I’VE BEEN THINKING OF MOVING to another building.
In the great tradition of “We’d Rather Sell It Than Move It” sales promotions, I’ve been auctioning pieces of my book collection on eBay. (Please go ahead and click here to look at what I’ve got up there today; I promise I’ll still be here when you get back.)
I’ve been augmenting the sale items I’ve already got wtith a few titles I’ve picked up at second-hand outlets, for whch I can find avid collector-buyers.
One of these was The Girls from Esquire.
That was a 1952 hardcover collection (which I’ve already sold; sorry) of stories, essays, and cartoons about and/or by women, originally published in “The Magazine For Men” during its 1933-52 original heyday.
(For the uninitiated, the first version of Esquire, created by legendary editor Arnold Gingrich (no relation to Newt), was far different from the sad little mag it is today. It was a lush, oversize compendium of top-drawer fiction, quasi-naughty humor, “good girl art” cartoons, pinup paintings, fashion, and other material for the sophisticated Urbane Gentleman, or rather for the man who fantasized about being an Urbane Gentleman.)
The main attractions of The Girls from Esquire for modern-day collectors are (1) the cartoons and (2) the big-name authors. The authors include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel Benchley, Ilka Chase, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Brendan Gill, Langston Hughes, Budd Schulberg, and James Jones. The cartoons, by such unjustly-forgotten greats as Abner Dean and Gardner Rea, mostly depict gorgeous, splendidly-dressed fantasy women who are totally adorable even when doing less-than-proper things (kept mistresses, husband-killers, etc.)
The fiction pieces are great. So are the profiles of four of the period’s great women (Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, and Ingrid Bergman).
But what makes this book truly a relic of an earlier age are the seven essays (four by female writers) complaining about those uppity U.S. females who insist upon careers in the work-world and upon dominating marriages and families at home.
Piece after piece rants on and on about how American had lost their femininity, their sense of purpose, their joy, their fashion sense, their homemaking skills, and their “knowledge of woman’s rightul place”–especially as compared to the WWII war brides from Britain and the European continent, who (the various authors claim) were more attractive to men and more satisfied with their own lives because they still knew how to be soft, beautiful, quiet, modest, and deferential to men.
A half-century (and umpteen new paradigms for American womanhood) later, similar arguments are still being made by hate-radio hosts and by mail-order-bride websites. Books like The Rules and A Return to Modesty and What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us propose to bring back “old fashioned” feminine values and principles.
And Esquire is in a circultion and ad-sales rut; threatened by the British-led spate of “bloke” magazines celebrating the end of the Urbane Gentleman and the rise of the Guy. Freed from the sole-family-provider role and from the associated need to appear mature and stable, the new Guy (at least in these magazines’ fantasies) can remain an overgrown boy, possibly for life. He can drink and cavort and drive fast and sleep around and perform any other number of less-than-responsible behaviors, leaving the women to run more and more of the household and the world.
Any return to old-fashioned womanhood would require a return to old-fashioned manhood. By that I don’t mean the drunken rapist boor of radical-feminist villain imagery, but the suited-and-tied, emotionally repressed breadwinner who used to read Esquire in order to fantasize about being an Urbane Gentleman, going to Broadway shows with the wife and to hotel afternoons with the mistress.
Despite the recent cocktail and swing revivals, I don’t think many men really want that era back.
TOMORROW: Memories of the Bicentennial summer in Philadelphia.
ELSEWHERE:
