11
products, in alloys, in freight transportation, in tariff, in paper and printing, in chain-store
methods and other retails outlets, and in women’s fashions.” She must pay attention to all
phases, including style, for “If the fashion for long hair goes out, the unwary hairpin
manufacturer goes out.”
26
Finally, she alludes to looks:
The woman banking official is usually a charming person who has all the poise
and grace of a diplomat. She is dressed simply but beautifully. She wears the
unobtrusive jewels of the well-bred woman to enhance her own sense of aesthetic
fitness. She talks with clients, business associates and subordinates as perfectly as
she talks to her guests in her drawing room. In other words, she is the twentieth-
century equivalent of the successful banker of the 90’s who wore silk hat,
sideburns, and a gold watch chain over his impeccable waistcoat.
27
Here, then, modernity and tradition, femininity and industry, come together to empower
the employed woman. The old frame, which conflated tradition and femininity on one
hand and modernity and industry on the other, but kept the two separate, has been
subverted and reworked.
After Fleischman’s series, however, LHJ reverted to stereotypes. In 1930 and 1931,
the magazine ran another series on women in various careers: journalism, world trade,
advertising, sales, nutrition. The series offers a glimpse of the struggle between
stereotypes about women’s supposedly natural limitations and a more progressive view,
even in copy ostensibly supportive of women’s careers. For although Fleischman had
tried to reframe the employed woman as simultaneously feminine, modern, and powerful,
and although she had questioned ideas about women’s “nature” into a discussion of
26
Fleischman, April 1930, 26.
27
Fleischman, April 1930, 232.
Convention