7
curtains to go with it. She does this on Sundays and on her holidays from the
rubber-tire factory where she works in the complaint department. How much
happier she might have been in a textile-manufacturing studio where her talent for
colors and her love of beauty might have laid the foundation of a successful
career.
20
Fleischman’s examples reveal her rather obvious rhetorical strategy, designed to
thwart backlash while blending women’s traditional interests with career ideas. The
talents discussed (cooking, gardening, working with textiles) are consistent with
traditional femininity, but she does not tell the women to be cooks and seamstresses.
Instead, she offers more profitable, professional alternatives (chef, landscape architect,
working in a design studio). Unlike the “Woman as Exception,” frame, which pits
traditional roles against careers, Fleischman incorporates the two.
The article also describes various professions in detail: art, architecture, law, literature,
scientific research, acting, and public relations. She includes training, starting pay, and a
list of women in the field. Although encouraging, she is candid about obstacles. For
example, “A woman lawyer find life much more difficult than a male lawyer of even less
ability. Law is based on custom. Therefore, law is conservative and everything that has to
do with law is conservative. Few important law firms admit women associates. And few
important business organizations engage women lawyers.”
21
Similarly, “Architecture is
so new an enterprise for women that it is full of psychological barriers. Large
architectural firms do not like to accept women” for they believe laborers are
demoralized by women supervisors and that the public does not trust women. However,
20
Fleischman, March 1930, 24.
21
Fleischman, March 1930, 25. Some women do make it in law, she says, but women should not expect to
enter law as stenographers, for it is “not politic.”
Convention