Enter Helen

by Brooke Hauser

  It was around this difficult time that, in 1957, Betty was asked to conduct a survey of her Smith classmates leading up to their fifteen-year reunion. Though she was hesitant at first—she felt guilty that she hadn’t done more with her Smith education—Betty agreed to do the survey, largely because of a controversial book that had just come out called Modern Women: The Lost Sex. The authors, Freudian psychoanalyst Marynia Farnham and journalist Ferdinand Lundberg, argued that too much education was making American women unhappy at home. Fired up, Betty decided to use her Smith questionnaire findings to write a feature article for a major women’s magazine—and McCall’s wanted to run it.

  Drawing on her background in both psychology and journalism, Betty threw herself into developing the questionnaire with Marion “Mario” Ingersoll Howell, the vice president of the Class of 1942, and another Smith classmate, Anne Mather Montero. After several brainstorming sessions, they came up with a list of questions that voiced many of Betty’s own personal doubts and disappointments. The final survey asked about marriage, sex, children, household chores, finances, reading habits, and religious and political beliefs, but it also featured more ambiguous categories, such as “The Other Part of Your Life” (“Did you have career ambitions?” “If your main occupation is homemaker, do you find it totally fulfilling?”) and one tellingly called “You, Personal” (“In what ways have you changed inside as a person?” “What difficulties have you found in working out your role as a woman?”).

  They eventually received two hundred responses from Betty’s classmates. While they appeared to have picture-perfect lives with nice homes, husbands, and children, many of the interviewees said they felt depressed and trapped—they just didn’t know why. Betty tried to publish an article about her findings, suggesting that it wasn’t too much education that was making women unhappy, but rather their limited roles in society, but McCall’s no longer wanted it. After a year of rewrites and rejections, Betty decided to write a book exposing the truth that no women’s magazine dared to print. She had a much easier time finding a book publisher: Her agent sent her to Norton to meet an editor named George Brockway, who listened intently to her proposal for a book about American women’s disillusionment with domestic life. As it happened, Brockway’s wife, a graduate of Bryn Mawr, had just given birth to their thirteenth child. (A few years later, she went back to school and earned her Ph.D.) After that meeting, Betty got a $3,000 book advance and began writing her book, which would take her several years to complete.

  By the spring of 1963, dog-eared copies of The Feminine Mystique had made their way into suburban living rooms from Schenectady to Salt Lake City. Housewives recognized themselves in the book’s portraits of women who didn’t know the cause of their mysterious blisters or bouts of depression. “Sometimes a woman would tell me that the feeling gets so strong she runs out of the house and walks through the streets. Or she stays inside of her house and cries. Or her children tell her a joke, and she doesn’t laugh because she doesn’t hear it,” Friedan wrote. “I talked to women who had spent years on the analyst’s couch, working out their ‘adjustment to the feminine role,’ their blocks to ‘fulfillment as a wife and mother.’ But the desperate tone in these women’s voices, and the look in their eyes, was the same as the tone and the look of other women, who were sure they had no problem, even though they did have a strange feeling of desperation.”

  The Feminine Mystique began with a question—“Is this all?”—and ended with a plan of action. The last chapter was titled “A New Life Plan for Women.” Women needed to stop pretending that housework was a career. “The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own,” Friedan wrote. “There is no other way.”

  SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, Friedan’s message embedded itself into Helen Gurley Brown’s consciousness as she was writing and revising Sex and the Office. “I’ll tell you this,” Helen typed, addressing the legions of unhappy housewives, newly outed. “Women in offices never have to wonder who they are. They know who they are, and nobody lets them forget it!” A career girl didn’t have to search for her identity, she argued: She was the secretary, the actress, or the executive. People needed her and depended on her.

