This amazingly feminist novel was written by a middle-aged white man 99 years ago
‘The Job’ struggled with the problem of having it all before women could even vote
Close your eyes and imagine a contemporary male novelist, a real titan of American letters, spending a few years at his commanding desk in some cozy Brooklyn garret penning a tale about an individual woman’s self-actualization through work. Imagine him writing about her intimate struggle to find her professional place in the world, excoriating her mansplaining boss, railing against the the senselessness of the ceiling on her success, on the constraints of gender itself.
If such a contribution strikes you as almost laughably unlikely, you are not alone. But 99 years ago, such a book was written.
Sinclair Lewis’s second novel, The Job, was published in 1917. American women were still three years away from winning the right to vote, but militant suffragist Alice Paul had started the National Woman’s Party a year prior, and change was in the air. Novels like Henry James’s Daisy Miller and Portrait of a Lady had popularized the idea of the New Woman, a liberated, educated broad able to hold her own in political debate, and engaged in cultural pursuits as a participant, not just a spectator.
That strong New Woman characters began to appear in fiction mattered, a lot. At the time, literature was popular entertainment, and people waited for new novels like they were Netflix series. Writers were lionized and, like other celebs, they could make real money. In the words of Gore Vidal, “a busy minor writer could make as good a living as a minor bank president.”
A vibrant literary scene had grown up around certain ideas about freedom— not just the freedom of women, but a broader emancipation from Victorian strictures on everyday life. Writers like Theodore Dreiser and Edith Wharton deftly satirized the upper-class obsession with propriety, ushering in a welcome levity and reflexivity about social mores.
The Job follows Una Golden, a young woman from a little nowheresville called Panama, Pennsylvania. Golden is the daughter of a small-town lawyer who was “aimlessly industrious, crotchety but kind, and almost quixotically honest,” and a mother who seems to typify the ideal of feminine goodness: she was “bright-lipped as a May morning” and “wrote poetry about spring and neighborhood births.” Una, the product of this pair, is as “undramatic as a field daisy,” but unlike her mother — who “never demanded, merely suggested her desires” — Una wants more from the world. When her father dies in 1905, the 24-year-old “took charge of everything — money, house, bills” — and then she went to look for work. Surveying the minute world of opportunity that is Panama, Una laments that she’s effectively trapped, destined to lead a life she doesn’t want.
“Una was facing the feminist problem,” Lewis writes, “without knowing what ‘feminist’ meant.” (This, in 1917!) Her options were to teach “in some hen-coop of pedagogy;” to marry, but “no one seemed to want her” except a weird old widower; or to go study something, but she couldn’t afford it. “If only I were a boy,” she sighs, “I could go to work in the hardware-store or the railroad or anywhere, and not lose respectability. Oh, I hate being a woman.”
In 2016, there are surely fewer things to hate about being a woman (in some places in the world), but the questions underpinning The Job are the same ones we’re still asking a century later. Many women, perhaps especially those who combine work and motherhood, are bedeviled by the notion of achieving “work-life balance,” or even the fantasy of “having it all.” As was demonstrated by Kate Bolick’s 2015 book Spinster, a long meditation on and justification for the “extravagant pleasures of simply being by myself,” female success and solitude are still being actively defined — and still, somehow, require defending.
Sinclair Lewis certainly wasn’t the obvious candidate to take up these issues. He wasn’t overtly political, for one thing, unlike his muckraking friend Upton Sinclair, with whom he was, as John Updike wrote, “frequently, to his disadvantage, confused.” He was notably physically repellent, a ginger with a “deeply furrowed…freckled, haggard face,” a “cadaverous face” (truly, it is difficult to find any write-up that doesn’t vividly reference his apparently legendarily ugly mug). He was also a rip-roaring drunk, an emotionally unstable but enthusiastic fabulist, and a bit of a pest: he reputedly proposed to his second wife within hours of meeting her, then when she declined vowed to ask her every subsequent time he saw her. (Yeah, one of those guys.)
Eventually, Una decides to move with her mother to New York to study stenography, and become “a secretary to a corporation president, a rich woman, free, responsible.” She is quickly swept up by the city’s glittering possibilities. She studies at a “cluttered, wheezy omnibus of a school,” under a motley crew of teachers, including even an “active, young Jewish New-Yorker of wonderful black hair, elfin face, tilted hat, and smart clothes.”
At first she feels it’s the first time in her life “when her labor seemed to count for something.” But she soon finishes her program and gets a job in the real world, where she daily experiences enough condescension to make you puke. (When she takes dictation successfully, the editor she’ll later fall in love with comments, “Good work, little girl.”)
Perhaps the most powerful element of the novel is Una’s uncanny appreciation for the larger significance of her struggle. Lewis renders her character — paradoxically — as almost singularly unremarkable, but in spite of a thousand references to her mousiness, her “commonplace chin,” and her “undistinguished littleness,” she persists in pursuing a brighter future and seems to know intuitively that she’s “leaning in” in the service of a larger cause: women’s liberation. “I will work for all this,” she says, “for the little mother, dear mother that’s never had a chance.”
So it shouldn’t surprise the reader that after her mother unexpectedly dies, Una moves to a boardinghouse, the Temperance and Protection Home for Girls, and befriends a very vocal Jewish socialist labor leader, Mamie, and a feminist and fellow stenographer, Esther. So begins Una’s real education — in social justice and culture. She frequently goes with her gregarious gal pals to art galleries and theater performances, and they spend hours discussing the pressing issues of the day, even marching for suffrage (early 20th century squad goals). Another friend and mentor, Beatrice, encourages Una to start selling real estate, which she does, embarking on an ambitious new career.
At the close of the novel, it’s 1915, and our protagonist—divorced from her insufferable, drunk, gambling, starter husband—is a successful real estate broker. Her promising record allows her to create a new position, “woman sales-manager, at twenty-five hundred dollars a year, controlling five other women salesmen.” She’s so busy that she finds she’s able to ignore completely a male colleague who “‘didn’t believe in’ women salesmen.”
Lewis writes, “For her personal life, her life outside the office, she had found a way out such as might, perhaps, solve the question of loneliness for the thousands of other empty-hearted, fruitlessly aging office-women. Not love of a man. She would rather die than have [her ex husband’s] clumsy feet trampling her reserve again. And the pleasant men who came to her flat were — just pleasant. No, she told herself, she did not need a man or man’s love. But a child’s love and presence she did need.”
Just as the single, aging Una (she was 34, “but by six of an afternoon felt 40”) decides to adopt, we get our rom-com ending: Walter Babson, the patronizing editor with whom Una had fallen in love, returns. After some hand-wringing, she decides to keep her job, but to marry Walter and bear his child. “Oh, I am a woman,” she says, “and I do need love. I want Walter, and I want his child, my own baby and his.” This sudden capitulation to the heteronormative love story is, on the one hand, a bit of a buzzkill. On the other? It was 1917, after all.
