2
point of view.”
2
As an example, she tells the story of a young woman who took an
afternoon off from her job as a lawyer’s stenographer because her mother wanted her to
come home. There was no emergency. The mother was hosting a women’s club meeting
and wanted her daughter to help with refreshments. When the lawyer told the
stenographer that he had in essence paid for her mother’s maid service, the daughter was
confused. How could she stay at the office if her mother wanted her at home?
Blair argues that women long used to donating their services as homemakers or
volunteers had no idea that a fundamentally different perspective was needed when
working for pay. A volunteer works “if she can.” A professional works “as she
contracted,” she says. “These two phrases measure the difference between the
professional and the nonprofessional point of view.”
3
Both Fleischman and Blair, writing in the late 1920s, were trying to reframe the way
employed women saw themselves and were seen by others. That they did so in a
conventional women’s publication, Ladies’ Home Journal, is significant. This was a
space constructed for women, but it was generally devoted to traditional female roles, and
its role as the bible of domesticity was widespread. As Jennifer Scanlon argues, LHJ
“increasingly came to define womanhood for the early twentieth century and beyond and
for the middle class and beyond.”
4
This paper looks at articles published in LHJ during the interwar period that attempted
to frame women’s paid employment in positive ways, focusing particularly on the work
of Fleischman and her contemporaries. It is part of a much larger project exploring
2
Emily Newell Blair. “The Professional Point of View.” Ladies’ Home Journal. August 1927: 27 and 159.
3
Blair, 159.
4
Jennifer Scanlon. Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of
Consumer Culture.(New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 7.
Convention