“You see them every morning at a quarter to nine, rushing out of the maw of the subway tunnel, filing out of Grand Central Station, crossing Lexington and Park and Madison and Fifth avenues, the hundreds and hundreds of girls.” It’s 1958, the year Rona Jaffe published her first novel, The Best of Everything, and all the women streaming to their offices, getting ready to sit down at their desks for a day as a file clerk or a typist or maybe a junior editor, are still known as “girls.”
Jaffe’s book came out five years before Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique and more than a decade before the profusion of feminist novels by such writers as Alix Kates Shulman, Marge Piercy, and Marilyn French. Jaffe thought of her book as a “cautionary tale,” she wrote in an introduction to the 2005 edition—Penguin has just released a new edition, with an introduction by Rachel Syme—but scores of women read it and packed up their lives to move to New York. “An exciting life, even if very difficult, is better than a dull one,” Jaffe wrote, and she sure made it look exciting, if not downright soap-operatic. Maybe that’s why the book was seen as fluffy and why I never read it in the 1980s and ’90s alongside The Golden Notebook and Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. But I finally picked it up recently and was blown away by Jaffe’s sharp, fizzy writing; her pointed analysis of women’s roles and restrictions; and her matter-of-fact depiction of sexual harassment in the workplace decades before the Clarence Thomas hearings or #MeToo.
Like Jaffe herself when she wrote the book, her fictional women work in publishing. Caroline Bender grew up in a comfortable New York suburb, went to Radcliffe, and got engaged to her college boyfriend, Eddie. Then he dumped her. Now she wants to be an editor, even if it means starting as a secretary to a notoriously difficult boss. April Morrison came to New York from a small town in Colorado, hoping to become an actress. “You’re my idea of what a New York girl should look like,” she tells Caroline, soon making herself over and finding a wealthy Ivy League boyfriend. Mary Agnes Russo from the Bronx is patiently waiting for her wedding, which is a year away. Barbara Lemont is a single mother struggling to support her daughter and her own mother, whom they live with, through her job at Fabian Publications. And Gregg Adams is an actress from Dallas who hopes her relationship with a well-known Broadway producer will bring her closer to the center of New York’s artistic swirl.
The women are constantly going to bars with their bosses, drinking whiskey, and getting groped under the table. There’s an unplanned pregnancy and a coerced abortion. Relationships that seem to be love turn out to be ephemeral, and the women find the lives they’d planned going up in smoke. “You little bitch,” yells the editor-in-chief at Barbara when she rejects his advances at a Christmas party. “You’re fired. Don’t you dare come into this office on Monday. Don’t you dare!” I had no idea that anyone in the ’50s was writing like this.
For more insight into midcentury sexual politics, try Carmela Ciuraru’s Lives of the Wives (Harper, Feb. 7), a nonfiction book about writers and their wives—many of them writers themselves—including Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal, Kenneth Tynan and Elaine Dundy, and Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge. “Once romantically entwined, the wives often had to shelve their own aspirations in order to nurture their partners, sometimes fighting like hell to keep their own identities,” says our starred review. It’s a fascinating companion piece to Jaffe’s book.
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
