Skyscraper (35 page)

Another, newer type joined these adventurer-breadwinners: the business girl of middling origins. By the early years of the Depression, her real-life counterpart was a fixture on the job landscape: no sexually charged femme fatale but a demurely attired twentysomething woman in a lower-level position who can work her way up. She is a beginner but preferred to an ambition-driven college graduate. And she is of course not yet wed (businesses looked askance at married women, especially if a husband could provide for them). Finally, an important trend: she is excited rather than frightened by a workplace that both she and her creator are sure she can navigate. In sum, whatever Gotham's seductions, she can take care of herself.

This “bachelor maid” had come to the city as generations had before her. To her supporters, her unassailable virtue was necessary to defuse the long-lived cultural suspicion that virginal young women were “unfit to work” amid the sexual temptations of the clerical-job landscape. The debate on the perils of office work had raged from the beginning of women's entry into the industrial and office workforce. Women had fought for the right to type and file, though clerical work was considered more ladylike than the factory. Lynn Harding profits from those earlier victories and from others as well. Not only does she cash her own paychecks rather than hand them to some male guardian, she has plans to invest savings (once she has them). Though she has the modesty and obedience necessary for her place in the pecking order of the Seacoast Bank hierarchy, she is also the inheritor of decades of activist women's greater and lesser crusades: the right to vote, to drink, to smoke, to wear makeup and alluring evening gowns (Lynn's office attire is strictly professional). And, a trademark Baldwin touch, her sophistication does not tarnish her purity or innocence.

In literary terms, Baldwin's Wise Virgin is a direct descendant
of the business-girl novel of the pre-Depression era. Female clerical workers who by novel's end secured a foothold in the masculine office world peopled fiction by writers as diverse as Sinclair Lewis (
The Job
, 1917), who excoriated small-town America, and Booth Tarkington (
Alice Adams
, 1921), who lauded it. In these male authors' hands the heroine challenges prejudices against women in the professions and becomes, as one
New York Times
reviewer somewhat awkwardly put it, “the master of herself and of her job.”
⁵
Best-selling women's author Edna Ferber provided many corollaries in the world of department-store workers. “The Girl Who Went Write” (1918) satirizes both the notion of domesticity as the only female role and the outmoded belief in working-girl immorality.
⁶
With her “ambition, clever little head” (63) and “indomitable desire to get on” (60), Ferber's heroine paves the way for a new generation of literary defenders of feminine ambition.

A vastly more popular form, however, and one read by working girls themselves in cheap paperbacks and pulp magazines from the late nineteenth century onward, also informed the Baldwin plot. Its chief practitioner was Laura Jean Libbey, and it, too, centered on the virtuous, determined working girl who toils in the city. Yet Libbey did not purvey vocational independence. Her stock-in-trade was upward mobility through marriage to the boss. Charming cads, usually married, sometimes distract the Libbey heroine, but not for long. Her virtue is never at risk, for her fine character (and pretty face) determines her marital fate.

While women's historian Joanne Meyerowitz has found that by the 1930s, in pulp fiction, the fallen woman could be redeemed, Baldwin's heroines never trade their virtue for a sinecure or a loveless marriage.
⁷
In fact, in their different ways,
Baldwin and the queen of “sob sister” melodrama, Fannie Hurst, with whom Baldwin is often paired, preached that only the self-directed woman can hope to survive the depredations of the Great Crash. Being “kept” by a married businessman was the ultimate dead-end job.

In fiction at least, the masculine job losses of the Great Crash underscored the morality of supporting oneself. Women of the 1930s, particularly those without dependents, resolved to enjoy the pleasures that a little disposable income could generate. So, too, in
Skyscraper
: Baldwin's Lynn Harding, twenty-two years old and earning a relatively good $1,900 a year, is able to buy the occasional seventy-dollar dress and live at a young woman's hotel. This residence, complete with a motherly but stern director, is safely regimented. Soon, rightly believing in her own ability to manage her life without surrogate parents, Lynn shakes off the turn-of-the-century chastity regulation. To the delight of Baldwin's widespread female readership, Lynn shares an apartment with a tiled bathroom, goes out with different suitors, and eagerly seeks out the shows, films, and other entertainments increasingly available in the modern city. She smokes, though sparingly; she know her way around a cocktail; and she has no intention of marrying soon, or, perhaps, marrying at all. In comparison to a century of hard-pressed Yankee and, later, ethnic girls from equally genteel (or genteelly impoverished) backgrounds, she is happy in the workplace. We even, for a change, know what she does there: she researches the financial backgrounds of prospective trust-fund clients for Seacoast Bank, and she does it well indeed.

While billed as a romance novelist and often one of the upper crust, Baldwin thus captured Lynn as a new type of womanly resolve. Central to this determination was the workaday world dismissed as humdrum or cautioned against by generations of Victorian writers. By the early 1930s, when
Skyscraper
first appeared,

It is difficult to recapture the avid curiosity this by-now familiar type produced in the years between the waning of Victorianism and the Second World War. Artists like Isabel Bishop even used the Renaissance fresco technique to paint rather proletarian-looking office girls, at ease in the crowd of business and mendicant types. Bishop's free-spirited young women seem to chat nonstop around Fourteenth Street, refreshing their makeup, and poring over pulp romances like
Skyscraper
.

Bishop's brand of social realism, however, was never Baldwin's aim. In distinct contrast to the radical heroines of Agnes Smedley's farm-girl-to-radical saga
Daughter of Earth
(1929) and Meridel Le Sueur's Bottom Dogs-to-survival novel
The Girl
(1939), Lynn grows very little in the course of the narrative. All of the people around her, whose ethics are shakier, must learn (or refuse) to live up to her high standards—fantasy indeed.

