6
feminine and be successful in a career. They may marry and have children--and
still work.
13
Fleischman’s solutions prefigured such late twentieth-century antidotes to girls’ self-
doubt as Take Our Daughters to Work Day and Mary Pipher’s popular book on
adolescent self-doubt, Reviving Ophelia.
14
“At fifteen,” Fleischman writes, girls are
“afraid to be a grind or a serious thinker, because boys shun this type of young woman.”
15
She urges women give to up this attitude, developing ambition and concrete plans.
Moreover, they should look beyond stenography, taking clerical jobs if they must but
only to get a foot in the door.
16
Fathers might help if they would take their daughters to
work and initiate them into the business world.
17
A focus on career choice is also central to Fleischman’s work. Women must be honest
with themselves about what they love to do, she says in her second article.
18
A woman
who loves to cook, but who toils in the statistical department of a bank instead of
pursuing a career as a chef, is shortchanging herself. A woman who loves to garden but
sells real estate instead of being a landscape designer is doing the same. One has to
choose what is right by self-scrutiny, she says. “Job shopping and job testing are the most
wasteful, demoralizing and haphazard of all methods.”
19
Women could choose careers
more wisely if they simply paid attention to what they like to do. She offers an example:
Fleurette paints her furniture in bright new colors every few months, and dyes the
13
Fleischman, January 1930, 16.
14
Mary Pipher. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. New York: Putnam, 1994.
15
Fleischman, January 1930, 16.
16
Fleischman, January 1930, 17.
17
Fleischman, January 1930, 16.
18
Fleischman. “Women in Business.” Ladies’ Home Journal. March 1930: 24-25, 229-230 and 232.
19
Fleischman, March 1930, 24.
Convention