Tag Archives: Women

Are You H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan’s Ideal Woman? A Quiz

Hi, everyone! It’s been a while. For a few weeks I was working full-time and also taking this online course at MIT, which taxed my ability to maintain a basic level of sanitation, let alone write a blog. Now that I’ve switched to part-time I have quite a backlog,* but if a post sits around in my head for too long it starts to feel like homework, and it’s Fourth of July weekend and who wants to do homework?

Cover, Smart Set, July 1920, man and woman in bathing suits.

Smart Set, July 1920 (modjourn.org)

Luckily, 1920 came through, in the form of an article by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan in the July 1920 issue of Smart Set called “Répétition Générale.” There are often articles called “Répétition Générale” in Smart Set, consisting of Mencken and Nathan, the magazine’s co-editors (and literary critic and drama critic respectively), going on about whatever they feel like.**

This time, what they feel like going on about is The Ideal Women. Italics theirs, followed by a list of 57 qualities this paragon possesses.

“Yay!” I said. “Quiz time!”

Longtime readers might be thinking, well, she has some nerve, given that I wrote an entire blog post on how Mencken is not my romantic ideal, and another one rejecting Nathan as a possible suitor. But just because you don’t love someone doesn’t mean you don’t want them to love you. So I got out my pen to tally my score. You can follow along, marking your answers as true or false. Because one can only endure so much perfection, I pared the 57 questions down to 25. There’s a scoring chart at the end.

Here goes!***

The Ideal Woman—

1. In writing a letter, she never adds an apostrophe to every word ending with S, and, when she makes a blot, never undertakes facetiously to comment on it.

TRUE. I never, ever get apostrophes wrong. Admittedly I don’t make many ink blots these days, but due to the ferocity with which I oppose misplaced apostrophes I will give myself full credit here.****

2. Upon deliberately touching a man’s foot under the table, she never makes a pretence of having believed it was the leg of the table and of ejaculating, “Oh, sorry.”

Norman Rockwell, May 1, 1920

TRUE. Side note: I think Mencken and Nathan are deluding themselves here.

3. After eating a particularly sticky piece of candy, she doesn’t place her hand on one’s shoulder under the guise of a sudden burst of affection.

Saturday Evening Post, May 22, 1920

TRUE. Because I’m not five years old.

4. If she desires to say “I love you,” she says it in English and doesn’t go in for “je t’aime.”

A Dance in the Country, Auguste Renoir, 1883

TRUE.

5. She can drink a lemonade or an orangeade, a gin daisy, a milk punch or a mint julep through a straw without making a noise like the last quart of water running out of the bath-tub when she gets to the bottom of the glass.

October 1914 Coca-Cola calendar, woman drinking through straw.

prices4antiques.com

TRUE. See #3.

6. She never makes use of such phrases as “yes indeedy.”

TRUE. As far as I can recall I have never in my life said “Yes indeedy.”

7. She signs her name simply and doesn’t put a bow-knot with two dots underneath it below the signature.

TRUE. Viz:*****

8. Her handbag contains just and only such articles as she needs, and isn’t packed full of two month’s old streetcar transfers, tops of pill boxes, keys the identity of which she has long forgotten, addresses of dressmakers long since deceased, cigar bands with sentimental histories, and a number of archaeological fuzz-covered salted almonds.

FALSE. It’s only because Coronavirus has brought my handbag-carrying days to a temporary halt that you are not being subjected to an inventory or, worse, a photograph.

9. When tiffing with one over the telephone and at a loss for an appropriate retort, she never tries to gain time by resorting to the subterfuge of clicking the hook up and down and, blaming it on Central, exclaiming, “Isn’t that ma-ddening?”

Women at C&P Telephone Exchange, Washington, D.C., ca. 1920, Herbert French.

C&P Telephone Exchange, Washington, D.C., ca. 1920 (Herbert E. French)

FALSE. I was going to give myself this one until I remembered the time back in the eighties when, desperate to shake off a cluelessly persistent admirer, I unplugged the phone in mid-sentence, and then blamed the phone company when he called back.

10. It is possible for her to pucker up her lips and whistle without imparting to her face the aspect of a dried-up lemon.

FALSE. I can’t whistle so am thankfully spared the dried-up lemon test.

11. She is able to find the telephone number of John Smith & Co. without first looking through all the B’s, M’s, and P’s.

New York Telephone directory listings, 1920 ( Bell Telephone News, Volume 9, Number 9, April 1920)

TRUE. (UPDATE 7/5/2020: Hey, I know one of these guys! The last person on the list, Walter C. Arensberg, was a would-be poet and noted modern art collector. I made fun of one of his poems here.)

12. Entertaining a male guest in her home, she is able imperturbably to observe a spark fall from the latter’s cigarette without following it with her eyes and making sure that it doesn’t burn the carpet.

H. L. Mencken caricature by McKee Barclay, 1920 (Digital Maryland)

FALSE. Okay, it’s their ideal, but “willingness to risk having your house catch on fire to accommodate my sloppy habits” is pushing it.