  But they also judged her. In 1963 the career woman was as maligned as the single girl had been two years before when Helen started writing Sex and the Single Girl. Helen had been looking for something to rail against, and she found it in the advice of Dr. Benjamin Spock, who suggested that working mothers were doing a disservice to their children; in the housewife who snarled over the career girl’s success; in the working girl who dropped her job as soon as she found a husband; and in the blatant misogyny of writers like Philip Wylie, who authored a vicious article, “The Career Woman,” for Playboy’s January 1963 issue. “They call her brilliant, this highly paid Circe,” Wylie wrote. “If she is, however, she is also, outside her career, more ignorant than institutionalized Mongoloids. . . . On her throne she sits, this skirt-girt squid, the she-tycoon, caring only about herself and heedless of the damage she is doing to the national psyche.” (Two decades earlier, in his 1942 book, Generation of Vipers, the woman-bashing Wylie blamed society’s ills on “momism,” a term he coined to describe the phenomenon of American mothers smothering and emasculating their sons.)

  The realization that the career girl was the new single girl hit Helen like a rolling metal filing cabinet. The working woman was just the outcast du jour. Helen felt her plight deeply, the unfairness and the injustice of it, but she knew she had to be careful not to sound scolding, or else another Philip Wylie would come along and lump her in with the rest of the shrieking she-wolves. She had to be subtle. And witty. She had to make people laugh before they would listen. So, she wrote a little riddle.

  “We haven’t been introduced though I may have been pointed out to you at parties,” she began. It’s likely that she was talking to a group of men, and that the person doing the pointing was a woman, gossiping with a gaggle of other women. “I might as well stop playing ‘I’ve Got a Secret’ and tell you who I am!” Helen wrote. “I’m one of those driven, compulsive, man-eating, penis-envying, emasculating, lacquered, female wolverines known as a career woman. Frankly . . . I’ve been about as much in vogue in recent years as rattan bedroom furniture. Rosalind Russell used to play me in movies of the Forties, but nobody wants to play me anymore.”

  In her signature, snappy style, Helen went on to list twenty-four reasons why women should work, suggesting that instead of becoming professional housewives they consider becoming psychiatrists, nurses, schoolteachers, social workers, and medical professionals, as well as entering fields monopolized by men, like physics and engineering. The chapter “Come with Me to the Office” was a clear invitation to women to follow her up the ladder, one rung at a time. Helen wanted it to be her first chapter, but it landed on Berney’s desk with a thud. He was all for the sections on how to catch a man in the office, but for the most part he thought Helen was wasting space encouraging girls to get ahead in their careers. One day, he suggested, she could write a separate manual for the really ambitious girls.

  “Most girls—probably 90 per cent—who work in an office are not pyramid-climbers,” he told Helen in a letter. “You happened to belong to the 10 per cent.”

  But Helen argued right back. She was willing to tone down that chapter, not to lose it entirely. The book needed a cause beyond instructing office girls how to flirt—she wanted them to soar. The typical working girl felt sorry for herself, just as the single girl had before, she pointed out to Berney. She was all of eighteen when she took her first job at radio station KHJ in Hollywood to pay off her tuition for secretarial school. She worked because she had to, because she didn’t have a choice, and at first it felt like just another punishment that poor girls had to endure. It wasn’t until she landed at Foote, Cone & Belding that she found her calling and a boss who was willing to take a chance on her as a copywriter. And where would she
be now if not for that chance?

  “Tell her she not only isn’t unfortunate to be working but has the best of all possible worlds,” Helen pleaded with Berney. If he insisted on cutting all the getting-ahead-in-a-career stuff, the book would lose its mission, and she would be stuck as a crusader without a cause.

  Maybe it had something to do with the phenomenal success of Betty Friedan’s bestseller, but more and more, Helen Gurley Brown, champion of the single woman, began to set her sights on attracting the married woman she had once mocked. It was time to stamp out the idea that the career girl suffered from some incurable illness that would derail Mother Nature’s plan for her to procreate. A woman’s fulfillment outside of the home was good news for the whole family.

