8
“If more first-rate conscientious workers enter this field and are willing to learn the
arduous technical ends of architecture, to master the problems of elevator shafts,
plumbing pipes and heating fixtures, and to face the special problems of human contacts,
it will become more and more favorable for women as well as men.”
22
Illustrations for the articles belie how difficult it was to visualize employed women in
a non-stereotypical way. Blair’s article is illustrated by two very small, oval drawings--
one of a woman holding a baby, the other of a woman at work in a kitchen. They are
placed so that the woman in the kitchen gazes up admiringly at the woman holding the
baby. These small, generic drawings seem to function like the “Clip Art” of the day,
breaking up the gray copy more than illustrating its contents, but they are inappropriate to
the topic. Did the editors realize the paradox? Did they have no other art to run, a
possibility that suggests a lack of stock visual language with which to depict employed
women? Or were these domestic images intended as commentary on women’s “real”
work?
The art that illustrates Fleischman’s articles is similarly contradictory. Formal portraits
of successful women illustrate the January and March articles. However, the March
article also features a small drawing of a woman in overalls holding the throttle of a large
set of gears. If we apply the theories of Roland Marchand, who argues that the
disproportionately tall women in interwar ads often looked more like “Art Deco
figurines” than like real women, we see that she is “modern.”
23
Like the ads that
22
Fleischman, March 1930, 25.
23
Exaggerated into “geometric abstraction” as decorative objects, women were often grotesquely out of
proportion compared to real women. Some would have been over nine feet tall in real life, Marchand says,
with feet and toes that “appeared to have emerged from a pencil sharpener.”
See Roland Marchand.
Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985), 179-181.
Convention