10
1 Wall Street, New York City.
“’Dear Kate: Come on over to lunch with me at the Bankers Club on Friday
and I’ll tell you why we can’t lend you more than ten million on the collateral
you
offer.
“’By the way, I’m taking your small daughter to the circus next Saturday,
although you don’t know it.’
“That’s all, Mr. Jones, thank you--oh, you might get the office of the Secretary
of the Treasury on the wire, and find out when she is coming up from
Washington. I can arrange to see her about the English situation at any time. One
more thing--would you mind calling up the British Embassy. Yes, I’ll talk to the
Ambassador.”
Fiction? Of course. Fantastic? Not exactly. I prefer to call it a prophetic close-up
of the advancing future when women Owen Youngs will do business with
feminine Andrew Mellons; when Poincares will confer with the weaker sex on
financial terms of equality, and when women will help shape the affairs of
America as they promise to. They have made quite a start.
25
The strategy here is blatant role reversal. As it continues, the article looks at
opportunities in such modern industries as manufacturing, food production, agriculture,
merchandising, and banking, but as in Fleischman’s earlier work, the text blends notions
of traditional femininity with modernity and power. A woman who wants to manufacture
hairpins “should be interested in the mining of the ore, in the smelting, in steel by-
25
Fleischman, April 1930, 26. Owen Young was a lawyer and industrialist (1874-1962); Andrew Mellon
(1855-1937) was a financier and was Secretary of the Treasury from 1921-1932; Raymond Poincare (1860-
1934) was President of France from 1913-1920. The Random House College Dictionary, revised ed.
(1988).
Convention