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“Take a Letter, Mr. Jones”: Reframing Women’s Careers in Ladies’ Home Journal
(WORK IN PROGRESS)
Women may be lovely and feminine and successful in a career. They
may marry and have children--and still work.
Doris E. Fleischman
“Women in Business”
Ladies’ Home Journal, January 1930
The only thing necessary is for a woman to forget that she is a
woman, and the men will forget it too.
Catharine Oglesby
“The Woman Salesman”
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1931
In her series of articles “Women in Business,” which ran in the Ladies’ Home Journal
in 1930, Doris Fleischman says many women of that era suffered from “infantile
dilettantism” when it came to paid labor.
When women go into business with this background of infantile dilettantism, they
are as handicapped as the Chinese woman whose feet are tightly bound. They will
not exercise their intellectual muscles; they will not develop intellectual brawn or
attain an independent posture. They will always depend on the men in their
offices instead of walking confidently in swinging strides beside them. It
behooves the young girl to start when she is young to consider herself seriously as
a future worker.
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Fleischman was not the first to speak of women’s “handicap.” In “The Professional
Point of View,” published in LHJ in 1927, journalist Emily Newell Blair argues that the
single biggest hindrance to women’s success in the workplace was lack of a “professional
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Doris E. Fleischman. “Women in Business.” Ladies’ Home Journal. January 1930: 16-17 and 59-62. The
series began in January 1930 and appeared again in March and April (under the title “Jobs for Women”)
that year. Fleischman, of course, is one of the early practitioners of public relations. She was married to
Edward L. Bernays, often credited with founding the field.
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