Now WIVES (and that includes past wives, present wives and wives thoughtlessly left strewn about by the departed), will you agree the work world can be shimmery? Challenging? Sexy? (Excluding the professional variety discussed in the last chapter.) Will you agree that you’re silly to be letting others make off with the spoils—grown-up companionship, money, recognition—while you stand there with your grocery list? Will you admit that you’re simply mule-headed?
No, I suppose you won’t admit anything of the kind. You’re convinced that holding a paid job may be all right for other femmes but you prefer straightening up the pad, stitching up the tea towels, baking up the beans ... to say nothing of golfing up the green, bidding up the no-trumps and who knows . . . maybe toting up your wins at Santa Anita.
Sometimes I think I’ve failed you utterly! I haven’t gotten through! Don’t you understand that while you are cheerily being Nora in the doll’s house, some doll in an office may be thinking about your very own husband—or one you plan to acquire—as part of her profit-sharing plan?
Don’t you see that by working you could have it all? Hire somebody else to do the household drudgery, keep your dainty mitts on the creative stuff if you like (gourmet cooking and decorating), continue to golf and no-trump for recreation, and be more exciting to your husband (or to that someone you have in mind for the future in case you’re a divorcee or widow).
I could almost give up. You’re not listening! Tell you what I’m going to do. Rather than harangue you any further about the joys of working, I’m going to reveal exactly how two wives and mothers who work (real girls, of course) manage to give everyone in the family his full share of love and attention and have a delicious grown-up life as well. Since I’m not a working mother myself, having never been a mother, the only honest thing to do, I felt, was secure some qualified people to talk to you. Two case histories do not a Gallup Poll make, but the testimonials you’re going to hear will certainly show what can be accomplished. Once we get going, the girls will do most of the talking, and I’m just going to sit and crochet or something.
Christine and Sally might be considered unlikely women to hold the jobs they have. They each have young children. Their husbands are “old-fashioned,” masculine, good providers. The girls are not driven, selfish, “career” types. Yet each says her job makes her feel more alive and more richly fulfilled. Christine, mother of seven (including two sets of twins), told me, “Maybe it’s my Catholic upbringing showing through, but I was taught that you are honor-bound to make fullest use of your potential. If you have a talent or flair, you develop it . . . show God you are grateful.” Sally says, “I started working accidentally, but now I couldn’t give it up.”
Sally is twenty-eight, peach-skinned, dark-haired and nobody’s hips, including a matador’s, look better in skinny pants. Sally is executive secretary to a famous furniture designer and her husband’s an engineer with one of the world’s great airspace companies. They have two boys, aged seven and two, and Sally figures they own about one-sixteenth of their pretty house. In the next few pages you’ll read her story, in her own words.
My husband has an excellent job. Most of the other engineers’ wives stay home. Why do I work? [This is Sally speaking.]
It began with my having to work when Carl was an engineering student. I toiled long and hard in those years which we now refer to fondly as “our darkest hour.” I wasn’t a whiz and my first job wasn’t too good. I had to keep reminding myself all the time that what I was doing was important to our future. During that slavery period, a good friend kept telling me, “Don’t feel sorry for yourself, Sally dear. You may be the sole support of a student husband now but, believe me, when Carl is through school and you don’t need to work anymore, you’ll find yourself doing exactly what you’re doing now because you enjoy it.”
She couldn’t have been more right. Carl was graduated. I got a degree too—P.H.T. (Pushing Hubby Through)—signed by the dean of the engineering college in official recognition of my efforts. I was very proud. But after Carl got a good job—engineers usually do—I wasn’t about to stop working even though by now I was a working mother. The decision to continue was simplified by one important aspect of my job. My boss at this time (I’d had several jobs by now) was an impatient, difficult, demanding, quick-witted, fast-moving executive, for whom I worked at all times at top speed. Nevertheless, he had a genuine regard for my family situation. He knew I had a husband, a child and home life and always made it possible for me to do justice to them.
