Advice To The Working Gal

[LizzieMaine]

From the New York Daily News, Thursday 8/31/1933.

IT'S PLAY THAT KEEPS WORKING GIRL VIVACIOUS

by
Antoinette Donnelly

I feel, in fact I know that there is a large group of business women in this country who have cultivated a machine attitude toward life. I refer to the type who lets her work absorb her, eat up her best years, and her every thought.

Now, this is no plea for career abandonment. It's simply a plea for the accused to keep her youth so long as she has her work or wants to work.

Surely women have gone a long way in the once-called "male" field, but they're away behind the man in learning how to turn off the job switch at 5:30 and on Saturdays and Sundays. True, more and more of them are getting out over the weekend, doing something far more important to their continued health and youth than staying home worrying about work and refurbishing their clothes. But a great many of them seem not to have learned the lesson about all work and no play making the dull one.

One may say "But I can't afford it!" Another, "But I haven't the time." Other women of this group -- the smart ones -- on no higher income manager it all right. They refuse to live, breathe, and eat "job." There's something else to be had out of life -- and they're going to get it. They come home at night dog tired, maybe, but that doesn't mean they're going to stick around every evening in their day clothes. They manage a quick bath or a good cleanup, change frock and shoes, and after a leisurely dinner find themselves ready and willing to join in at bridge or call up someone to come over or go to a show.

It's getting away from the job -- not clinging to its eyelashes every living minute that preserves that enthusiasm for the task. Play, that is! Contact with others! Getting away from shop talk. Having an interest as unlike one's work as possible.

You see some of these business women grown kind of sour as they get on. It isn't the work, nor the lack of appreciation that can be blamed half so often as the woman's own self and her failure to use her leisure hours intelligently, and for leisure.

I think the psychology of changing into a different type of dress for dinner in itself is recreative. You're a new person, and you won't let the evening be a dreary stretch you put in awaiting a machinelike return to the job in the AM.

 

[Lady Day]

Wow Lizzie, its like you were in my head.

This article hits home for me as of late. All I do think about is work (well now I can play seeing how I just lost my job). Man. Makes you realize how similar we are to the women of yesteryear, enough so for articles to be composed about such a dilemma.

LD

 

[Lulu-in-Ny]

You know, this is probably more timely now than it was then. I spent way too much time mulling over what goes on 40 hours out of my week.
And the companies that we work for know it. I work for a major retailer, and we have a corporate intranet at work. Last year, they sent out a poll to all the managers asking if we would like to have access to this intranet at home. I answered a resounding "No!", as I thought most managers would, male or female. I was astounded to learn a few weeks later that 68% of managers said "Yes". It saddens me that so many are willing to let a job that pays them only for how many hours they're obligated to work insinuate itself into their off-time.
I wonder if this is more of an American situation, as the few Europeans that I know take their vacations, their personal time, and their sick time without feeling an ounce of guilt about it.

 

[June]

Thanks for the article, Lizzie. The message could certainly apply to our time as well, and definitely across gender lines. The "Work/Life Balance" seems to be becoming more and more of a figment of our imaginations. And at what cost ??

 

[LizzieMaine]

What makes this article so interesting for me is the fact that in 1933, anyone who had work counted themselves lucky to have it -- and knew if they didn't keep their nose to the grindstone there were plenty of hungry people out there willing to take over. A lot of that excessive committment to the office may well have been desperation.

I'm actually a lot like this myself -- my best friend says I wear the hair-shirt like nobody she's ever known, and I suspect this is yet another result of the Depression influence that marked my upbringing. I've never been one to leave work at the office, even when I was working at home!

LD, hope you find work soon. It's high time hand-drawn animation made a comeback!!

 

[Inky]

Lizzie that's a great article. It also hits close to home for me. I have the benefit of a telecommuting job, and getting away from work is very difficult, to say the least.

The more things change, the more they really are the same!

 

[Lady Day]

LD, hope you find work soon. It's high time hand-drawn animation made a comeback!!

Thanks Lizzie.
As far as a 2D comeback, well, it kinda is.

Breaks my heart a bit to know Im circling like a vulture but cant find an in.

LD

 

[ShoreRoadLady]

The more things change, the more they really are the same!

Too true!

Thanks for the article, Lizzie. We definitely need to have a good work/life balance.

I do take issue with one thing - the author seems to think that even a "dog tired" woman can come home, change, have a bath and a leisurely dinner, be able to go out in the evening, and *still* wake up the next morning! I know for me, that's assuming an awful lot. lol

 

[Naama]

I think the worst part of it, that most of these women then also have to care for theire children/family. So most of them don't even have the time for play.
History always repeats itself somehow.....




Naama

 

[ShoreRoadLady]

I think the worst part of it, that most of these women then also have to care for theire children/family. So most of them don't even have the time for play.
History always repeats itself somehow.....

I get the impression that this article was presented toward young, single working women, not wives and mothers. Otherwise I'm sure they'd have mentioned *something* about kids or the husband!

 

[LizzieMaine]

Quite likely -- there was a whole movement during the thirties toward the idea of "career girls," women who turned away from the idea of early marriage and kids in favor of carving out business careers. These are the same women who made up the core audience of "Mademoiselle" magazine, "the Magazine for Smart Young Women," and who made a book called "Live Alone and Like It" a best-seller in 1936.

A lot's been written about the role of the war in getting women into the workforce, but comparatively little about how the Depression was just as important in that respect, and arguably its influence was quite a bit longer-lived -- these women were in it for the long haul, rather than getting out of the workforce as soon as the crisis had passed.

 

[Paisley]

Most nights, I come home "dog tired" but make myself work out anyway. It turns out I'm rarely "too tired" to exercise--and I've heard others say the same thing. I usually go out Friday night, too; it's a matter of knowing when I'm so tired I won't have any fun and when I just have to make myself go.

My employer emphasizes work-life balance. The CPAs and staff here put in long hours of hard work, and the company invests a fair amount in their career development. We don't want burnouts. The accountants are encouraged to take a weekend off during busy season, and the admins, after five years' service, go from three weeks' paid days off to four weeks'. Every few years, the partners take a one-month sabbatical: they can't be contacted by the office or have contact with clients.

I must say, it helps make it a pretty happy place to work.

/trying to get a particular Lounger to work here.