13. She is able to pass the windows of a man’s club-house without looking in.

Photograph of the Townsend house, now the Cosmos Club, Washington, D.C., 1915.

Townsend House, now the Cosmos Club, Washington, D.C., 1915, Francis Benjamin Johnson (Library of Congress)

TRUE. Granted, I haven’t had a lot of opportunities lately, but I lived not far from the Cosmos Club in D.C. before it went coed in 1988, and I never tried to peek inside.

14. When in a theater, she doesn’t give birth to a look of annoyance when someone (who has paid for it and has a perfect right to it) comes and takes the seat next to her upon which she has placed her hat.

Theater audience, Plaza Theatre, Geelong, Victoria, Australia, 1920.

Plaza Theatre, Geelong, Victoria, Australia, ca. 1920 (Museums Victoria)

TRUE. But I’m lucky this is about theaters, not trains.

15. She is able to walk through one of the poor tenement districts and observe a small child without remarking that the child looks as if it didn’t get enough to eat.

Lower East Side, New York, street scene, ca. 1915.

Lower East Side, ca. 1915 (Library of Congress)

TRUE.

16. When, in an elevator, an operator calls out the sixth floor, at which she desires to get out, she gets out without asking the operator whether it is the sixth floor.

Men tipping hats at woman going into elevator, from the John Lloyd film High and Dizzy, 1920.

Still from “High and Dizzy,” 1920

FALSE. Although with me it’s more a case of the door opening, people starting to get out, and me saying, “Oh, wait, is this six?”

17. She is able to play a sentimental song on a piano without trying to sing it.

Sheet music, I'll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time, man and woman walking past apple tree, 1920.

Sheet music, 1920 (indianahistory.org)

FALSE. First of all, there’s my inability to play a sentimental song on a piano, period. But there’s also my desire to sing along with whatever music is playing under whatever circumstance, which I often, but not often enough, manage to suppress.

18. She has the kind of lips that look permanently as if they had just said “if.”

FALSE. Although be careful what you wish for:

Me when I just said “if”

Me when I didn’t just say “if”

19. She never asks one to explain to her just what it is that causes the illumination on fireflies.

Erté, May 1918

TRUE. The master****** of my house in college was one of the world’s foremost experts on bioluminescence, and I never even asked him that. Although that’s a bad example, since I went through college with the extremely misguided policy of never asking anyone in a position of authority anything.

20. She never has her photograph taken showing her looking wistfully at a lily.

Calla Lilies, Irises and Mimosas, Henri Matisse, 1913

FALSE. When I lived in Cambodia, this was the default photographic pose for women.

21. She has never read Laurence Hope’s “India Love Lyrics.”

Passage from "India's Love Lyrics" by Laurence Hope.

From “India’s Love Lyrics,” by Laurence Hope, 1902

TRUE. Although naturally I had to check it out, and if this passage is anything to go by, it’s pretty steamy by ca. 1900 standards.

22. When a phonograph starts playing a swinging fox-trot, she is able to sit still and behave herself instead of standing up and vouchsafing a movement or two symbolic of her gracefulness and irrepressible gypsy blood.

Sheet music for The Vamp, 1919, woman with flower in hair.

Leo Feist Inc., 1919 (National Museum of American History)

FALSE. See #17.

23. When lunching and shown the tray of French pastry, she is able to make her selection at once, without rolling her eye lingeringly around the platter three or four times.

Illustration of pastries from The Book of Cakes, 1904.

The Book of Cakes, T. Percy Lewis and A.G. Bromley, 1904

FALSE. I see no need whatsoever to justify myself here.

24. There is in her family no rich relative of whom she is very proud but to whom, by way of screening the pride, she is in the habit periodically of alluding in derogatory terms.

Publicity photo of Irene Noblette, also known as Irene Ryan, 1930.

Publicity photo of Irene Ryan, 1930 (beverlyhillbillies.fandom.com)

TRUE. Irene Ryan, best known as Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies, was my grandfather’s cousin’s wife. I have never in my life said a word against her.*******

25. She has at no time in her life evinced any curiosity to see Chinatown.

FALSE. I have, in fact, evinced so much curiosity about Asia as to move not only to Cambodia but also to Laos. Here I am at the Plain of Jars in Xieng Khuong, Laos, in 2008.

That’s it! Time to tally up your scores.

21-25: You are silent film star LILLIAN GISH, with whom Nathan was desperately in love, but who turned down his many marriage proposals.********

Lillian Gish, ca. 1919

16-20: You are writer and college professor SARA HAARDT, whom Mencken married in 1930, when he was 49 and she was 32. She was in poor health at the time of their marriage and died five years later.

Sara Haardt Mencken, wife of H.L. Mencken, 1919.

Sara Haardt Mencken, 1919

11-15: You are Mencken’s longtime lover MARION BLOOM, of whom he wrote in a letter to her sister (!), “Like all other right-thinking gals she wants a husband…For me to marry her would be sheer insanity. The first time she began her childish nonsense about Kant, Hegel, materialism, etc., I’d walk out of the house and never come back.”

Marion Bloom, lover of H.L. Mencken, date unknown, from In Defense of Marion.

