by Megan Hustad
I had the first twinge of awareness that I might be in this kind of sticky, no-win situation a couple of years into a job I loved. All my early progress had sputtered slowly to a halt. The momentum I enjoyed during my rosy-cheeked, eager-beaver first months was completely lost. The details aren’t especially interesting, but the trajectory—for everyone—goes something like this: Year one you’re on the fast track. Year two you’re still on track, or so you think, but there just doesn’t seem to be as much enthusiasm in the air for you. So you consider a haircut. You rearrange the piles on your desk, go to the supply closet for more pushpins, and stick up some different pictures in your cubicle. At the beginning of year three, there’s still no measurable change in your status, though your efforts still seem to be appreciated. That is, to the extent you can determine, because no one in the office is telling you much. Meanwhile, people are hired from the outside while the ones inside stay unpromoted. You start to wonder if you’ll ever make it to the next rung.
The immediate effect of this game of existential Scuttle is that you’ll start dabbling in routine bouts of self-flagellation. You speculate wildly but without conviction, knowing only that you seem to be failing. A former colleague of mine, after working five years for a woman I knew to be a cold, cold fish, with no promotion in sight, tentatively ventured that perhaps—he wasn’t sure, “It could just be me”—that his boss enjoyed humiliating people. Seeing as how this very same woman had repeatedly made me feel like a slatternly chambermaid who couldn’t be trusted to keep her apron on straight, I gently suggested that, um, yeah, maybe he was onto something.
When you’re stuck in the shame spiral—not getting better projects, more recognition, more money, more love—you rarely pause to consider that your powerlessness, and the fact that it looms indefinitely into the future, might just have nothing to do with you. Sometimes the problem is bad management, or an asthmatic corporate culture, or some other rot that set in long before you darkened the company doorstep and will continue long after you leave the place behind. This idea can be very hard to grasp. Abdicating responsibility is at odds with the whole self-reliant, make-it-happen strain in American success literature to this point. When in reality, the whole idea of a meritocracy ruins many a striver’s Sunday night.34 Even in pay-your-dues industries, where people are supposed to start at the bottom, there are always some higher-ups who employ deliberate amnesia, forgetting their own mad scramble to the top, and go on blithely assuming that everyone’s potential is commensurate with their current station. In other words, if you’re still working near the bottom, you must be a bottom feeder. After prolonged exposure to these people, you start to wonder whether they might be right.
Looking your powerlessness squarely in the face, however, can actually be pretty liberating. Which brings us back to Helen Gurley Brown. Gurley Brown was writing for a generation of young women who had to consider the possible forcible removal of their underwear when getting dressed for work every day. It was a time when offices still employed gal Fridays—glorified gofers even more lowly and underpaid than secretaries. It was when a secretary emptied her boss’s ashtray. When her time was considered his to waste. The bit of pop culture that really put this era in perspective for me is the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which premiered on Broadway in 1961. One scene has a highly competent female secretary—been with the company for years—cooing at a young man trying to break into business. “You have the cool clear eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth,” she trills. “Yet there’s that upturned chin and the grin of impetuous youth. Oh, I believe in you. I believe in you” The young man—a window washer just the week before—is promoted to junior executive after only three days on the job. No mention is ever made of her potential.
Helen Gurley Brown herself had seventeen secretarial jobs before landing the ad agency stint that led to the copy-writing job that finally led to professional recognition—sometime around age thirty. She couldn’t have believed in meritocracy if she tried. And she has some interesting things to say about feeling—and being—stuck.
Gurley Brown’s route to the editor in chief’s spot at Cosmopolitan, which she landed in 1966, was a long and circuitous one, and she got it largely because she’d written a bestseller called Sex and the Single Girl. The book was everything the title suggested. “I think marriage is insurance for the worst years of your life,” she wrote. “During your best years you don’t need a husband. You do need a man of course every step of the way, and they are often cheaper emotionally and a lot more fun by the dozen.” In the year 1962 this was enough to afford her instant notoriety.
(Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a very different but no less galvanizing book, was still a year away.)
Kicky title aside, fostering a sexual revolution was not foremost on Gurley Brown’s agenda, and what’s most remarkable about her work today is the number of paragraphs she devotes to “Squirming, Worming, Inching, and Pinching Your Way to the Top.” While men of her generation were beginning to find the whole business of being businessmen stifling, for her it was terrifically exciting. Sex and the Single Girl was followed by Sex and the Office two years later. By that time, Gurley Brown had found that many young women were uncomfortable with the idea of ascending the ranks; they would rather sit in the stenographic pool unnoticed by any coworker who wouldn’t eventually be proposing marriage. Other women worried that professional success would cost them the other good things in life—husbands, children, comfortable homes. And some were very concerned about the unsettling effect of having single girls regularly parading around the office.35 But Gurley Brown was out to win hearts and minds: the office could and should be a veritable pleasure cruise for young women. Why? Because “being great at a terrific job is sexy.” Because “when you start having a rather terrific success in your job, it’s like little firecrackers going off inside you… pop, pop, pop. Sometimes it’s a few days between pops, but the sensation is a bit like the sweet, glow-y feeling at the beginning of a love affair.” With all the fun to be had, sex itself was almost beside the point. Unless a young woman was, in her words, a Bona Fide Nester, and content to spend her days at home washing windows, she really ought to be working. The repetition of “sex” in her titles just obscured the fact that Gurley Brown was really most concerned with the mechanics of upward mobility, clothes on.
