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Sinclair
Lewis
THE JOB (1917) Reviews and Comments by Patrick Killough (A) Review for http://www.barnesandnoble.com Here is how your review will appear on the title page: REVIEW BY: T. Patrick Killough (patrick@thekilloughs.com), a fan of Sinclair Lewis, June 28, 2005, BOOK'S RATING: Four Stars * * * * REVIEW'S TITLE: Even in 1915 you could not keep a good woman down. Sinclair Lewis's 1917 novel, THE JOB, spans ten years 1905 - 1915. The heroine is Miss Una Golden. At tale's beginning she is 24 and living in Panama, Pennsylvania. She had completed high school at 17 and taught "two miserable terms" at the district school. She then continued living with her parents, keeping house and doing unsystematic reading. Her father was now about to die unexpectedly. He was a small-time lawyer. "His entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended" (Ch. I) After her father's death, Una took charge and moved with her mother to New York City to find work. The rest of the story is about Una's determination both to find romantic love with a good man and to make a man's career for herself in business. Most of the jobs she has are stenographic, secretarial and sometimes lightly office-managerial. She begins what would later be called 'networking' as early as some courses which she took with other men and women at a commercial college. Her first job brought her $8/ week. There is little romance in her business world. "It is a world whose crises you cannot comprehend unless you have learned that the difference between a 2-A pencil and a 2-B pencil is at least equal to the contrast between London and Tibet" (Ch. IV). In a work week ending at noon on Saturday, "Thursday ... is the three P.M. of the week" (Ch. X), i.e., the day when everyone slumps. Bosses (all male) all think that they have their sly secret tricks for enforcing discipline, but all the girls know and discuss them. In her second job, with a small-scale architect, Una made $13/week, becoming steadily more thoughtful about her work. "She had real satisfaction in the game of work -- in winning points and tricks -- in doing her work briskly and well, in helping [her boss] Mr. Wilkins to capture clients" (Ch. X). She began listening carefully to endless discussions of 'Women in Business' (Ch. XI). Once when WIlkins was out sick, Una ran the office notably well. She also made some good women friends "with whom to play, with whom to talk and hate the powers" (Ch. XI). When in 1909 she read in a trade magazine that a former boss was now advertising manager for the great drug and toilet goods firm Pemberton's, Una took the initiative to write him and became his secretary. While waiting to start at Pemberton's she 'temped' for two weeks at a company that jobbed iron beds. The partners were white- bearded Orthodox Jews. They were merry, kind -- and this was new to Una -- "they were not omniscient rulers, but merely elder fellow- workers" (Ch XIV). At last, she experienced an office which was 'a joyous adventure.' In late 1912 Una was 31. Thanks to networking with a Jewish girl friend, Una became confidential secretary to the senior partner of a real estate company focused on developing the suburbs of New York CIty. It was a good, low-stress office. She developed the habit of working late. She injected deliberate friendship into working with 'ordinary stenographers' (Ch. XVIII). From a free- lance, relatively impoverished young aristocratic woman New York realtor, Una deliberately sought and received tips on how to move real estate. And Una also read into the field. She boldly asked for a chance to sell land to a difficult married couple and succeeded where all the men had failed. With this new self-confidence, Una then wheedled the chance to have her own office for the company in a new development on Long Island, where she did very well from March 1914 to late 1915. She then parlayed this triumph into a new $2,500/year job within her firm as its first women's sales manager. We last see Una at the end of a carefully planned campaign in which she has studied a new, innovative chain of hotels, done field research and then convinced the chain's partners to hire her, at age 34, to be in charge of the chain's departments for catering, service, decoration and related. At $4,000/year! This seems likely to be a long way from the end of Una's rise to ever greater responsibility, power and wealth. Interwoven with Una's tale as a Woman in Business, are threads of caring for her widowed mother, seeking romance, marrying a salesman whose values prove too different from her own for the marriage to survive, measuring several potential husbands and finally having dropped in her lap the prospect of happiness with a onetime admirer from business school. He had already been hired as publicity director in the hotel chain. In a whirlwind, deus ex machina denouement, he instantly proposed marriage after years of no news of her. But she will surely accept him, abandoning her earlier idea of being a single mother and adopting a child -- in order to have his baby. He says that he will not work long for her (what man can work well under a woman?), but will soon find another job and they will then be able to afford marrying. But an Una who has boosted her new firm's receipts 17% in three months makes it clear she is not going to marry in order to be 'minding the cat and the gas-stove...' He replied, "You don't need to. We can both work, keep our jobs, and have a real housekeeper ... to mind the cat" Ch. XXIII). A slowly growing additional theme which builds throughout THE JOB is that friendships among working women are important both emotionally and professionally. For women reassure women repeatedly that they are at least as good as the often barely competent male bosses they work for. The more experienced women mentor the novices. And their networking is decisive to upward mobility. -OOO- Also recommended: Sinclair Lewis, MAIN STREET, ANN VICKERS. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= (A) Review for http://www.barnesandnoble.com The Novel THE JOB is RATED FOUR STARS * * * * TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: In 1915 women had few resources for rising above menial office work, June 29, 2005 Reviewer: T. Patrick Killough (Black Mountain, NC United States) - See all my reviews In ten years, 1905 - 1915, Miss Una Goldman, heroine of Sinclair Lewis's 1917 novel THE JOB, moves from 24 year old economic nobody in backwater Panama, Pennsylvania to success in business at age 34 in cutthroat New York City. She is not pretty, not well educated. How then does she rise in a man's world? First, she is friendly and makes enough affable acquaintances and a few friends (increasingly they are women) that she creates a booster or referral network which she can call on and does call on. Networking, beginning with contacts in a New York City commercial school, from time to time help her find a better job: first just stenographic, then secretarial and lightly supervisory and finally with real responsibility for selling real estate. On her own she markets herself to her final employer who takes her into his recently formed and expanding chain of hotels as a manager of several departments. Along the way Una Golden forms a crush on a man who leaves New York for a better job in Omaha. She later marries unsuitably an alcoholic womanizer much older than she. Him she dumps eventually as he becomes more and more a lazy sponger. In the end she is reunited, most implausibly, at age 34 with her first love and the implication is that they will marry, have children and both continue to work -- something her old fashioned husband forbade Una to do once he was back on his feet economically. Unlike ELMER GANTRY or THE GOD SEEKER, Sinclair Lewis's THE JOB is relentlessly, single-mindedly, depressingly secular and this worldly. Here are some of the very few references of any kind to organized religion. Of Una's father just before he dies at novel's beginning: "He believed that all Parisians, artists, millionaires, and socialists were immoral. His entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended; and he desired no system of economics beyond the current platform of the Republican party." ( Ch. I). On their first dinner date, Una's first boyfriend (who returns in triumph at novel's end) asks "Which god do you favor at present -- Unitarian or Catholic or Christian Science or Seventh-Day Advent?" Una thought that they all worshipped the same God. He says that the same God can't both approve candles and music in an Episcopal Church and reveal to the Plymouth Brotherhood the wickedness of organs and candles. Una agrees that she really does not care which church is right. He goes on to say that church buildings are touted as God's houses but are allowed by congregants to be ugly. But he admits that his real thoughts about almost anything are critical and negative. End of discussion. (Ch V) Another suitor spoke with Una after "(s)he had been to church; had confessed indeterminate sins to a formless and unresponsive deity. She felt righteous and showed it." (Ch. IX) Una moved into a rather posh and nominally strict boarding house for working women that as a matter of policy admitted "East Side Jews" but "no agnostics or Catholics." Yet Una's roommate, a Roman Catholic, had got away with telling the landlady that she was a "Romanist Episcopalian." Una's encounters with Jewish men and women in various levels of New York business were invariably friendly and productive. Decisively helpful later in Una's business rise was her lame Jewish boarding housemate Miss Mamie Magen, who was brilliant and increasingly well connected in charitable circles. (Ch. XI) Mamie was scornful of "half-churches, half-governments, half-educations." Mamie explained New York to Una, brought the metropolis to life. Thanks to Mamie Magen, Una found a two week temporary job with the jobbing firm of Herzfeld and Cohn, two white-bearded Orthodox Jews. Una had had nebulous prejudices of the Jews then beginning to conquer New York business. Yet the two partners had merry eyes, gestures of sympathy and created a pleasant, companionable office environment. They were not tyrants but patriarchs, elder workers. They made their office "a joyous adventure." Una looked forward each day to her work and learned lessons she would later apply elsewhere about how to humanize the work place. (Ch. XIV) In her next to last office, the dynamic Jewish partner in a real estate office proposed marriage, but Una merely admired him, did not love him. (Ch. XVI) With her Catholic roommate Una "attended High Mass at the Spanish church on Washington Heights ... ; felt the beauty of the ceremony; admired the simple, classic church; adored the padre; and for about one day planned to scorn Panama Methodism and become a Catholic, after which day she forgot about Methodism and Catholicism." (Ch. XII) In the first two years of her marriage, Una's salesman husband was out of town 2/3 of the time and she herself did not work. To keep her shorthand alive, she took down "the miscellaneous sermons -- by Baptists, Catholics, Reformed rabbis, Christian scientists, theosophists, High Church Episcopalians, Hindu yogis, or anyone else handy -- with which she filled up her dull Sundays. ... Except as practice in stenography she found their conflicting religions of little value to lighten her life. The ministers seemed so much vaguer than the hard-driving business men with whom she had worked; and the question of what Joshua had done seemed to have little relation to what Julius Schwirtz (her husband) was likely to do. The city had come between her and the Panama belief that somehow, mysteriously, one acquired virtue by enduring dull sermons." (Ch. XVI) In THE JOB Sinclair Lewis shows little belief in religion as able to uplift and change lives of his characters. And those lives emphatically need uplifting from the relentlessly dull, stressful, slave-like conditions most women face in their low-paying office jobs. Sinclair Lewis's women generally see only two ways out of having to work: to marry or to die in harness. A few women such as Una Golden and Mamie Magen break out of their pre-ordained ruts and create a third possibility: doing better work than their men colleagues and convincing progressive bosses to give them a chance to prove themselves. -OOO- =-=-=-=-=- Black Mountain, North Carolina June 29, 2005 |