Marion Bloom, date unknown

1-10. You are a PROVINCIAL SCHOOLMA’AM, a SUPERSTITIOUS BLUESTOCKING, a SUNDAY SCHOOL-TEACHING VIRGIN, or any of the other terms that Mencken hurled at women, real and imagined, who didn’t share his taste in literature. Although, given the wording of the questions, you’re more likely to be one of the less intellectual members of the Ziegfeld Follies chorus.

I got a 15, so I’m a Marion, one point away from being a Sara. That’s fine with me. They both seem like decent people, dubious taste in men aside. But don’t worry, whatever your score, there’s no chance whatsoever that Mencken or Nathan will call you up, forcing you to cut off the line and blame Central.

Have a safe and happy July 4 weekend, everyone!

*Including, as I tweeted, a post about the (arguably) first gay American novel, which I didn’t finish in time for LGBT Pride month but will get to sometime. (Except that, oops, I just invoked the promised post curse.) (UPDATE 5/24/2021: I actually did this! Curse averted.)

**Must be nice, I thought reflexively, until I remembered that I don’t exactly have a lot of editorial restrictions here.

***As always, men are welcome to play along! You’re at an unfair advantage, though.

****Apostrophized plurals are a particular scourge in South Africa, where I live most of the time, because in Afrikaans you put an apostrophe before the S when a word ends with a vowel (e.g. foto’s), and this spills over into English.

*****This isn’t my real handwriting–it’s a not completely successful effort at library hand. I don’t think signature forgery is much of a thing anymore, but best to be on the safe side.

******A title that was, amazingly, only retired four years ago. We used to actually call the person “Master So-and-So.”

*******I learned just now that she and her husband Tim Ryan were a well-known vaudeville duo, and that they divorced in 1942.

********And, according to some sources, dumped him when she found out he was Jewish.

Did College Shrink Your Breasts? A Quiz

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I’m angry, people!

Over the past year, I’ve traded the horrible news of today for the even more horrible news of 1918, when the world was disease-ravaged and at war, suffragists were greeted with condescending amusement, there was a “Darkies” section in the leading humor magazine, and progressives debated about who should be allowed to breed.

I hate what was happening then, and I hate what’s happening now. But, unlike a lot of my friends, I haven’t fallen into a permanent state of anger and/or depression. It’s a question of temperament, I guess. At heart, I’m a sunny soul.

But then I read an article in the Educational Review called “Sex in Mind and Education,” and I was livid.

I was expecting an entertaining romp through the world of social hygiene, as sex education was known back then.* Instead, I got an article—two, actually, spread over the May and September 1918 issues—about why women are unfit for higher education.

An issue for another day, I thought, since I’ve been trying to focus more on World War I with the centenary of the armistice approaching. But then I remembered the suffragists being asked to put aside their demands because there was a war on. And, skipping back to the present, this West Virginia constitutional referendum I just voted on, which, whatever your views on abortion, is legally meaningless as long as Roe v. Wade is in place and also maybe not the most urgent issue in a state that’s awash in opioids. (UPDATE 11/7/2018: The amendment was approved, 52%-48%.)

German imperial ambition is, I think we can say with confidence, safely in check. The war on women, not so much. So I retrieved “Sex in Mind and Education” from the “later” pile.

The article, written by British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, turns out to date back to an 1874 issue of the Fortnightly Review. The Educational Review justifies its republication by noting that it was reprinted and given wide circulation in Mr. C.W. Bardeen’s Series of School Room Classics. Which happened in 1884, so I’m not sure why it was considered timely in 1918. Maybe because Maudsley had just died? Maybe to keep women in their place with suffrage on the rise? Maybe because the journal’s editor was Columbia University’s horrible, reactionary president Nicholas Butler? Maybe all of these things? Who knows?

Henry Maudsley, 1881

Maudsley’s bottom line: women shouldn’t go to college with men, because menstruation.

Of course, there’s more to his argument than that. He has a LOT of reasons why women shouldn’t go to college with men. But, for someone so esteemed that Britain’s largest mental health training institution bears his name to this day**, he’s not exactly rigorous about evidence. He’s all “it is quite evident that” this and “when we thus look the matter honestly in the face” that.

So I decided to subject his arguments to evidence-based testing by pulling out his assertions so that we college-educated women can compare them to our own experience. And turned them into a quiz, because what woman doesn’t love a quiz? (No need to feel left out, men—we need a control group, so you can take it too.)

Get out your pencils!

If you have a delicate constitution, with little vitality to spare, did you break out into disease when you reached puberty?

YES NO N/A

In your experience at university, could the difference between between male and female students accurately be described by the expression “for valor he” is formed and “for beauty she and sweet attractive grace”?***

YES NO N/A

Have childbearing and raising been the most important offices of the best period of your life?

YES NO

Did your laborious days of intellectual exercise and production cause injury to your functions as the conceiver, mother, and nurse of children?

YES NO

Photograph of women in Radcliffe physics class, 1912.

Radcliffe College physics class, 1912 (Radcliffe College archives)

Has this intellectual exercise resulted in your children being puny, enfeebled, and sickly?