  In a chapter called “Come Back Little Wives, Widows, Divorcees,” Helen made a special plea to the Little Wives to join the working world: “Explain to your husband, if he doesn’t already understand, that you will be a better companion, a more adoring wife and loving mother if you are allowed to take a job,” she advised. “Don’t you see that by working you could have it all?”

  IT WAS ONE thing to try to change the image of the Brown Bag Lunch, and quite another to change the image of the working woman in America. But Helen wanted no less, and she didn’t have to look far to find a poster girl for the glamorous career woman. In the spring of 1963, newly pregnant and still as chic as ever, she was on TV almost as frequently as her husband, whom she might not have met if not for her job.

  Jacqueline Bouvier was twenty-three years old when she began working for the Washington Times-Herald newspaper as “The Inquiring Camera Girl,” a reporting gig that paid her $42.50 a week to interview and photograph notable people around the city, including Richard Nixon. Granted, her questions weren’t exactly hard-hitting. In 1952 she asked six housewives if they thought that Mamie Eisenhower’s bangs would become a nationwide fad. Shortly thereafter, she met a soon-to-be senator named John F. Kennedy, whom she featured in her 1953 column and married the same year. Ten years and two kids later, she had one of the most important jobs in the world as first lady of the United States. How was that for having it all?

  ( 13 )

  WOMEN ALONE

  1963–1964

  “No matter how accustomed to your own community you may become, never grow to feel safe in it. Feel threatened. You are threatened. You are never safe.”

  —Max Wylie, Career Girl, Watch Your Step! 1964

  On August 28, 1963, all eyes were on the nation’s capital, where a massive crowd of 250,000 people gathered for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was a Wednesday, and thousands of New Yorkers had decided to skip work to head south to Washington, D.C., instead. Those who stayed in the city congregated—in boardrooms, barbershops, bars, living rooms, dorm rooms, and newsrooms—to watch a live, black-and-white broadcast of the procession toward the Lincoln Memorial and to hear the melodious but mournful voice of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King as he cried out his vision for equality. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” he told the crowd in a speech invoking the Constitution and the Bible, the spirit of Lincoln and of America itself. As the sun dropped lower in the sky, King’s voice crescendoed, keeping a nation in thrall. But just as the final words of “I Have a Dream” echoed through Washington, a nightmare was unfolding in New York City.

  That same day, two young women were brutally stabbed with kitchen knives in their third-floor apartment at 57 East Eighty-Eighth Street near Madison Avenue, an exclusive address in an affluent neighborhood. The victims were unlikely targets for violence in their doorman-protected building. Janice Wylie was a twenty-one-year-old copy girl at Newsweek who came from a prominent family. Emily Hoffert was a twenty-three-year-old Smith College graduate with a teaching assignment lined up on Long Island.

  A third roommate, Patricia Tolles, later came home to a wrecked flat and called the local precinct before investigating any further herself. Then she called Janice’s parents. By the time the cops showed up, the Wylies were already waiting inside the apartment. Janice’s father, an author and advertising executive named Max Wylie, led the detectives to a shared bedroom, where blood spattered the walls. On the floor, the bodies of the two roommates lay under a blue blanket. One was nude and had been disemboweled; her ankles were bound together by strips of white cloth, curlers still in her hair. That was his daughter, Janice Wylie.

  Less than twenty-four hours later, the news broke: “2 Career Girls Savagely Slain,” trumpeted the New York Daily News, coining a catchy moniker for the double homicide that would soon turn into a city wide obsession. Adding to the drama was a cast of already well-known characters, including Janice’s father, Max, and her uncle, the author Philip Wylie, whose venomous screed on career women Helen Gurley Brown had referenced in an early draft of Sex and the Office. “The Career Girls Murders lit up the city like a hit Broadway show,” T. J. English wrote in his 2011 book, The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge. “The case had innocent female victims, shocking brutality, and the makings of a classic whodunit. . . . The race of the victims, the savagery of the killings, and the social standing of the Wylie family all conspired to make the story a keeper,” what cops and crime reporters called “a good murder at a good address.”