Many bosses profess to love and appreciate their secretaries but actually believe the girl has no interest in life outside the office—and ought not to have. Leave those bosses to the single girls who really don’t have much of an outside life, I say. There are plenty of bosses who prove their love and appreciation by respecting your personal situation. For example Mr. B. (my boss during this period) let me start late and take a long lunch hour so that I could run home and visit with my boys. He knew I would work twice as hard the rest of the time out of appreciation for these motherly privileges—and I did. In return for his understanding, he had my deepest loyalty and respect, from which stems the greatest efficiency and support a secretary can ever give a boss.
I’d say, then, the first requirement for a working mother is to find a man who is interested in you and your little brood and to whom you can give complete efficiency and devotion in return. (Sounds like quite an order, but there are such men.) The second requirement is: Never travel any great distance to a job.
While Carl was still in school we rented a little house just five minutes from my office, and the house we finally bought is twelve minutes away. Living close by means an anguished mother can get home in an emergency in minutes, and the lady who’s caring for your children has the reassurance of knowing you’re near. You can also run home to spend many lunch hours with die little folk. Most important, you can usually be home before your husband in the evening, so that he seldom has to experience that dismal business of being alone in the house around dinnertime, feeling neglected but compelled to start the potatoes! I’ve always made a habit of setting the table the minute I get in the door because it gives a welcome-home feeling to Carl. That table setting—pretty place mats, silver and wineglasses—says that you are just as prepared for his home-coming as you would be if you’d stayed home all day.
Not everybody agrees with me, but I don’t think the husband of a working wife should ever do domestic chores. They rob him of his manliness and diminish his role as master. Carl has never helped with dishes, errands or marketing, and I’ve never encouraged him to. I’m so grateful he doesn’t object to my working that I feel one way I can repay him is by spoiling him at home—just as he’d be spoiled if I were there all day.
Seems odd, but the busiest working girls often turn out to be the most efficient housewives. They don’t have time for the coffee klatches and endless telephone gossip that never helped anybody keep a better house. They’re well-organized. Housework to them is something to get over with, not expand to fill lonely hours or build up to make them feel what they’re doing is important.
As to how a husband fares when you work, there are many reasons to support the idea that he’s the winner, not the loser. A working wife is twice as eager to please the man because of her secret guilt—she enjoys her job more than housework! I cook Carl a big farm breakfast with two kinds of meat every morning. When you work yourself, you understand a man’s mood better at the end of the day when he gets home. He can have a quiet moment with a newspaper and a drink instead of a barrage of questions from his bored little wife who hasn’t had any adult conversation all day.
And this lucky man seldom comes home to a slob who is too pooped to pretty herself up. She works in a world of men, so trie business girl never lets up on her grooming or wardrobe. Even though you’re pooped too, it would never occur to you to scrub off your make-up and shimmy into a Mother Hubbard after work. You get out of your office clothes—but into a sexy sweater or blouse and Capris or hostess skirt.
Carl Junior—whom we call Skip—and John Quincy have never known me as anything but a working mother, so they’ve never begged me to stay home. A friend of mine with five children once said, “Sally, I don’t think it’s the amount of time you spend with your children that counts, it’s the quality of the time.” I think that about wraps it up. Because Carl and I both work, we rarely go out evenings during the week. That time is devoted to the boys. They may go to bed a litte later and get up later than other children but they still get their twelve hours’ sleep, as advocated by Dr. Spock. We plan family activities for weekends and, I confess, are forever late for all our social gatherings because we don’t like to leave before the children are in bed. The housekeeper we have now said that Carl and I spend less time away from the kids than any other parents she has ever worked for, and she has only worked for mothers who stayed home before.