YES NO N/A

If your household has a male primary caregiver, is he almost as much out of place in caring for the babies as he would be in attempting to suckle them?

YES NO N/A

If your household has a male primary caregiver, has he abandoned the task in despair or disgust, and concluded it not to be worth while that mankind should continue on earth?

YES NO N/A

If you attended a coeducational college, was it at a cost to your strength and health which has entailed life-long suffering, and even incapacitated you for the adequate performance of the natural functions of your sex?

YES NO N/A

If you attended a coeducational college, do you feel that the stimulus of study had a more harmful effect on you than on your male classmates, not only because of your greater constitutional susceptibility, but also because women do not have the compensating balance of competition on the playing field?

YES NO N/A

Drawing of women's basketball game, Stanford vs. University of California, 1896

Basketball game, Stanford vs. University of California, E.J. Meeker, 1896

In your experience, has the prediction been borne out that, due an increase in women’s education, the wives who are to be the mothers in our republic [the United States—Maudsley’s quoting a Harvard professor now] must be drawn from transatlantic homes?

YES NO

Has study during the periodical tides of your organization [i.e. your period] led to pallor, lassitude, debility, sleeplessness, headache, neuralgia, and then to worse ills?

YES NO

As a result of your studies, have you become the victim of aches and pains, unable to go on with your work, and compelled to seek medical advice?

YES NO

Photograph of three women on a beach holding parasols, 1915.

Women at the seaside, 1915

If so, and if you were restored to health by rest from work, a holiday at the seaside, and suitable treatment, did you leave college a good scholar but a delicate and ailing woman, whose future life is one of more or less suffering? Did you fail to regain the vital energy which was recklessly sacrificed in the acquirement of learning?

YES NO N/A

If so, and you subsequently married, were you unfit for the best discharge of maternal functions, and apt to suffer from a variety of troublesome and serious disorders in connection with them?

YES NO N/A

Has the neglect of physical exercise, and the continuous application to study, left you lacking the instinct, desire, or capacity to nurse your offspring, forcing you to resort to a wet-nurse or feeding by hand?

YES NO N/A

If you have not nursed, has this caused the organs which minister to this function to waste and finally to become by disuse as rudimentary as they are in the male sex, forcing you to invoke the dressmaker’s aid in order to gain the appearance of them?

YES NO N/A

Advertisement for Nature's Rival bust enhancer, 1910

Delineator, 1910 (witness2fashion.wordpress.com)

During the best years of your life, are/were you, for one-quarter of each month, more or less sick and unfit for hard work?

YES NO

Have you turned into a monstrosity—something which having ceased to be a woman is not yet a man?

YES NO

Okay. Pencils down.

In the spirit of fairness, Dr. Maudsley quotes John Stuart Mill’s argument in The Subjection of Women, to wit:

What we call the nature of women is essentially an artificial thing.
It is the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.
Women’s character has been disguised by their subjugation by men.
If given equal opportunities, they would perform as well as men.

He says that

if these allegations contain no exaggeration, if they be strictly true, then is this article an entire mistake.

Is it??? Let’s score the quiz and see! Disregard the N/A’s, count up the yeses, and divide them by the total number of questions you answered.

It would be terrible for humankind if even a significant minority of Maudsley’s concerns turned out to be valid. So let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that if most women score over 25% we’d better rethink this this whole going to college with men business.

I threw out a bunch of questions because I don’t have kids and calculated my score: 9%. My one “Yes” answer was to #4, about my laborious days of intellectual exercise causing injury to my functions as the conceiver, mother, and nurse of children. Most college-education women have children, but the percentage is lower than among women without college, so I’ll give this one to Maudsley.

Photograph of Mary Grace McGeehan graduating from Harvard, with parents, 1983.

Me graduating from college with no apparent ill effects, 1983

Granted, one is a small sample size if we’re trying to be scientifically rigorous, but it’s one bigger than Maudsley’s. And I’m guessing that my score is typical. Maybe some of you moms consider childbearing and raising the most important offices of the best period of your lives. But maybe some of you dads do too, so here’s where the control group comes in.

So, unless I’m gravely mistaken, Maudsley is hoist with his own petard.

But he’s not giving up so easily. Even if John Stuart Mill turns out to be right, he says,

there is a right in might—the right of the strong to be strong. Men have the right to make the most of their powers, to develop them to the utmost, and to strive for, and if possible gain and hold, the position in which they shall have the freest play.

If women were treated equally, and used their political power to pass laws that men didn’t like, he asks,

can it be supposed that, as the world goes, there would not soon be a revolution in the state by men, which would end in taking all power from women and reducing them to a stern subjection? Legislation would not be of much value unless there were power behind to make it respected.

You see what’s happening here, people? Maudsley’s admitting that, if women get too equal, the men are going to have a revolution! Throw out all the laws! Rely on brute force!

We have to do something, women!****

Starting with this:

League of Women Voter's poster with caption VOTE, 1920.

League of Women Voters poster, 1920

*And which I can’t believe I’ve made it to November without writing about. On the list!

