Windows into Working Women’s Lives in 1920

I may have foolishly failed to take Susan’s advice about reading Death Comes to Pemberley, but at least I had the sense to follow up on her recommendation of Women’s Hotel. From the very start, Lavery’s droll style made me chuckle. The novel is set up to comment about lives of single, working women in New York in this period of the earlier half of the 20th century, and does so in a sharp but amusing way.

Mrs Mossler is the manager of the Biedermeier hotel, is said to be passionately evangelical about “culinary conveniences” because

“no woman setting foot into an office thinking about the breakfast dishes in the sink of the dinner yet to be planned could be expected to keep her mind on the job, ‘or indeed to keep the job itself!’” (p4)

This is so wonderfully precious, and of its period (1920-1930s), as a backlash to women not being allowed to work outside the home. That said, now of course it is bog standard that women do keep their minds on the jobs, and the jobs themselves too, while still planning dinner and washing dishes! It is also hilarious that Mrs Mossler believed every Biedermeier girl was at

“at once the ideal employee and within a hair’s breadth of being fired” (p4)

It may sound contradictory, but Laverty beautifully captures the precarity these single women were teetering on.

Lavery is scathing about accommodation and residency provided for single women in this era, of the 1920s, damning venerable old firms for

“producing neat little refrigerators for storing career-minded girls from just-good-enough families against spoilage, when root cellars and iceboxes would no longer do, or salt curing wouldn’t take; right up until October 1929, after which point they had enough problems of their own and left the hotels to fend for themselves” (p6)

Laverty is also damning about the hypocrisy of some ‘third rate’ places which didn’t require references “but made up for it with a florid, pious overfamiliarity, where floor managers were addressed as ‘mothers’ and residents as ‘daughters’ or even ‘our girls’, and no meal could be set upon before chanting in unison some shockingly abbreviated prayer of thanksgiving, one that mode often than not attempted to rhyme ‘food’ with ‘good’. I was rolling with laughter at how Laverty put his disdain and horror at the linguistic abuse on level with the awfulness of these third rate places pretending to be caring.

We meet a whole range of young women in the Biedermeier as one would expect, from recovered former alcoholic, Katherine, is who floor manager of certain floors, assisting Mrs Mossler (formerly Emilie, whose tearoom business petered out when the tearoom boom had passed), to masculine and political Pauline, sad and difficult Ruth, Kitty who ends up in jail, the artistic cohort sharing a unit, Patricia, Sadie, Carol; the fashionable Lucianne, and the destitute JD who is very old, and who turns to stealing in her desperation for food and money. In fact, many of the residents of Biedermeier are cash-strapped perpetually, and turn to creatives ways of cadging food and getting a bit of extra income. Laverty flags their attitudes to work, to money, to values, and to men in a lively but pointed manner. “Potential never seemed to be able to bear up under its own weight” (p122.), Lavery might have some character observe, for example, of a typical kind of take in this novel, or montage.  

Some women are vague about what they want, and some are extremely specific and detailed. Many do know what they don’t want, but are less sure what they do want. One who is totally sure of a new arrival, Gia Kassab:

“I’m in New York to get married, only the man I’m going to marry doesn’t know it yet, His name is Douglas Burgess, and he’s an editor at Viking Press, and he used to go with my mother before she married my father, but of course that was a long time ago now. She doesn’t know it yet either” (p128)

Gia sets her cap at this former lover of her mother’s and inveigles her way into his life, his bed, and into marriage eventually. Gia takes the stance that men older than herself, matured and established men, are more desirable than her peers:

“Good-looking, sophisticated men with exciting jobs who did not want women were rare, and therefore to be prized.[…] Gia could hardly understand why any woman would marry someone her own age, some fellow sapling with whom she would be forced to share the privileges of youth, rather than bear the palm alone, and to be borne aloft in her turn on a pair of seasoned shoulders. A man who had first made himself strong, then been weakened enough by life to need her – that was the only sort of man worth having” (p209).

But not all the residents are as sure about men and marriage as Gia. Lucianne for example, attractive and astute and seemingly very confident, seems to have a problem making up her mind as to why kind of man might be suitable for her. She is fairly clear-eyed about marriage being a career prospect for women like herself, rather than a romantic venture.

“The real problem, as Lucianne saw it, was that unless you had given p the question of marriage entirely (and she was not at all sure that it was wise to do so; it seemed to her that giving up the possibility of marriage was a wildly idealistic thing that she herself could not afford to do), any man that you liked had to be seen through the light of a potential future employer as well as someone you might like to see socially. That put an awful lot of pressure of the men she liked, even if they didn’t know it. Something she might have liked very much in a date wouldn’t have been at all suitable in an employer…” (p122).

The read was somewhat uneven, some parts and some characters were so much more interesting than others. But overall, it provided a beautiful overview of life in New York in this period for this particular demographic, with its little treats and rewards and deprivations and challenges. Freedom and mobility are theirs to command, but they do contend with lack of resources and opportunities. They add friendship, creative problem solution, and quirky personalities to the mix, and a place like the Biedermeier was a rite of passage for most of these women, who were not intending that it should be a destination, only a stepping stone.

[For another take on this book, see Susan’s review]

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