Beyond these escapes from a circumscribed daily existence, there is nothing else. A couple of gals will walk the Mall on Sunday, hoping to get picked up; or they join a church, or go to one of the countless dances held during the winter season by state societies, where they find everyone else as desolate as they are; or they scrimp and save all week for a thrilling breakfast-lunch on Sunday at the Statler, where they find to their dismay everyone else in the room is a government girl, too, and stranded for company.
Many secretaries of Senators, Congressmen and executives are their office wives. All Congressmen’s offices contain sofas paid for by the Treasury.
These females, when they arrive, usually have accents, idiosyncrasies and dress foibles peculiar to their regions of origin. They quickly fall into the common mold. This is not surprising to your authors, who for years have been writing about Broadway showgirls. Within six months after one leaves the farm to join the chorus, she has acquired a new veneer which covers all she brought with her. You can’t, in any one chorus-line, classify the girls, except by their current hair shades. They are as uniform as if they wore uniforms.
The government is like a chorus; instead of 20 girls there are 200,000, and they all talk the same—mainly about favoritism shown to another by the immediate superior whom they accuse of sleeping with her. They dress the same—usually in suits. They eat the same—salads and dainty desserts. They live the same—in spick and span tiny rooms, with intimate wash hung on the line in the bathroom, which does triple duty as a kitchenette. They drink the same—martinis.
Their sex-lives are remarkably alike, too. Some are afraid they will. Others are afraid they won’t. And it all boils down to the same sustained jitters, but in different wrappers.
The G-girl is in an unnatural vacuum. She has no time-limits; her sentence is for life, usually. She isn’t home and she isn’t away. Her marriage outlook is bleak. No family ties console her. She is more often wooed by women than by men.
She makes a mockery of the theory that a woman’s first instinct is for security.
B. Girls with Glamor
Let it not be surmised that government-girls are all the girls. There are wives and fiancées, college co-eds, a sprinkling of debutantes and other daughters of the rare society clans, smart saleswomen, even a few presentable sob-sisters.