I don’t think I’ve ever missed any of Skip’s school activities that required a parent to be present, again thanks to bosses who’ve had a genuine regard for my “mother’s role.” It’s always kind of interesting to note the difference between the rest of the mamas and me on parents’ visiting day. Ninety per cent of the girls show up in sweaters and scruffy pants because they can’t be bothered to dress up in the daytime, even for a school occasion. Skip, though he’s only seven, always seems very proud of his high-heeled, slick-chick mother.
I do my share for the PTA but stay out of their gab fests. In the meetings I’ve attended, I’d say most of the business could have been decided in about ten minutes—except that the girls like to argue and debate even the most trivial stuff.
As for the emotional effect my working has on Skip and John Quincy, teachers and other parents tell me the kids seem happy and normal. (I hate the phrase “well-adjusted.”) I think the boys are great. Carl thinks they’re great. But it’s good to hear it from somebody else. Treated like children they are. Spoiled they are not.
I’ve heard nonworking mothers say that by bedtime some days they’re ready to chloroform the children and jump out the window themselves. I cheerfully admit I’m tired to the breaking point too when the boys are cranky or sick, but I do think you have more tolerance with them when you have daily hours away from one another. It improves the “quality of the time” you’re together. Lots of mothers manage this separation with club meetings, bowling, golf, bridge, anything to get out—and I don’t see how anybody can blame them for wanting a break. The trouble is the girls wind up spending more time on this nonsense stuff than if they worked, and they aren’t so careful about the quality of the time they spend with their children.
It takes some doing to find the right household help when you are a career-girl mother but hiring anybody for any particular job is not necessarily simple. Do you know how many girls a man interviews looking for a secretary? Maybe twenty. It’s not that there’s any shortage of household helpers, far from it. You just have to find the person who fits into your home and who’s going to be happy with you.
When I first started working and Carl was in school, we had very little money, of course, so I thought it would be cheaper to depend on friends, aunts, grandmothers, sisters, stepmothers and foster parents to baby-sit for a while. It didn’t work out very well, so I finally put an ad in the paper. To my amazement the phone rang nonstop all weekend. I saw about two dozen unsuitables, but from that whole mob I found the Rock-of-Gibraltar Englishwoman who stayed with us for four and a half years. She used to arrive at eight-forty-five every morning, stay until five-forty-five, take care of baby Skip, do all the laundry and ironing, start dinner for me—and all for thirty dollars a week. This was in the second biggest city in the country, too, where wages are supposed to be high. Mrs. Marcussen left us only when we moved to a neighborhood that had no public transportation.
We pay our present live-in housekeeper one hundred and fifty dollars a month plus her social security and provide her with everything right down to Kleenex. She has a pleasant bedroom and bath and is completely satisfied with her salary—says she doesn’t know many people who have one hundred and fifty dollars free and clear every month. I also hire a cleaning woman for a day every other week (eleven dollars) to do the heavy work. Almost any top secretary can make one hundred dollars a week, so working is still profitable even if you pay a housekeeper.
I’ve given my version of what it’s like to be a wife and mother and work. What are my husband’s views?
I guess it’s safe to speak for Carl, because we’ve certainly discussed the subject often enough. Carl believes a man gets into real trouble when he tries to force his wife to do anything simply because he wants it. When he says, “Your place is home with the children,” but she secredy yearns to be out in the world, she can grow to hate him, her home and very possibly even resent the children. How much wiser, Carl says, to let your wife try something on the outside if she wants to, even encourage her to. If it’s wrong, she’ll discover it herself and come right home. If it’s right for her, Carl thinks the husband is the winner. “I’d much rather have a working wife doing something constructive that she really likes and bringing in money,” Carl says, “than spending us blind on her shopping sprees because she’s hostile.”
It works the other way too, of course. When a husband tells a wife she must find a job because they can’t manage on his income, she pretty soon starts thinking she married a failure. It’s quite human to resent any situation that somebody forces you into. Carl has always said, “If you want to work, work. If you want to stay home, stay home.” That way, you see, I can’t whine too much about my life, because I’ve had a choice.
