Life Before ‘Having It All’: Portrait of a Working Girl in 1940
Life Before ‘Having It All’: Portrait of a Working Girl in 1940
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Caption from LIFE. A good address, which Kitty acquires, usually has something the matter with it. In the East 60's, Third Avenue "El" clatters a few feet away.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
In 2010, nearly 60% of American women over the age of 16 were employed. In 1940, that number was 25%. And when just a quarter of the female population went to work outside the home, there was no public debate about “leaning in” or “having it all.” Though some women chose to work, a good portion of those who worked did so because they had to.
That year, LIFE dove headlong into “an important species of American woman”: the “White Collar Girl.” The movie studio RKO was adapting Christopher Morley’s best-selling novel Kitty Foyle into a film starring Ginger Rogers. The movie, which would land Rogers an Oscar for Best Actress, followed a lower-middle-class working girl from Philadelphia on her exploits in work and love.
LIFE seized the opportunity to dissect the trials of the “White Collar Girl” in a photographic essay featuring Carol Lorell, a Rogers look-alike whose life happened to mirror Kitty Foyle’s: “Like Kitty, she came from Philadelphia, ran away from home, first lived in a lonely female hotel.” Lorell’s poses took readers through a day in the life of a woman like her: grabbing a bite at a lunch counter, serving customers at her job and dressing for a date.
Despite these images of independence, this working girl, whose life was presented as a matter of class-driven necessity, would rather not be one—Kitty would choose to marry and forgo the lonely city nights, if only she could meet a mate. Kitty’s and Carol’s futures hinged on their capacity to land dinner and a movie as opposed to a raise and a promotion: “Living in a city full of men, bumping into them on the crowded streets, mashed up against them in subways and elevators, she still yearns to know them and is lucky if she can get herself a few dates.”
Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
The White Collar Girl: Model Carol Lorell stands in for Ginger Rogers, star of the upcoming adaptation of novel "Kitty Foyle," about a working girl in the big city.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Kitty Foyle's home was on Griscom Street in the shabby Frankford section of Philadelphia. It was a clapboard house like this one with a little patch of grass in front, a sun-baked yard in the back. There was an outhouse in the backyard and it always smelled of chlorides.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Kitty's one romance was with a rich "Main Liner." "We went to a little cabin on a lonely pond in autumn," she remembers. "We built a big fire and lay in front of it. Wonderful…firelight. It was the first kind of light men and women ever made love in."Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. LIFE sent out a camera expedition to explore the ways of the White Collar Girl. Its guide was Christopher Morley. A girl named Carol Lorell, who looks like Ginger Rogers, went along to act as Kitty.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. The White Collar Girl wears the collar which gave her kind its name. She dresses neat but not gaudy. When she types, she doesn't watch her hands. Somewhere in the background of the office stands the inevitable tier of wire incoming-&-outgoing baskets.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. In a quick-eats joint on Sixth Avenue, she stops for a sandwich to get away from the routine of tea rooms and drugstore counters. She notices that the men eat with hats on and that their chewing makes their hats ride up and down - something for a movie-camera close-up.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. She works as secretary-demonstrator for a cosmetics maker named Delphine Detaille. This is Germaine Monteil who could easily double for Delphine. Here she shows Kitty a new way to apply perfume - spray it in the air, then walk through it so that only the ghost of it clings to you.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. The Five p.m. feeling is awful. Finished with work, she is sure of meal and a bed. But she suffers the dreadful loneliness of the White Collar Girl because she has nothing to do between work and bedtime. Here is the Five p.m. feeling in Times Square.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. A Frankford parlor like this real one must have crocheted antimacassars, brass chandelier, lace curtains with scalloped blinds behind them, newspaper under canary cage and leafy plants by the sunny window.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. The hotel for women, where Kitty lives at first, is built of small rooms around a narrow court. It gives a chance for some nice camera work.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. A good address, which Kitty acquires, usually has something the matter with it. In the East 60's, Third Avenue "El" clatters a few feet away.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Demonstrating beauty, as Kitty does, is hard work. She learns that though the young women are the ones who crowd around the counter to try things, it is the middle-aged ones who shyly shuffle to buy them.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. In the large dining room of the Pocahontas, where Kitty Foyle first lived, there was not a man in sight. At "The Wigwam" bachelor girls ("they called themselves bachelor girls" says Kitty, "But a bachelor is that way on purpose") pay only $8 to $12 per week for their room and two meals. The girls get their money's worth but their souls suffer.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. "The twice a week chicken croquettes and those rocky little peas, sort of crumpled so they wouldn't skid." Kitty vividly recalls the food at the Pocahontas. Sometimes corn was mixed with the peas, "They couldn't even have men waiters to remind them what a pair of pants look like" and take a girl's mind off the monotonous fare. After dinner, through the evening, girls who have no dates and don't know how to mix, sit in the lounge trying hard to absorb themselves in the evening paper or the communal radio.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Kitty's union label.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. "Lonesome washing" is what Kitty calls the feminine flimsies hanging to dry with no man's clothes for company. The White Collar Girl dries her underwear in her bathroom.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. The kitchenette in her own apartment is a great advance over the women's hotel, a jump from croquettes to canned soup. "Just fussing round in a kitchenette helps," says Kitty.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Steaming out the wrinkles in a velvet wrap is a working girl's trick. She runs hot water into the tub until the room is full of steam which raises the nap, removes the creases. Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. The mutual bedroom, when three girls live together, frequently has one big double bed and one single bed. The latter is a studio couch, hallmark of almost every White Collar Girl's furniture. The girl who comes in last at night sleeps on the couch so as not to disturb her roommates. Here, in the last few idle minutes before turning out the light, Kitty manicures her fingernails while one roommate finishes her nocturnal creaming. The other, trying to get some reading done, finds the conversation too engrossing.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Getting dressed up for a big date, Kitty pins on her gardenias. If her date is thoughtful, he sends the flowers. If he isn't, Kitty may buy them herself. Here, of course, is one place where the movies can dress up Ginger Rogers to look very gay and glamourous.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Out dancing, the White Collar Girl often prefers not to get too dressy because it costs money and is an awful lot of trouble at the end of a hard day's work. Kitty remembers dancing with Wyn, "mouth and ear close together, like those new French telephones."Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. Climax of the movie will come when Kitty, in a speakeasy reads the newspaper through the water bottle. In magnified type she sees: "of Welshwold, near King of Prussia, announce the engagement of Miss Veronica Gladwyn to Mr. Wynnewood Strafford VI."Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesCaption from LIFE. In Giono's little speakeasy in the West Forties, Kitty Foyle sits between a bottle of Scotch and a decanter of water, turning a little glass stirring rod around in her hand. Wyn is lost to her forever, engaged to marry the kind of Main Line girl she always knew he was destined to marry. In the novel, Kitty goes on to success but finds no one to fill Wyn's place in her heart. Here LIFE leaves Kitty in the hope that RKO and Ginger Rogers can find happy ending for this love story of a White Collar Girl.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