The hard-bitten stenographers, typists, and gal Fridays who, conscious of the male gaze, pulled up their skirts an inch or two, and gossiped vernacularly in parks and luncheonettes were not the ladylike figures whom Lynn Harding and her prim boss, Sarah Dennet, represent.
⁹
Baldwin concurs with Lynn Harding's wish, in modern terms, to “have it all.” But how was that possible without some kind of compromise in such a hardscrabble time?

The Depression-Era Surround

It is no accident that
Skyscraper
is set soon after the stock market's Great Crash, when dishonest market manipulations were especially heinous. Unlike most “escape” novelists, Baldwin gives her heroine's choices a virtuous capitalist overlay. Even though Baldwin doesn't question capitalism directly, there nevertheless is a dichotomy between “good” capitalism, as represented by Lynn, and “bad” capitalism, as represented by her would-be lover, the amoral lawyer David Dwight and his insider-trading tactics. Indeed, the capitalist system that animates the many lives and businesses in the Seacoast building and a thousand others in Manhattan is particularized through Lynn Harding's moral dilemma. Her otherwise honorable love interest, Tom Shepard, could dig himself out of his frustrating, poorly paid work by following a stock tip overheard on the Seacoast grapevine. To do so would jeopardize his relationship with Lynn, whose loyalty to the company reflects an implicit belief that the economic system will recover by itself if people at the top do not engage in chicanery. Lynn confides her troubles to Dwight, the financial and sexual predator. Already well-off, he represents capitalism run amok, for his only motive is profit, whether he risks ruining Seacoast or not. The intertwining of Dwight's exploitative sexual and monetary tactics is but a stand in the larger narrative, but Baldwin so constructs her defense of honorable (feminine?) entrepreneurship that by novel's end his dual punishment is near. And it is, of course, no accident that he will receive it at the hands of women like the upright Lynn Harding.

Punitive or not, Baldwin's women, it should be added, never relinquish the banner of gentility. Baldwin was a woman who abhorred four-letter words, except, as she remarked, those like “love” and “hope.”
¹⁰
She was seemingly a product of the social benefits of money and a finishing-school education. She married Hugh Cuthrell, the President of the Brooklyn Union Gas
Company, soon had a fourteen-room, 8.5-acre home in Westport, Connecticut, and mothered four children. But she also won a series of lucrative Hollywood movie contracts and serialization in leading women's magazines.

Neither Baldwin's social cachet nor her popular appeal accounts for
Skyscraper
's range of allusion to the era's hard times. She took in the life of a young woman who feared unemployment more than spinsterhood. Pulp fiction the novel may be, but the young women's conversational fascinations with boyfriends, fashions, and nightclub life disguise real fears. Even Lynn, wooed by a millionaire, involuntarily recalls the office scrubwomen “earning their musty daily bread” (70).

These realities surface occasionally rather than inform Lynn Harding's world. She is a Midwestern doctor's daughter, and her New York City circle is white, Protestant, and middle-class. Like many of her real-life counterparts, Lynn quit college after a year at a state university because her overextended father was having a hard time paying her tuition. Lynn's downward mobility, though, prompted no reflections on class difference, much less on class struggle. One would never know from Baldwin's novel, that New York in the waning years of the Hoover administration was characterized by breadlines, street corner socialists, mass demonstrations orchestrated by the Communist Party, or widespread unrest. Furthermore, on the rare occasions that they are mentioned at all, the novel is unenlightened about sexually or racially liminal groups like gays, Asians, and Jews.

Beyond the saga of Lynn's love affairs, what matters is that she can support herself. In that, she is representative of the one-quarter of American women who worked as wage earners, many the sole supports of their families. Also fairly typical for the time is that Lynn, as the fiancée of a low-level financial analyst, risks losing her job. Her boss, Sarah Dennet, who never married, informs her soberly that women whose husbands are employed must leave the bank.

Another representative character is Mara Burt, who works with Lynn but, a married woman, supports her spouse. Together with Jennie Le Grande (née Smith), a model who works else
where in the giant building, the three young women feel the pressures of what was called the “back-to-the-home movement.” Much of the badinage they exchange may swerve this truth, but there are scenes in which each woman placates the man in her life with promises to curb her ambitions. For a pulp author, Baldwin also spends a surprising amount of time on these men's fears of being unmanned, even castrated, by women's new economic importance.

This masculine bitterness was a theme running through novels from
Gone With the Wind
to the Greenwich Village leftist's intelligentsia-and-adultery novel
The Unpossessed
(Tess Slesinger, 1934). It is worth noting that while left-wing women novelists catered to a decidedly more intellectual audience than Baldwin's, they shared her concern with the resentments of the male workplace. Allowing for differences in depth of treatment and tone, leftist literary women were saddened by the costs of the emancipation they had so ardently sought through the Communist Party or its allied causes. All too often, husbands and lovers punished them psychologically for having jobs. Apologetic for competence, humbled (or isolated) by masculine anger, Baldwin's women join Slesinger's to pay a heavy price for being good at what they do.

Skyscraper
even borders on the subversive. A newly enlightened Tom Shepard muses:

This passage, like the novel as a while, has its contradictions: the man's decision that they will “work together” may place the woman in the role of receptionist. But the reference to feeling “perfectly at home” at work instead of in the domestic sphere redresses the balance somewhat: as he respects his own work
goals, so he is beginning to respect Lynn's.