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Doris Fleischman, Women: Types and Movements (1932)
In 1932, the writer and publicity agent Doris Fleischman wrote the chapter ‘Women: Types and Movements’ for Frederick J. Ringel's book, America as Americans See It. Characteristically, it was prefaced by a comment by her husband, who commended her “not only as a wife and mother, but also as a writer and an interpreter of womanhood”. You can read the Chapter for yourself here. It is short (pp.105-117) and easy reading. What is striking in her account is its lack of overt feminism, and her almost-dismissal of women’s direct role in politics. “The flapper with her [tomboy] desire to taste all the pains and pleasures of life as early as she could, seems to have passed,” she comments. Instead, the Chapter emphasises the huge variety of different ‘American women’ – not least that one in ten women in America was Black – the daily difficulties under which they laboured, and their huge importance in every area of American life.
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Some Quotes:“What are American women? They are peasants laboring on farms. They are school teachers, coal miners, poets, factory mechanics, boiler menders, social workers, flappers, stenographers, dressmakers, athletes, servants, truck drivers, and only a few– a very few– are found in the beautiful leisure classes and have time, leisure, energy, and money to be extravagant, to flirt with men other than their husbands, to live riotously at night clubs, to spend wasteful afternoons at bridge and backgammon parties, to spend occasional summers and occasional winters at the fashionable resorts in Europe. Only a very few ... have more than a few hours of leisure time in the evening and on Sundays." “Most women work in or out of the home, many of them in and out of the home, and working as they do, they shape and create America equally with their men." “If there is any outstanding characteristic of the women in America, it is that no matter how hard they work or how idle they are, all over the country the great mass of them are deadly serious about life, their duties, their families, their country, their moralities and their habits, and are eagerly striving for cultural self-betterment. If there is another characteristic of American women, it is distinctly contradictory. They are childish in their attitude towards the broadly social factors of life and towards all the masculine manifestations of their world. They are [hesitant] towards erudition, towards politics, towards economics, and all the impersonal institutions which are so important in the national life." “American women are not always American women. Hundreds of thousands of them are factually Italian, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Czecho-Slovakian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Armenian who live in America. Many women speak no English and in their daily lives perpetuate the customs and ideals of the nations from which they derive." “One might divide them into their educational classifications and contrast women college presidents, women physicians, women lawyers, women artists, poets, research scientists on the one hand with the stupendous group of two million women of voting age who are completely illiterate." “There are few fields of labor in which women are not to be found. The great masses of them are in subordinate positions in their work.... Far fewer women reach commanding positions proportionately than men do. Although women have achieved political equality, they are far from having achieved industrial equality." “It is wholly confusing to read the advertisements in the large magazines that feature the enticing quantities of vacuum cleaners, mechanical refrigerators, electrical dish washing machines and the hundreds of other devices which should lighten the chores of the women in the home. On the whole these large middle classes do their own housework with few of the mechanical aids that ornament the highways with their advertisements. Among 10,000 farm houses, only 32 per cent have any running water at all; 96 per cent do their own washing. Only 57 per cent use washing machines. A meager 47 per cent have carpet sweepers; 79 per cent still care for kerosene lamps and have never felt the magic of an electric light button. But 95 per cent use sewing machines." “Women who live on farms – and they form the largest group in the United States – do a great deal of work besides the labor of caring for their children, washing the clothes, caring for the home and cooking for the family and farm hands. Although many communities discountenance the practice, thousands of women still labor in the fields. Thousands help milk the cows and carry the heavy pailfuls. Millions have small truck gardens which constitute the chief element of food for the table. Very often, the money that women make in raising chickens and selling eggs is the only fluid money in the house." “The other largest group of American women comprise the families of the laborers. They are women of the miners, the steel workers, the factory hands, the railroad workers, and the vast army of unskilled, semiskilled and skilled workers. The wages of these men are on the whole so small that in a huge number of cases one or more women of the family as well as the children must work outside of the home to add funds to the family budget. Wives who do this must of course do double duty– that is, caring for the children and the home and toil on the outside as wage earners. Even these women, hardpressed as they are by the strain of overwork, the strain of financial worry and the strain of insufficient nourishment, have time and energy to interest themselves in movements or ideas by which they can better themselves and raise the standard of their children." “It is obvious that since women are the purchasers, that manufacturers must take their tastes, desires, prejudices and reasonings into consideration. It is indirectly women's will that keeps the manufacturing machinery of a thousand industries whirring. When women refuse to wear ostrich feathers, South African farms languish. When women decide to buy vacuum cleaners thousands of men are employed in their manufacture and in the allied metal and transportation occupations." “Women's political influence has not stopped with the getting of the vote. This is despite the statistics which show that women vote in about the same proportion that men do and that, statistically again, they seem merely to double men's vote. Many women are now in public office. But this is not the main factor of their political influence. No political boss would think of planning a campaign without keeping one good eye on the women's vote. Many important measures have been passed through the state and national legislatures simply because the women have come out and asked for them.”
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Doris Fleischman (1891-1980) wrote the women’s page for the New York Tribune and became assistant Sunday editor. She was a strong supporter of equal pay and opportunity for women, and in 1928 published An Outline of Careers for Women: A Practical Guide to Achievement . Yet – in one of the contradictions you will become aware of as you study the history of American women in the 1920s – in 1919 she went to work in her husband’s publicity firm. There – although a company partner who wrote most of the firm’s press releases, speeches, and letters – she was oddly submissive to her husband, and remained in the background, not getting much attention for the work she did to ensure her husband's PR success. She said that she never worked out whether she was a Ms or a Miss.
Doris Fleischman is one of the subjects of the 2012 book Anonymous in Their Own Names, which tells the stories of three women who, while working as their husbands' uncredited professional partners, changed the media. Although most references to Fleischman concern her work in publicity, her chapter: “Women: Types and Movements” has been referenced by:
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