Any bona fide A.I.D. (American Institute of Interior Designers) decorator will spit at the idea that a girl with little more than good taste to qualify her can sneak up on this profession, but I’ve seen it done. Suppose you worked as a secretary for W. & J. Sloane or any other good furniture store. During that time you should have, with your little pitcher ears and big green eyes, seen and heard a lot about fabrics, woods, periods, decors, scaling furniture to rooms, etc. You could augment this knowledge with reading in depth, decorating courses, friendships with decorators and manufacturers, haunting museums, visiting antique stores and touring famous homes when they’re open. You could start with just one client who’s willing to take a chance on you (perhaps while you’re still a secretary). Charge a minimal fee, do a good job and you’re off and running.
3. Become a couturier. Your taste is superb. The clothes you make yourself look as good to most people as Givenchy’s (though you know better—Givenchy seams could be worn on the outside). Perhaps you could interest one or two women in letting you design and make a costume. They might even want something cop ied they’ve seen on you. Add a few more customers; then you can hire an assistant to sew and open a small boutique shop. You’ll buy some of the things and design others yourself. Easy does it. Start tiny.
4. Do research for a successful writer. One important novelist I know has experienced none of the adventures he writes about. His research girl has ferreted out everything from the conduct of an archeological survey in Crete to the performing of a lobotomy. You could combine your survey work with secretarial work for a writer, or keep your regular secretarial job and do free-lance research until you gain experience. A girl who hopes to become a writer herself would find this experience profitable (though of course to write, you must write!).
5. Become a photographer. A recently-fired secretary I know owned a Leica camera (worth about $800 but bought from a distressed party for $100). For years she had been taking pictures in the park of mothers, children, dogs and trees. After she was fired, she got a magazine-editor beau to set up appointments for her with the picture editors of his magazine—food department, fashion department, etc. She took her portfolio, consisting entirely of her Sunday afternoon amateur stuff, around to each editor and got her first assignment—to photograph the Columbia University campus. She expects to work up a lot more pictures and a regular clientele by the time her unemployment insurance runs out.
6. If you’ve a great face and photograph well (some pretty girls don’t), become a model. For photography, you need some terrific pictures of yourself. You might go to work for a photographer as a secretary and take part of your salary in merchandise. Maybe he’ll use you as a model sometimes. With your pictures you will go visit other photographers, magazines and art directors of advertising agencies. Actually amateur pictures of you don’t do badly if somebody talented takes them and blows them up big. Naturally, being signed by and working with a model agency helps.
I’m not going to suggest kinds of modeling other than photographic because they don’t pay any better than secretarial work and girls are made to feel very crepey-necked and ancient at age thirty-two.
7. Be an entertainer. You sing. You play the mandolin. You do flamenco. Start by entertaining at parties for a small fee. You may get enough experience and confidence to audition for clubs or a show. (Ethel Merman did while she was still a secretary.)
If you have looks and stamina, get a job as a Playboy Club bunny. You’ll make about as much money as a good secretary, but a producer may spot you for a show.
8. Become a tour conductor. If you’ve been to Mexico nine times and know more about bullfighting than anybody but the bull and the matador, you might as well take people south of the border and get paid. If you know that much about other places, you could open your own travel agency or take tours there.
9. Cook with your cooking. Write a recipe book. (Yes, there’s always room for one more.) Peg Bracken’s The I Hate to Cook Book has sold over 100,000 copies to date, and she was a busy wife and mother when she wrote it. (She might have been a secretary.) At least send in your best recipes to women’s magazines. They often buy from outsiders.
10. Open your own secretarial service. You simply rent space in a hotel and hang out a shingle. The public stenographer at the Statler Hotel in Los Angeles wears glorious hats while she types and makes bundles of money.
Click for more of Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Office. . . .
