Sex and the Office by Julie Berebitsky

Author:Julie Berebitsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2012-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

A NEW MODEL FOR WORKINGWOMEN: THE SEXY CAREER GIRL

Brown’s first piece of advice was to work hard, on yourself and at your job. As she makes clear in the first few pages of Sex and the Single Girl, it is the single girl’s presence in the workforce that makes her attractive. More to the point, it was possible for the sexually active single woman still “to be a lady, to be highly respected and even envied if she is successful in her work.” Brown elaborated on the importance of a career, a fulfilling sex life, and the connections between the two in her second book, Sex and the Office (1964), which urged young workingwomen to take their jobs seriously.15

For Brown, work was rewarding in and of itself, and it leveled the romantic and sexual playing field; a successful workingwoman could escape many gender restrictions, such as those that limited women’s ability to pursue men. Business travel provided one such opportunity, as the story of Evelyn made clear. With the respectability that came from being a professional and the anonymity and daring that came from being out of town, Evelyn became a sexually adventurous aggressor, seducing the respectable general manager she’d been sent to interview. As she recalled, “I was enjoying myself utterly because I was seducing him instead of getting mauled by some Adonis who was getting around to me simply because I was a girl—maybe number three thousand seven hundred and two on his list.” Brown again celebrated the sexual freedoms of the successful woman while on a speaking tour: “It is one thing to say that a cloistered, protected, fragile, parent-dominated flower of a girl is ‘ruined’ because she has had an affair with a man—but it is quite another to say a woman who possibly has five employees of her own, one of whom is the man she has had the affair with, may never hold her head up again. Her private life and her business life are two separate areas.” Of course, Brown actually exposed how the two were often intertwined, and she also revealed one of the unspoken perks of achievement: if you are successful or indispensable at work, often others will look the other way with regard to the particulars of your private life, even if they go against dominant business standards or social mores. In these examples, Brown’s calculus was clear: if you worked and earned like a man, you, too, were entitled to a degree of sexual autonomy.16

In Brown’s view, a sexy attitude and the calculated application of femininity could help a woman on the way to professional success. That success, in turn, would facilitate her sexual independence. As she told readers of Sex and the Office, brains and talent alone would not get them to the top because many men still thought women belonged at home and therefore limited their workplace responsibilities to chores like making the coffee. The way around this bias was not to be an “unnatural penis-envying wolverine ready to spring at a man’s jugular vein.

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