  In the days that followed, the March on Washington receded into the back pages, while tabloids found new ways to package the stories of the dead Career Girls. With both pity and morbid curiosity, New Yorkers read about Janice Wylie, who actually had planned on going to the March on Washington the day she was killed; her father, worried about her safety at such a mass demonstration, convinced her to stay home. The prettier of the two roommates, with blond hair, a Marilyn Monroe mole, and arched eyebrows, Janice quickly became an object of gossipy speculation, thanks to her good looks and once active dating life. Was she promiscuous? A swinger? A sleep-around girl who finally slept with the wrong guy? Or just a nice girl who liked to have a little fun?

  The entire city was on edge about the slayings, but especially single women, who saw themselves in the victims, reported Gay Talese, who headed uptown to capture the mood among East Side residents shortly after the story first broke. “Throughout the day, girls were asking superintendents about double locks, or were going to hardware stores to buy door chains,” Talese wrote in the New York Times. “Residents at The Barbizon were telling Oscar, the doorman, how lucky they are. Many of those who live alone, such as the blonde social worker in an East Seventy-third Street walkup, were moving out and staying with friends.”

  It wasn’t just the Upper East Side. From midtown Manhattan to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, girls began to change the locks on their doors and install peepholes. Some vacated their apartments altogether, seeking refuge back home with Mom and Dad. “All I remember is that a wave of fear ran through single women in New York. That’s all we talked about,” Jane Maas says now. Back then, she was a married thirty-one-year-old mother, who would go on to become a creative director at the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather. “I went home to a Marine Corps husband every night, and yet I was super aware of how worried all my single, apartment-living friends were: Are we safe going on dates? Or are we taking our lives into our hands? Are blind dates now not to be had? Maybe I should get a roommate. . . . Our mothers called us and said, ‘I think you should give up this wild notion about living in the city.’”

  Fleeing New York might seem like an overreaction now, but it didn’t seem like such a crazy idea then—especially because the killer was still on the loose. By late September 1963, the New York City Police Department hadn’t found a likely suspect after canvassing the city and questioning almost five hundred people. “The police [are] under intense pressure to solve the crime and remove from the streets a killer whose act has frightened thousands of lonely women,” the New York Times reported.

  Inside of her apartment on Sixty
-Fifth and Park, Helen Gurley Brown tracked the case along with the rest of the city. Never one to back away from a sensationalist story or a controversial subject, she also wrote about the Career Girl Murders in her column, “Woman Alone.” The headline was . . . not subtle: HOW DO YOU KEEP FROM GETTING MURDERED? it blared. Despite the fearmongering title, however, the article itself was quietly and calmly informative. Its advertised purpose was to give girls tips on how to stay safe in the city, and Helen dutifully interviewed the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for his advice on defense tactics. (For instance, what to do if a man is following you on the street: “Scream,” he advised.) She published other tips from a self-defense booklet that he gave her, but she had another agenda in writing about the Career Girl Murders, one that wasn’t advertised but was still obvious. As frightening as the city could be, she didn’t want one freakishly horrible story to scare off her readers; many were small-town girls who dreamed of pursuing their careers in the big city, just as she had. In writing her column, she was always talking to a version of herself, the little girl from Little Rock. If she could make it in a city like Los Angeles or New York, so could they—and they shouldn’t let anything stop them, not even a terrifying double homicide.

  “Is there so much more crime in New York City that girls should stay away from here?” Helen asked the deputy commissioner.

  Not at all. Of the twenty-five major American cities, she learned, New York ranked eighteenth in murders, seventeenth in rape, and tenth in aggravated assaults.

  “Well, maybe girls alone should stay away from all big cities entirely?” she asked. Wrong again. In fact, crime was going up in suburban areas, she reported back. It was simply impossible to predict when and where a woman might end up in the grip of a psychopath, the deputy commissioner said, adding that “it will have nothing to do with where she lives.”