**Oh and he also gave them a lot of money.

***Hey Maudsley, you got the quote wrong! Here’s what Milton really said:

Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed;
For contemplation he and valor formed,
For SOFTNESS she, and sweet attractive grace.

****I realize that some men might be reading this, but if they managed to stomach all the menstruation talk they’re probably allies.

What’s Your 1918 Girl Job? Take This Quiz and Find Out!

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One of the (few) disappointments about reading in 1918 is that nothing’s interactive. Of course, I understood when I started this project that my days of discovering what secondary Jane Austen character I most resemble were over for a while.* And I knew that crossword puzzles were a few years away from being invented.

But still, there could be quizzes, or personality tests, or…something. But no. The year peaked with the vocabulary-based intelligence test in the Literary Digest in February. After that, nada. Unless you were a kid, in which case you got to enter St. Nicholas magazine contests, and cut out paper dolls from women’s magazines, and make this actually extremely cool diorama that I am definitely going to get to one of these days.

Delineator, June 1918

Being a grownup, I was left to make my own entertainment. Which I did when I came across this article in the June 1918 Ladies’ Home Journal:

What’s a girl to do, LHJ asks, when the war’s over and the boys come home and want their jobs back? Answer: find yourself a girlier one.

But which one’s for you? LHJ helps you figure it out by providing questions where you match your skills and personality traits with each job.

Which, to the modern sensibility, screams QUIZ. So I added a scoring system and turned it into one.

Here’s how it works: Rank yourself on each attribute. If you have no basis for assessing yourself, estimate how you would score. Add up your points.

Okay, here goes! Get your 1918 pencils out.**

Who Will Make a Good Teacher?

Teacher and students standing next to the Lamoine [Washington] School in 1918 (Library of Congress)

THE GIRL WITH—

Steady nerves (1-5 points) and a sound body (1-5 points).

Clear brain (1-5 points), warm heart (1-5 points), and sympathetic imagination (1-5 points).

Power to build the school into the community (1-5 points).

Enthusiasm for boys and girls that will keep her from becoming a machine (1-5 points).

What Makes a Good Office Worker

American Lumberman, 1907

THE GIRL WHO HAS—

Swift, careful fingers (1-5 points) and an agile brain (1-5 points).

Good eyesight (1-5 points), good hearing (1-5 points), and good memory (1-5 points).

Good judgment (1-5 points) and a sense of responsibility (1-5 points).

The Successful Saleswoman

Loras College, Center for Dubuque History

THE SALESWOMAN YOU LIKE IS—

Alert (1-5 points), courteous (1-5 points, then double your score), and energetic (1-5 points).

Interested in her customer’s needs (1-5 points, then double your score).

Thoroughly acquainted with her stocks (1-5 points).

The Dressmaker and The Milliner

Loras College, Center for Dubuque History

TYPES OF ABILITY REQUIRED—

The seamstress must have skill in hand (1-5 points) and machine (1-5 points) sewing.

The dressmaker needs not only technical skill (1-5 points) but creative (1-5 points) and artistic (1-5 points) ability.

The milliner has need of artistic skill (do not score; included under dressmaker) and business sense (1-5 points).

The sewing teacher should combine technical knowledge (do not score; included under dressmaker) and ability to teach others (1-5 points).

The Broad Field of Domestic Science

Home economics class, Toronto, 1911 (Archives of Ontario)

FOR THE WOMAN WITH—

Skilled hands (1-5 points, then double your score).

A practical turn of mind (1-5 points, then double your score) and the best training (1-5 points).

Ability to command the respect of other people (1-5 points, then double your score).

Got your score? Okay, here’s what, according to LHJ, you can expect from your girl profession. (The assumption being, of course, that you’re white and Christian.)

Teacher

New York Times, July 14, 1918

OPPORTUNITIES FOR TEACHERS—

Teaching is the oldest profession*** for girls outside the home. It offers greater variety of choice to-day than ever before and is especially attractive to the girl with social vision. It is a vocation, not a bread-and-butter job. Salaries are not high, but advancement is certain for the teacher that makes good.

Office Worker

New York Times, July 14, 1918

POSITIONS AND PAY—

Experienced stenographer, $10-25 a week;

Court stenographer, $2000-3000 a year;

Private secretary, $900-1800 a year.****

THE OUTLOOK—

The field is overstocked with half-trained, incompetent stenographers. But for girls with good general education and technical skill there is always room. There are too many $8 a week girls, too few $25 a week ones. For the girl with executive ability, broad education and business experience there are many new openings.

Saleswoman

New York Times, July 14, 1918

KIND OF PERSON IN STORES—

Errand and cash girls;

Cashiers and examiners;

Saleswomen;

Hands of stock and buyers.

WAGES AND CONDITIONS—

The average pay is low, hours long, and the work is not easy, but employment is steady for the competent worker. Hours have been shortened, however, and conditions improved by the activity of the Consumers’ League. Chances for advancement are good, however, for the ambitious girl in the employ of a good firm.