Carl, I know, likes being married to somebody other men enjoy talking to. Recently we were at a gathering of his office buddies and I was the only working wife. Naturally I kept rather still on the subject. Well, the girls talked at great length—of course we were all on our side of the room—about how the checkstand boys tried to do them out of the right number of green stamps. They explained in exquisite detail the bylaws and machinations of their baby-sitting club, then branched out into linoleum waxing and finally got to pediatricians. Honestly, I felt just like a single woman crashing a married women’s party . . . there, save for the happy accident of having once had to help a husband get through school, went I. When Carl and I were at home that night, I felt as ravishing as a single woman again.
Recently we entertained a top Detroit executive and his suburban wife. I wish I had a tape recording of that conversation. The woman giggled nonstop, drank nonstop and talked nonstop about her children, their private school, her house, her religion, her relatives. She told her complete repertoire of religious jokes, children’s bright sayings, and funny household crises. She obviously hadn’t the slightest idea what her husband did for a living and no interest in his work whatsoever. I thought about her a great deal the next day and came to this conclusion: The only women who can survive complete and utter domesticity as a way of life and retain their sanity must be one of two extremes—either terribly simple (like the Detroit executive’s wife) or terribly intelligent.
The truly uncomplicated ones would be miserable with a job and need no more mental stimulus than that provided by their offspring. I’m not being derogatory about this group. They usually are the most contented of women—excellent cooks, warm and reliable mothers, accomplished home-furnishers and dressmakers. They know nothing of the outside world and how it works. It was invented for other people. In a sense they are as innocent and protected as their children.
The other extreme, the really brilliant women, keep themselves current by reading and studying practically everything in sight—so that it doesn’t matter a bit whether they are in the working world. They are usually more intellectual and technically smarter than girls who work, sometimes smarter than their husbands. By taking the trouble and making use of their time, they stay hip and keep up with their husbands and everybody else just beautifully.
Between these two extremes, however, lies a vast number of women of average intelligence just like myself. And I believe, more often than not, these women are discontented at home, though they hide it under layers and layers of rationalization. They are not—or I should say we are not—brilliant or self-starting enough to be absolute whizbangs regardless of domestic drudgery. We need an office or a job to bring out the best that’s in us and keep us alert
Perhaps it sounds as though I protest too much. I really am willing to let other girls stay home if they wish, but I can’t help believing we working mothers have the best of two worlds. Domestically I have the wondrous enchantment of a good husband and two darling little boys—and I ardently believe that having beautiful babies dwarfs all else that a woman can do in life—yet I get to leave the domestic drudgery to hired help. In the professional world, there’s the exciting tempo I love, the friendship of fabulous people I’d never get to know any other way, the feeling of being part of the highly complex, scientific, expanding society we live in. I must confess that if I didn’t belong in this exciting working world I would tend to be lethargic to the point of delinquency. I just don’t have the resources of the brilliant women I spoke of earlier to keep myself charged up and involved without the outside stimulus of boss, office, responsibilities, pay check, office pals and all that. I need and want the extra push.
Christine perhaps doesn’t have everything quite so well organized as Sally, but she has seven children—two sets of boy twins, two girls and a teen-age son—to Sally’s two. When you hear her story, I think you’ll agree she is an amazing example of what can be accomplished by one determined lady. Chris manages a nine-room house (“which we can’t afford but have to have”), looks after the lives of nine people—if you count Chris and her husband—is one of the women’s editors of one of California’s top five newspapers—and does it all without paid household help. Don’t you feel like a sloth!
