Helen Gurley Brown - Sex and the Office

O UR PLANE is now on the ground. You can unfasten your pink alligator seat belt and take off your jeweled goggles. The jet engines have been turned off, the stewardess has given us back our wraps and were free to leave the ship.

Im going to miss you, though I wouldnt be surprised if youre glad to get out of my clutches. As your office tour conductor I realize Ive poked, prodded and exhorted you to see everytliing my way. Perhaps it sounds as though I think all women should work in the offices weve just visited.

Thats almost what I thinkwith one or two exceptions. For example, I wouldnt dream of taking a Bona Fide Nester out of her nest. Of course, to qualify as a Bona Fide Nester in my book, you have to prefer your hands in hot soapy dishwater to having them kissed by your firms creamy representative from South America. A true Nester also prefers masquerading as a Bengal tiger and snarling through an imaginary jungle while her squealing moppet safari stalks her to being bagged by a charming male co-worker for lunch at the Pump Room. Just because youre afraid to try your wings outside the nest doesnt make you a Bona Fide Nester, however.

True Silent Partners probably shouldnt work either. A woman who regularly sends her husband down to the soap company with her brilliant sales strategy is not going to be any better off selling mens furnishings. Her husband wont profit, either. However, just saying, How was it today, honey? and listening with one ear while you continue to puzzle how your friend Betty the Wizard got that showy angel-cake from only two boxes of cake mix isnt being a real Silent Partner.

Aside from these typesand youll notice invalids and Spanish-American war widows are not getting off the hookI believe most womenmarried or single, mothers or childless, grandmothers or ingnuesare better off working at least some of the time.

Positive emanations tell me I am not going to be elected mayor on this platform, but then I wasnt planning to run!

Its interesting to me how many seemingly bright people sincerely believe that a hooked career girl is incurably illa bloodthirsty wolverine who goes down to the office every day to see if there are any new jugular veins to be tasted. Many teachers, lecturers, ministers, psychiatrists, mothers, husbands and Dr. Spock think that holding any kind of job gets a wife and mother clean out of whack with Natures Plan. (Dr. Spock doesnt absolutely forbid a mother to work, but by the time shes examined her motives as thoroughly as Dr. Spock would like, what girl is guilt-free enough to answer the ad? Dr. Spock assures a girl, however, that with proper counseling and soul-searching she can usually talk herself out of that nasty old compulsive need to work.)

Husbands and Dr. Spock strike me as downright enthusiastic about wives working, however, compared to a certain group of wives themselves. Suggest that a job might improve their lot and they curl their toes tight around the radiator pipes and shriek that theyll never be taken alive!

Loads of women who work dont seem to like it either! When a single girl marries well, she drops from the office like an overripe apple from a tree. The single ones who dont marry wail heart-rendingly for somebody to carry them off. The married ones still working wish the somebody they did marry would hurry and make tycoon and whisk them away. Even girls reasonably content with their jobs are always scheming about what it would be like to do something Really Important, like rolling bandages for Albert Schweitzer.

I dont believe for a moment that a full-time job gets women out of whack with Natures Plan. True, Ive never been a mother, but then neither has Dr. Spock. Work doesnt seem to have destroyed over fifty million women in Russia, about one million women in Sweden and nearly twenty-four million women or their children in the United States. Some women seem to need to be with their children or in sight of them every waking hour, but theres no evidence that children (other than infants) need to be with their mothers.

As for a husband glooming up when his wife goes back to a job, no wonder! It isnt Natures Plan thats getting all mucked up. Where is he going to find any more eighteen-hour-a-day household help that doesnt get paid and cant strike? (A housewife who manages to sneak away to a job usually works about half as hard and half as many hours as she does at home.)

As a working girl yourself, perhaps you feel Ive exaggerated the glories of offices and lain very sneaky-low about the bad things! (Youre in an office and you know the life there isnt always a gondola ride through picturesque Venice.)

Dont worry. Im the first to admit that not all offices are pleasure cruises. There are plenty of dull, grimy, drab, boring, sticky little gopher pits a girl can work in, and Ive worked in them!

Not all girls who stay home are dullI admit that, too. And not all girls who work become vital, exciting personalities. Offices are full of drones! However, theres always the possibility youll become a more alive, interesting person if you work. Its likely your very best bet! And from dull grimy offices you simply drain off the good and move on!

Whether their job is good or bad, women in offices never have to search for their identity and wonder who they are. They know who they are and nobody lets them forget it. They are the bookkeeper, the secretary, the receptionist, the model, the actress, the nurse, the technician, the salesgirl, the executiveand people need them and depend on them and reward them.

Im proud of being a career woman and would argue with my last wolverines breath that a job gives a woman the best of all possible worlds.

Maybe I wouldnt love offices so much if I hadnt been involved in nineteen of them in the past twenty-three years. Some people are nutty about hominy grits because during their formative years they hardly ever ate anything else.

Maybe its nostalgia. (Im home from the office now getting this book written.) I understand inmates who leave Sing Sing after twenty years sometimes scuff around outside the place whimpering to get back in.

Vanished fringe benefits may be bugging me. Have you ever tried carrying on a world-wide correspondence with only a small cache of threes left over from a 1956 mailroom robbery?

Pure masochism may make me miss those machete-brandishings by new managements and dagger practice by the girls. I know for a fact that at the finish of a pain-wracked love affair you can, incredibly, wish the novocaine were out of your system and you were back in there getting beaten black and blue again.

If Id married sooner and had a real, full-blown emotional experience with slip-covering or buttermilk biscuits...

If ... if ... if! But honestly, I dont believe any of those circumstances accounts for my enthusiasm for the office. I loved being a working girl a mere ten years after I became one. (Any time before that is too soon to say whether you like it, because they always give the beginners such scruffy things to do.)

I miss the office desperately. I havent tasted a good jugular vein all year. Tell me, dear, are they just as delicious as ever?

I T IS CUSTOMARY for authors of books requiring research to append at this point pages of chapter notes or, at the very least, an impressive bibliography.

Monumental research went into the preparation of Sex and the Office, but it was simply not the sort that is usually pursued in a library. Like Mrs. Browns previous book, Sex and the Single Girl, this book is based largely on her own experiences and those of her many friends. Specifically, Mrs. Brown has drawn on her lives* in nineteen offices, embellished with field trips into those areas that were somewhat too exotic to have fallen within even a remarkably wide range of personal experience.