Dressmaker and Milliner

WAGES AND CONDITIONS—

A first-class seamstress or dressmaker is always in demand at $1.50 to $3.50 a day;

The millinery season is short and the hours long. The average milliner needs another trade for the dull season;

The salary for assistant sewing teachers is small, but good for heads of department.

Domestic Science

New York Times, July 14, 1918

SOME OF THE KINDS OF POSITIONS—

Matron or house mother in college dormitory;

Superintendent, purveyor, or dietitian in an institution;

Domestic science teacher in school or Y.W.C.A.;

Manager of a small hotel, summer or all the year;

Visiting housekeeper employed by private families or by the city;

Director of cafeteria, tea, or lunch rooms.

SALARIES—

Teacher, domestic science, $800 and up;

Cafeteria director, $700-1800;

Assistant matron, $200-600, plus board;

Matron, $600-1200, plus living expenses.

FUTURE—

The field of domestic science is not crowded and kinds of positions are multiplying.

I got TEACHER! (30/35.)

Which was a huge relief because, when I took the test before recalibrating it to make the points in each category match up, I got OFFICE WORKER. (27/35 this time around.) Being a court stenographer might be all right, given the interesting crimes I’m always reading about, like painting your pencil a treasonous color and wearing a second lieutenant’s uniform after being discharged for setting your yacht on fire to collect the insurance money. And being a half-trained, incompetent stenographer sounds appealing in a screwball comedy kind of way. But the problem with OFFICE WORKER is that the crucial question is missing: How well would you deal with taking orders all day from a man you’re way smarter than, for a fraction of his pay? I would get a 0 for that.

I got a terrible score in DOMESTIC SCIENCE. (18/35.) Being a matron in a college dormitory might be fun, though. Or director of a tea room. Reading Edna Ferber’s stories rid me of any ambitions I might have had of being a SALESWOMAN (24/35). As for DRESSMAKER (22/35), well, this picture of me in a dress I made in high school says it all:

If I were a middle-class American woman in 1918, I imagine that I would have been a teacher. Probably a pretty happy and capable one.

Or maybe I would have gone for a war job, like this one.

New York Times, July 15, 1918

Or this one—big enough for any intelligent man!

New York Times, July 15, 1918

Or—top choice—one of these.

New York Times, July 15, 1918

(All of these jobs were advertised in the “Help Wanted – Female” section—there were no gender-neutral want ads.)

Judging by what happened to most women, though, I’m not optimistic about my chances of hanging on after the men came home. It’s lucky, then, that I’m living a time when women can be diplomats. And late-in-life creative writing students. And time-traveling bloggers.

So…what’s YOUR 1918 girl job?

* The insipid Captain Benwick from Persuasion. Which is crazy. I’m totally Jane Fairfax.

** Don’t worry, I checked, and pencils weren’t made of lead back then, or ever. The reason we call the graphite in pencils lead is that graphite was mistaken for lead when it was first discovered.

*** “Oldest profession” struck me as an unfortunate choice of words, so I did a Google NGram,

which showed that this phrase has only been around since—about 1918, actually. I did some research (okay, looked on Wikipedia) and found that the phrase began making its way into the language after Kipling referred to “the most ancient profession” in an 1889 short story. This is the kind of discovery that makes all those hours of photo file size reduction worthwhile for the weary blogger.

**** A surprising omission from this list is bookkeeper. A lot of women had this job, including my grandmother (on my mother’s side–it was my grandmother on my father’s side who may have marched with the Czechoslovakians in the July 4 parade).

My 1918 Bedside Bookshelf

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Christopher Morley was one of those famous-in-their-time people no one has heard of today.* In 1918, the hardworking twenty-seven-year-old had just published Parnassus on Wheels, his first novel, and a book of light verse called Songs for a Little House,** and he had a book of essays coming out. He was also the literary editor of Ladies’ Home Journal.

The Bookman, February 1918

In a piece in the February 1918 issue of The Bookman (originally published in the New York Sun), Morley stirred up quite a kerfuffle. The issue: what books you should choose for your guest room. “Let us assume that many of your guests are of the male sex and have the habit of reading in bed,” he writes. “You keep a reading lamp by the bed, of course, and a bookshelf. What thirty volumes would you choose to fill that shelf?”

Of course, Morley doesn’t really want to know what books YOU’D choose. He wants to tell you what books HE’D choose. As advertised, they’re pretty manly. Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling. Plus some manly-sounding books I never heard of, like The Adventures of Captain Kettle and Casuals of the Sea. You can read the rest of the list here. Morley writes that

I find that for such strollers, wastrels and errant persons as frequent my house, this is a fairly well-selected guest-room library. I wonder if your readers will concur.

They didn’t. Harold Crawford Stearns sent in a list, published in March, that only had one duplicate with Morley’s, the Bible. It was equally manly, though. In April, D.M.T. Willis argued that Morley had chosen not bedtime books but “books that one wants to read when wide awake on a cold afternoon before the fire, or in a hammock under trees in warm weather.”

Bedtime reading, he says,

seems to me like the intense desire to eat candy one experiences immediately after church service, a sort of reactive indulgence, a kind of “now-I-can-do-as-I-please-for-the-rest-of-the-night” feeling.

