���I:�����Юa�A��(Ӣ�İ�) ���x

It is as a secretary or clerk��a business woman or career girl��that the white��collar girl dominates our idea of the office.She isthe office��write the editors of Fortune����The male is the name onthe door��the hat on the coat rack��and the smoke in the cornerroom.But the male is not the office.The office is the competentwoman at the other end of his buzzer��the two young ladieschanting his name monotonously into the mouthpieces of a kindof gutta��percha halter��the foury girls in the glass coop peckingout his initials with pink fingernails on the keyboards of fourvoluble machines��the half dozen assorted skirts whisking throughthe filing cases of his correspondence��and the elegant miss in thereception room recognizing his friends and disposing of his antipathies with the pleased voice and impersonal eye of a presidentialconsort.'
Novels about white��collar girls��appearing mainly in the 'twenties��were very popular.Kitty Foyle's time is from 1911 through the middle 'thirties�� Minnie Hutzler��another Morley character in Human Beings��is followed from 1889 to 1929�� the story of Janey Williams of Dos Passos' USA runs from 1900 to 1920�� Tarkington's Alice Adams and Sinclair Lewis's Una Golden lived before World War I.Ten years on either side of the First World War��that was the time of the greatest literary interest in the white��coUar girl.The images are tied to the scenes of that period of white��collar work��and many of the images presented are strilangly similar.
Sinclair Lewis's Una Golden��Booth Tarkington's Alice Adams��and Christopher Morley's Kitty Foyle��each was thrown into white��collar work after the death or failure of her father and in each case the father was an old middle��class man who had not been doing well.