At thirty-nine, Christine is a warm, giving, energetic woman. She’s also emotional. (“I’m not above locking myself in the bathroom to weep up a storm when things are really bad,” she says.) Her husband, to whom Chris has been married for seventeen years, manages an export-import office. Her own job, which sounds impressive and is, started in a quiet, unplanned way. This is Christine’s story:
I just kind of plopped into it [Chris says]. The “old” twins were eighteen months old, and we had three older children. I’d worked on my high school and junior college newspapers and done PR work in the WAVES, but never held a job. By the time I was married and the mother of five kids, my writing was confined to notes to the milkman and letters home to mother. About every three months I’d get so nauseated with the junk that women’s magazines published that I’d decide I could do better, and I’d write for a couple of hours. Then I’d remember my ironing or the kids would get home from school, and that would end that. During that time I was press chairman for a school mothers’ club and also for the Mothers of Twins Club—yes, there is such a club.
A club press chairman isn’t exactly Pierre Salinger. She mostly gets meeting notices into the paper. Nevertheless, the copy I turned in caught the fancy of one of the society editors, and she prodded her managing editor into inviting me to lunch. This was highly unusual, because most women’s editors wish club ladies would all get diphtheria. The managing editor did indeed take me to lunch and offered me a job as a “stringer”—somebody who writes free lance at “space rates,” which is virtually the same thing as writing for love. What the M.E. actually said was that I could have a whack at one assignment to see how I did. I managed to turn out a smashing good story because I had a smashing good subject: a three-year-old girl brought back from the dead by open-heart massage.
From that time on for four years I was a “stringer” for the paper, doing my stories from home. It could have happened to any club lady, presumably. I didn’t seek out the job. During those years of “stringing,” I had no expense account, no mileage allowance and I was paid a whopping thirty cents an inch. Sometimes a feature that I drove for, stood for, talked for and sweated over would bring a cool three dollars.
But there were fringe benefits. I wasn’t “just a housewife” any longer, and since the paper was understaffed—what newspaper isn’t—I got to interview such important people as Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. I kept reminding myself that there were people who would write for nothing just to see their work in print, and that I at least was getting paid something. It was kind of fun to go running around saying, “I’m Christine McPhearson from the Globe Democrat,” attending press cocktail parties and the like.
After three years on this job I noticed that I seemed to be losing my rather trim twenty-five-inch waistline. I visited an obstetrician, who peered, poked and said “My God, Chris, you look as if you’re about four months along.”
With this much certainty of pregnancy, I knew it had to be twins again. You just can’t confuse a twin-type pregnancy with a loner. The babies were born ten days before Christmas, and when Tom came to me in the hospital I cried an ocean. We could afford seven children like we could afford diamond tiaras, but I was a mighty happy woman.
The paper refused to hear of my quitting merely because I had two new babies—very positive-thinking newspaper. I nursed the new arrivals with a baby on one arm and a pencil in the other hand, and when the snack bar closed, I turned to the typewriter. Six months ago another newspaper asked me to come and see them about a job. They’d asked three times before and I’d always staunchly refused, because the Democrat understood me and my family and how I had to work. This time, however, I agreed at least to go and talk to them.
We couldn’t resist each other. Tom advised me to take the job if I wanted it, and I did. One of the reasons I could accept was that a well-educated Cuban refugee family had just moved in down the street. Their eldest son was at our house one night and announced that his mother, aunt and grandmother were home all day with nothing to do—did I know of any children they could care for. Did I?! I trotted over there and lined these lovely women up. They love my babies—kiss all three of us when we arrive in the morning—and reluctantly give the twins up when the older children come to get them after school. I pay the Cuevas a dollar an hour and am secure in leaving the babies there any time that I need to.
The first week on the new job I lost eight pounds—this paper was pretty big-time stuff—but after turning out some pages and hearing genuine compliments, I gained the eight pounds back (curses!). I now work two full days a week in the newspaper office and do the rest of the work at home. My two weekly pages are supposed to deal with women’s stuff, but I convinced the managing editor that women care about more than brunches and buffets. Now the features often deal with property taxes, politics, child-raising, the high cost of dying, blindness and so forth.