Gurley Brown’s underlying message was that nothing prepared you for power like having to wait for it—and the single girl would do well to use this period of relative powerlessness to study its ways, means, and perversities. That included developing a clear understanding of what factors you could control and which ones you couldn’t. Gurley Brown had a rare gift for removing her ego from the equation—even in the most intimate of circumstances, even when sex and work mingled just like the calamity howlers insisted it would. In a later memoir, she would confess that for a spell in the late 1940s she’d been a kept woman: she’d spend the day typing and filing, and then she and her boss would knock off around 4:00 p.m., have a few drinks in his office—tossing back Harveys Bristol Cream Sherry like it was Coca-Cola—then retire to the studio apartment he provided for her. Even in these circumstances, she suffered no delusions that her boss wanted her for her interoffice talents. No, he was merely attracted to her because she emitted “waves of waif-dom and vulnerability like a civet cat throwing off musk.”
That clearheaded diagnosis is probably hindsight at work— the seasoned wisdom of an experienced older woman. I imagine things were more confusing at the time. They certainly were for me, as they are for most everybody who feels their abilities are going unrecognized. So that leaves us with the question: Other than the unmistakable sign of seeing your underwear on the floor, how can you tell when your organizational powerlessness is structural, not personal? How do you know when it’s not about you?
The first sign is a certain opacity about procedure. Stephen, now in adult education, worked at a magazine right after college. He remembers being
mystified by the office dynamics; the editors were secretive in ways that baffled him. They would never go out of their way to explain how things were done, even to the entry-level staff, and there was something furtive in their step as they raced by certain cubicles. It was not that they wouldn’t be forthcoming when posed a direct question—about a bit of magazine business, say—but their responses were usually preceded by a silence long enough to imply that they were making calculations about just what to share. He couldn’t figure out how a junior person got an article in the magazine. After months of wondering what he was doing wrong—if anything—Stephen came up with a theory: The editors felt that only once you knew how things were done could you start asking for things. If you started asking for things (like, say, the chance to write a piece) then they—not liking to think of themselves as entirely unreasonable creatures—would eventually have to say yes. But that could mean they’d get dragged into supervising more of your work, or if you turned out to be good, that they’d have more competition to contend with, and ultimately it was just easier and simpler if no young eager beavers made any moves. (Other than getting up to make more coffee.)
He may have been slightly paranoid, but it’s true that some organizations—and from everything I’ve heard, this includes the blue chips of any industry: Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Google, Alfred A. Knopf, HBO, and the like—think you should be grateful just to be swiveling in their chairs. The second sign you may be mired in corporate dysfunction is when you can’t—despite your best, sincerest efforts—discern any straightforward relationship between the amount and quality of the work someone puts in and the extent and degree of their influence. In every office there is at least one high-ranked individual whose prestige and pay package irritate the larger, lower-ranked half of the organization. According to Sex and the Office, this is partly a function of available stock. There simply aren’t enough secure, well-adjusted people in the general population to populate the ranks of management. Any given floor of any given office will shelter a couple of charismatic, highly effective individuals—and a whole lot more average sorts. Inevitably some of the average ones will bubble up to the higher echelons, and ultimately decision-making power will be held by a loose conglomeration of lackluster characters. This process is always, Gurley Brown said, facilitated by managerial neuroses. “A very insecure or confused boss will surround himself with idiots while perfectly capable people are either fired or left unused,” she noted.
Her goal in pointing this out was to smooth the foreheads of frustrated climbers, but the idea that mediocrity ruled the day, and that substandard employees were never demoted, was already gaining cultural traction. A few years after Sex and the Single Girl, Dr. Laurence J. Peter, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California, would vault himself out of academic obscurity with The Peter Principle, a book that asked why advanced societies were floundering in inefficiency. The Peter Principle (cowritten by Raymond Hull) was the yin to Gurley Brown’s yang, and its message was less than reassuring. Car manufacturers installed gas tanks where they were vulnerable to rear impact; the school system consistently churned out graduates who couldn’t read; and going to see a play too often resulted in a really boring night out. “This incompetence would be annoying enough if it were confined to public works, politics, space travel and such vast, remote fields of human endeavor,” Hull wrote. “But it is not. It is close at hand—an ever-present, pestiferous nuisance.” Stupid things kept on happening, Dr. Peter explained, because people were promoted from positions in which they were completely competent into positions that were beyond their abilities—he called this their “level of incompetence.” Yet The System required regular promotions. If no one could be shown to have forged ahead through dutiful service to the company, then The System would start to break down.