My sentiments exactly!

Willis includes little blurbs with his list, like, “The Rubaiyat. Because every man and most women sometime at night want to feel as happy-go-lucky and sentimental as Omar,” and “The Bible, because some one might read it and become a poet.” His list is as lacking as Morley’s in women authors, but he’s such a charming blurber that I would totally stay at his house.

As for the contribution from Edward O’Brien, the editor of the Best American Short Stories series, all I can say is, really, Edward? The Canterbury Tales? At bedtime? I checked out another one of his choices, Religio Poetae, by Coventry Patmore. Here’s how the title essay starts:

No one, probably, has ever found his life permanently affected by any truth of which he has been unable to obtain a real apprehension, which, as I have elsewhere shown, is quite a different thing from real comprehension.

Zzzzzz.

The Bookman, to its credit, is snarky about Morley’s gender policy, saying in April that

Mr. Morley’s guest-room is apparently adapted solely to the needs of his male friends—or is it that his women visitors are of the kind that do not read?***

Finally, some women, identifying themselves as “Two Old Maids,” weigh in, and at last we have a handful of women authors: Jane Addams, Edna Ferber, and Lady Montagu.

Of course, I’m just like Christopher Morley: the real reason I’m writing about this is to give you MY 1918 guest room bookshelf list.

First I need a 1918 guest bedroom, though. Luckily I found one that’s perfect:

Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1918

Okay, now for my list. It includes a mix of books I’ve read for this project, other 1918-era books I’ve been wanting to read, and a few earlier classics. In the spirit of D.M.T. Willis, I’ve included blurbs explaining why I picked each one.

Bab: A Sub-Deb by Mary Roberts Rinehart. Because this story about a rebellious, hapless teenager is hilarious, and short enough that you’ll be able to read the whole thing during your visit.
Emma by Jane Austen. Because somehow it seems more 1918-ish than the rest of Austen.
Mrs. Spring Fragrance by Sui Sin Far. Because I just finished this fantastic collection of short stories about the Chinese community in Seattle and San Francisco, and I can’t wait to tell you about it.
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Because being a houseguest with a well-stocked bookshelf at hand is such an Edith Wharton thing to do.
The Magic City by E. Nesbit. Because every guest room bookshelf needs some magic, and I missed this one during my E. Nesbit years.
Tendencies in Modern American Poetry by Amy Lowell. Because I want to take a deeper look into what was happening in poetry in 1918, and who better to explain it than Lowell?
The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair. Because it was one of the big books of 1918, but when I ordered a print-on-demand version they sent me a book with Sinclair’s name on the cover but a 1907 Robert Chambers book with the same title inside.
Pointed Roofs by Dorothy Richardson. Because May Sinclair said in The Egoist that she’s a great modernist but I’d never heard of her.
Villette by Charlotte Brontë. Because I’ve been wanting to read it and it seems more bedtimey than Jane Eyre.
Renascence, and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Because Louis Untermeyer panned it in The Dial and I’m in the mood to pick a fight.
Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model by Winnifred Eaton. Because the story of a half-white, half-Chinese artist’s model sounds intriguing, plus she’s Sui Sin Far’s sister.
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery. Because, shamefully, I’ve never read it.
Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster. Because this breezy epistolary novel, which I wrote about here, is the perfect bedtime read.
Personality Plus by Edna Ferber. Because the Two Old Maids sound like they know what they’re talking about.
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. Because it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. Just don’t read the ending right before you turn off the light, like I did.
The Last Ditch by Violet Hunt. Because her wonderful poem in Poetry magazine about her breakup with Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford) made me want to read more of her work.
The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner. Because I really need to read this South African classic.
Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, by Elizabeth Keckley. Because Keckley’s amazing journey sounds well worth reading about.
The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart. Because this was Rinehart’s first best-seller, and if her mysteries are as good as Bab: A Sub-Deb I can’t wait to get started.
Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Because I read this when I was very young and I’d love to see if I remember anything.
The God by H.D. Because I need to start actually reading the Imagist poets instead of just reading about their love lives.
Married Love by Marie Carmichael Stopes. Because, who knows, this British sex manual might come in handy for my houseguests.
Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley. Because Jeff O’Neal raved about it, but mostly because I love the idea of Morley sitting on the bookshelf with all these women.

Of course, what I’ve really done is put together a list of books I want YOU to have when I stay in YOUR guest room. I’ll be traveling a lot over the next few months, so get ready!

(And there’s still room on the bookshelf–I haven’t reached Morley’s 30 volumes yet–so I’d welcome your suggestions.)

The House Beautiful, September 1917

*Except for Jeff O’Neal of Book Riot, who talked about Morley’s novel Parnassus on Wheels on last year’s holiday book recommendation podcast.

**It’s just like it sounds. He writes so goopily about his wife that I assumed, based on previous 1918 experience, that she would run off with a female Imagist poet in short order. But no, they were still married when he died in 1957.