Though our paper is the giant in the area, we have wild competition—four dailies and nine weeklies—and I’m really challenged. I also have to run like a rabbit to get everything done. A photographer who is impossible on his best days but wildly talented helps me, and our personalities click. I probably work twelve hours apiece on Tuesdays and Fridays, set
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, how do I manage with that brood?
On my two work days away from home, the older children take off for school, delivering the babies to the neighbors on the way. I do the breakfast dishes, pick up the bedrooms and leave for the paper. Since Tuesday is a late-work day, I usually start dinner the night before. And Tuesday afternoons the children will find this sort of note when they get home from school:
Dear Kids:
Soonest home, get the babies.
Spaghetti sauce in pan in refrigerator. Girls, you know what to do—garlic bread, salad, etc.
Friday will be a big, fat allowance day for all so make me proud today. Peggy, parcel out jobs. The house needs vacuuming, dusting and sweeping. Clothes in dryer have to be folded and put away. Stay off phone till work finished.
Nickey, do your homework, eat and collect on paper route. Thursday is the 5th and you have to turn money in.
Terry and Tim [seven-year-old twins] no FIGHTS!
Ellen, don’t be silly and slow everybody up.
I love you all.
Mother
Tuesday I will probably stay at the paper until eight or nine in the evening and get home deliciously exhausted. Everyone will have eaten and Tom will have the four twins in bed. The house will be reasonably neat and there’ll be fresh coffee on.
Fridays I get home from the office by five P.M. and take four or five of the kids grocery-shopping. Then I’ll probably see Peggy off on a date, Nickey off to a dance and possibly Ellen off to spend the night with a girl friend. Tom and I putter in the kitchen, get the twins to bed in shifts, and then I tackle the rest of my newspaper work to meet the Saturday-morning deadline. Sometimes I finish at midnight, more often it’s two in the morning. Tom delivers my envelope to the newspaper, brings home a pizza, and we yak until three or so.
Saturdays the “page make-up man” from the paper is on the phone by eight in the morning at the latest. When we get through doping things out, the kids and I tackle the house which, by this time, looks like after the fall of the Roman Empire. Nickey surfs on Saturday mornings, but his jobs wait for him until he gets home. Peggy and I argue, both feeling pretty abused by this time what with her school work and chores and my four hours’ sleep and chores, but around two in the afternoon we go shopping together and giggle over goofy hats and so forth. Teen-age girls are very consoling. They are people by now, and usually you can see glimmerings of the kind of adult they’ll be.
They’re all good kids. Nickey irons his own shirts and chinos. Peggy does her own ironing, sews beautifully and makes everything in her wardrobe. The three older children do up their own rooms. I help the younger ones. The babies are the only ones who make messes that other people pick up.
No family with seven children runs harmoniously for longer than ten-minute stretches. Personalities clash all over the place. Tom and I try to ignore the little things, yell over the big issues. With the teen-agers, restrictions on going out and using the phone are our most potent weapons. I’m not above swatting one of the kids when I get riled. What pleasure to go to work!
As for my husband, I love that man desperately. He’s land and gentle. He’s honest. He’s hard-working. He understands me and never goes to pieces. He worries out loud only on payday when his salary is shot before the pile of bills is even halved. But he comes home to say, “I saw the best-looking dress in Henshey’s window. It would look good on you. Go try it on.”
Tom doesn’t resent my working. We both like the money I earn, and he’s proud of my being able to earn it. He feels I have been blessed with a special talent, a gift to be used. The family appreciates that nobody has ever had to tiptoe around saying “Sh! Mother’s writing!” My office at home is on the old service porch. The desk Tom built for me hides sacks of onions and potatoes. It’s next to the kitchen, near the ever-running washer and dryer and off the hall from a bathroom. It isn’t private, but I can keep track of things.
I wouldn’t say the children are out-and-out proud because their mother writes. They’re proud of the new sweater mother’s money buys. If a boy friend should mention to Peggy that his father likes a feature I did, Peggy’s delighted. When a teacher recommends an article to the class for study and asks, “Ellen, did your mother write this?” Ellen’s pleased.