Peter’s principle was simple: “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence,” and everyone’s experience of work—unless you were a freak of nature or a solitary genius—was controlled by the Peter Principle. Some employees would reach their incompetence level very early in their careers and never get promoted. But even exceptionally smart people weren’t immune, as they’d just move from areas of competence to greater competence until, over time, demonstrating they could handle the requirements of each new post qualified them for another promotion. The cream of the crop rose until they soured, and the only real work that got done was done by those who had not yet reached their level of incompetence.
Which brings us to the third sign that it’s not about you. Gurley Brown’s recollections of her early career are filled with anecdotes that illustrate what Peter and Hull termed “the disruptive power of achievement”—the idea that there are times and places where being good at your job, where doing everything you think is right, proves disastrous. If she didn’t initially understand this, her experiences after escaping from the secretarial pool made it more than clear. Gurley Brown’s first big break was a promotion from secretary to copywriter—she became one of three “girl” copywriters at the Foote, Cone & Belding ad agency in Los Angeles.36 Of this bunch, says Gurley Brown, the most creative was fired. (The fired girl then found a job at another agency where she became “the darling” and started working on multimillion-dollar campaigns.) Back at Foote, Cone & Belding, the second girl copywriter got fed up and eventually left. Gurley Brown, the last one standing, kept herself busy by writing the Max Factor advice column in Seventeen magazine. She thought she was in management’s good graces. But every month, five to seven guys swooped in to rewrite every inch of column she churned out, and eventually the assignment was taken away from her. She kept doing busywork but slowly caught on to the fact that management wanted nothing from her beyond the basic, menial requirements of her job. Being the last girl standing made her a lingering reminder of earlier bad decisions.
It gets confusing. When mired in the lower ranks, you naturally assume that a new assignment means an uptick in status. But it doesn’t. Melissa, an event planner, was finally given a plum client by her boss, which she took as license to say, “Hey, do you think we could let up on the photocopying and other stuff?” He said, “Uh, no. No, keep doing what you’re doing.” So he was being petty, but she was essentially asking permission to slack. (Who would do the photocopying then?) Only the most Zen bosses will agree to this and mean it.
Much of Gurley Brown’s advice to young women on the job is thus implicitly tied to the Peter Principle’s bedrock rule of organizational life: The hierarchy must be preserved. Which is not to say a girl—or, nowadays, any stymied employee—couldn’t or shouldn’t be plotting her own revolution. It meant she had to perform acts of deference to keep things humming—the hierarchy had to look like it was being preserved even if it wasn’t. A junior employee had to be efficient and always on top of things, to be sure, but if one’s goal was a “sexy office life with marvelous things happening to you,” it made strategic sense not to act like you were gunning for the top all the time. No boss enjoys the sensation of someone snapping at his heels. Better to act —better to be—wholly emotionally invested in whatever minutiae they toss into your lap. A girl started to get professional traction not by demanding to be taken more seriously, but by being acutely sensitive to every interaction’s psychological undercurrents. For Gurley Brown, the hierarchical was always emotional. And once you understood it wasn’t all about you, you had to act as if nothing was about you. As she explained in Sex in the Office:
You’re going to hit me with an iced mackerel, but I have to tell you that the way you get the most out of your job is to give the most. You should feel empathy in your bosom—it doesn’t tickle or anything—if you are to get better and better jobs and go on to where the money and deep-piled fun are. When you’re trying to get a number for your boss and it’s busy, busy, busy, you’re as vexed as he is. When you help another girl type some reports, you care that she has a deadline. When the company gets a new client, you’re thrilled.
At this point, it may help to remember how many hoops prominent women of the time jumped through to make their power palatable for mass consumption. When Ida Rosenthal, founder and president of Maidenform Bras, was sent in 1959 as the only female member of a U.S. trade delegation to Russia, she prepared some interesting remarks for the occasion: “If [Russian women] wore bras they would be happier and prettier. The men would be happier. Consequently, the whole country would be more contented and I think Russia’s relations with the U.S. and the world might improve.” In all fairness, this is how she was quoted by a United Press Syndicate reporter. It’s possible she said something less silly, and she certainly did right by her company with that plug. Still, you can’t help but sense an impulse to downplay her savvy.
Couching one’s ambition in enthusiasm and endless resourcefulness was also better, Gurley Brown continued, than making sure you were never exploited along the way. So when asked to do just about anything, she suggested you try this approach:
Of course it can be done and yes, of course you’ll help. “Look, you take this end of the desk and lift and I’ll scotch the rug under” is far better dialogue than, “I’m not straining my back—the stupid building ought to tack the carpets down.”
And then you also play nursemaid. (“Of course you are a little mother to all the growing boys around the place. You dispense
Band-Aids and smiles to anyone who is wounded in the job, aspirin and Bromo to those who got the wounds the night before.”) And then flirt. (“You compliment them when they do well. You are charmed by them much as you would be by a date. What’s so difficult about that?”) When stuck, you ingratiate yourself by appealing to sentiment as much as, if not more than, intellect.
