Females generally fall into two categories, good and bad—the good being so because they can’t get the necessary masculine cooperation to be bad.
We have seen them all, all over the world, but nowhere else are they like they are in Washington. This town has 100,000 more nubile women than men. Forty-five percent of all its females earn their own livings. Most of them are government employes, and thus have better security than is provided by a husband. Many support husbands, or assist toward the expenses of the mutual establishment. Being self-supporting, they are, on the average, better dressed than you’ll find them anywhere else. That is on the “average.” There is little “high-fashion” except in diplomatic and social circles, because government salaries are average, not high.
Most Washington men are only fair wage earners, too, and that limits the loot. It is not so easy to promote a mink coat in Washington as it is in New York, though there are more minks per corpus in Washington than are won, wangled or plain bought in Philadelphia, Chicago or Boston.
Our capital is a femmocracy, a community in which the women not only outdo the men in numbers, but in importance. Males hold more exalted positions, but such work as is accomplished could not go on without the efficient, well-trained and permanent secretarial corps, almost all female.
Everything in Washington is slanted toward dames. The accent in the stores is on things women do or buy for themselves, instead of on home-furnishing and children’s clothes, which are the bedrocks of department store trade in other cities.
Elsewhere, femmes are divided into specific classes. They are wives, whores, glamor girls, home girls and office workers. Here none matches her opposite number as you know her. The females in the capital defy classification by other standards, and lap over into categories not laid out by economic divisions or natural vicissitudes of physical appeal. Prim, bespectacled bachelor-girl secretaries enlist as $10 call girls after hours or on Saturdays and Sundays—not for the money, but for adventure, substitution for romance. A friend of ours had to entertain visitors. He phoned for three call girls. When they arrived he saw to his horror one was his secretary.
Washington’s biggest she-group is made up of G-girls, government girls, who will be taken apart in later paragraphs. Running a close second are O-girls, those who work for organizations, such as unions, charity groups, scientific societies, trade and mercantile bodies, and those who do the paper work for lobbies which maintain permanent offices here.
Washington proves that the emancipation of women is baloney. See what happens here. They have jobs and make as much as most men. They have the freedom to live alone and like it, but they don’t. They have the opportunity to do vital work, to carve out careers in the civil service, as some do. But all, including most of the married ones, are desperately unhappy. They are caught in the unreality of this huge farce. It can’t be a home, it can’t be a place to live in and love, it’s just a rat race running the same course every day.
Tens of thousands of young and ambitious girls flock into Washington from every state, territory and dependency, and from foreign nations. There are even two from Samoa, pretty Laida and Marion Kreuz, whose brother, Peter Coleman, is a policeman in the House Office Bldg., and a night law student. The mass migration is similar in number, but not in purpose, to that which occurs in New York and Hollywood and to a lesser degree in Chicago and San Francisco.
The girls that come from the farms, the inland cities and the tributary towns to the other great metropolises come with stardust in their eyes. Having discovered that what they have is too good for the local cow-manicurists, soda jerks and grease station monkeys, they assume it can be used to start them on the road to fame and fortune in the big city. Most fail to find the golden pot at the end of the rainbow or even get anywhere near it in New York and Hollywood. The disappointed fall by the wayside or return home and marry the mailman.