*** This can’t possibly mean what it sounds like. If it did, she wouldn’t be sleeping in the guest room, would she?

A 1918 play about a single mother, too far ahead of its time

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Reading the March 1918 issue of The Bookman a couple of weeks ago, I came across a brief review of The Madonna of the Future, which had recently opened on Broadway. As critic Clayton Hamilton tells us,

the heroine of this play is a very rich young woman, unencumbered with relatives, who desires to become a mother but does not desire to be saddled with a husband. In consequence of her convictions, she picks out an apparently eugenic mate and becomes, in due time, the mother of a nameless child.

My reaction: What? This is the least 1918 thing I’ve ever heard of!

“Madonna of the Future” star Emily Stevens, New York Times, January 27, 1918

The Dramatic Mirror thought so too. “The most pitiful creature of the brothel would scorn such an idea,” the magazine huffed. It was not alone, apparently—New York Chief Magistrate William McAdoo* received a number of complaints. He wrote to the theater’s lawyers telling them that, if the issue arose in court, he would have to declare the play obscene. McAdoo said that

the character of the heroine repeatedly and tiresomely states over and over again that the doctrines advanced by her are unconventional and, in the sense usually accepted by ordinary people, immoral. She says that her highest ideal of maternity is that of the cow, which might suggest that the proper place for this play would be a stable instead of the stage, committing the dialogue to learned veterinarians.

I haven’t been able to find a script of the play, but here’s what I’ve managed to piece together. Iris Fotheringham, a wealthy young woman from Tarrington, New York, hates men, but has what the Dramatic Mirror calls “one redeeming virtue—the dream of all good women—the desire of motherhood.” She decides that her secretary, Rex Letherick, would be a suitable father,** and whisks him off to Europe. After the baby is born, she blithely resumes her New York life. Rex is desperately in love with Iris, and, as the Dramatic Mirror puts it, “still willing to be her husband.” Iris gets wind that there’s another woman in the picture, gets jealous, and marries Rex.

Alan Dale and his daughter Marjorie, 1900 (Library of Congress)

What makes this story even more interesting is that the play’s author, Alan Dale, was America’s most famous theater critic. The British-born Dale (real name Alfred Cohen) had been writing acerbic reviews for the Hearst newspapers since the 1880s. He had made a lot of enemies along the way. “The theatrical world is finding considerable amusement in the situation created by the police complaint,” the Dramatic Mirror gloated, speculating that the cause of the play’s troubles was a morality campaign by the city’s Tammany Hall mayor. For good measure, the magazine threw in some cracks about the play’s bad reviews.

New York Times, January 29, 1918

This was unfair, as far as I can tell. The un-bylined New York Times reviewer called the play “a brilliantly written comedy of ideas,” although he complained that the ending was a copout. He noted similarities to George Bernard Shaw, but said that Shaw, “having real ideas of his own, also has the courage of them.” Astonishingly, the reviewer got away with saying that the de-stigmatization of single motherhood was important to contemplate,

for women in these coming manless times will be much occupied with the thought that life would be less empty if only there were children. And the world will have need of new citizens.

George Jean Nathan, date unknown

George Jean Nathan, who co-edited Smart Set with H.L. Mencken and is now regarded as the greatest theater critic of his time, really, really hated Dale’s reviews. He complained in Smart Set’s April 1918 issue that Dale displayed

the sort of humour…that proceeds from the comparison of something or other with a Limburger cheese or from some such observation as “‘Way Down Yeast’ ought to get a rise out of everybody.” The sort of humor, in short, whose stock company has been made up largely of bad puns, the spelling of girl as “gell,” the surrounding of every fourth word with quotation marks, such bits as “legs—er, oh I beg your pahdon—I should say ‘limbs’,” a frequent allusion to prunes and to pinochle, and an employment of such terms as “scrumptious” and “bong-tong.”

But Nathan goes on to praise The Madonna of the Future, saying that

its theme is viewed through the glasses of a man possessed of a certain pleasant measure of cultural background and expounded in well thought out and effective vein; its net impression is of a piece of writing designed by a civilized gentleman for a civilized audience.

The New York Times ran this list of adjectives that had been used to describe the play, ranging from puerile to shocking to brilliant:

New York Times, March 10, 1918

After the theater received the letter, the script was revised, there was some back and forth with McAdoo, the play closed on Broadway after less than two months, and the censored version, retitled The Woman of the Future, moved to New York’s “subway circuit.”

In spite of its short run, The Madonna of the Future caused quite a stir. Today’s Iris Fotheringhams may, in part, have Alan Dale to thank for getting people used to the idea that having a baby without a husband isn’t all that big a deal.

Alan Dale lives on in another way as well: his 1889 novel A Marriage Below Zero has been described as the first English-language novel to depict a romantic relationship between two men.

All in all, not a bad legacy for someone who said “scrumptious” and “bong-tong.”

G.W. Dillingham, 1889

*This William McAdoo, a former congressman and New York police commissioner, was born in Ireland and was apparently no relation to Secretary of the Treasury/Railroad Administrator/Woodrow Wilson son-in-law William Gibbs McAdoo.

**Well, he has a great porn star name anyway.