I love pretty furniture and eating out, but our luxuries for the time being are seven kids. I feel rich looking at them, though I often can’t help noticing they need shoes. I’ve just gotten a twenty-dollar-a-week raise from the paper, bless them, and I didn’t ask for it. It was just there. They’re the type of people who know I’m working hard, and they are willing to pay for it. Maybe they’re unusual, but I worked like a dog the first six months and I guess they noticed.
As to what the neighbors say about my working, I tell the catty ones who imply I’m neglecting my family that I don’t coffee-klatch, bowl, play bridge or golf. Most women I know spend more time doing those things than I do on the job. There are the “friends,” of course who wait for you to slip—when you say, “I wish I could get to cleaning out the linen closet,” they say, “Well, when mothers go to work in an office . . .” their voices trailing off as though they’d just mentioned an unmentionable disease. I’ve learned to recognize and discount the signs of jealousy because I have left the kitchen sink and it’s still headquarters for them. I stoically resist mentioning that my being a part-time career girl may just possibly have kept me from visiting their psychiatrists.
When you have a husband you’re nutty about, seven children you dote upon, a job that gives you all kinds of satisfaction and wonderful moments, it’s hard to take your detractors very seriously.
Working and wifing at the same time may not be for everybody (although I don’t concede that). I did want to show you how these attractive man- and family-loving women manage to lead double lives successfully and happily. They say they don’t have drive— only desire—to live up to the best that’s in them.
If you’re at all interested in doing what they do—or something like it—I think we could put down these rules for wives, widows and divorcees with children who would like to get back into the sexy tides of office life:
1. If you want to work—or have the legitimate excuse of work to keep you away from home all day—there is nothing to feel guilty about provided you give your husband (if you have one) and children a good amount of attention when you are with them. Possibly you should baby them more than if you weren’t working.
2. Don’t look for support and encouragement in your go-back-to-work plans from nonworking mothers. They will probably resent your leaving their ranks and will try to pin that tired, antiquated, “unnatural mother” label on you.
3. Explain to your husband, if he doesn’t already understand, that you will be a better companion, more adoring wife and loving mother if you are allowed to take a job. Besides, the money is lovely—even if there’s only a tiny speck left over after you’ve paid the household help and bought the extra clothes you’ll need.
4. You can’t have everything you had in your non-working days. All-day shopping forays, long, boring lunches with six to eight girls, endless telephone gossip are some of the things that will have to go. You’ll love being without them. To save more time still, you’ll learn to order by telephone—sheets, towels and cases from the white sale, birthday and wedding presents—nearly everything can be charged, wrapped and sent, even groceries.
5. In deciding what to hunt for in the way of a job, decide what kind of work would make you happiest if you could do anything you wanted. Then look for any job that will bring you close—even if it isn’t the most exciting assignment. Don’t overlook secretarial work as a chance to get in. There are virtually no unemployed competent secretaries in a big city. (And you can learn passable shorthand in six months at night school, passable typing in six weeks.)
6. Don’t be apologetic about being out of your twenties. A man may tell the personnel office to send him a cutiepie with a thirtyeight bust measurement, but he usually settles for less. A woman over thirty-five (age, that is) who is chic and cute and prompt and quiet and energetic can become the love of a businessman’s life.
7. To find the job, check around among your working friends. Ask husbands. Tell everybody you’re determined to go back to work and see what ideas they have. Go and visit employment agencies. The want-ad sections of the newspapers are loaded with job offers, many without age limits. The jobs are not glamorous in the beginning, but you can get in and work your way up.
8. Find a boss who’ll appreciate your home situation. Give him a full measure of devotion, efficiency and hard work in return.
9. Work in an office as close to your home as possible.
10. Pat yourself on the back regularly. You are a very smart girl.