When I came across Joanna Scott’s novel Careers for Women, I was immediately intrigued. The cover showed the lower halves of women in midi skirts and sensible heels making me think of the TV show Mad Men or Rona Jaffe’s novel The Best of Everything. But you can’t judge a book by cover as the cliché goes, and perhaps this novel would have been better left on the library shelf.
Careers for Women started out promising. Maggie Gleason has just arrive to New York City from Cleveland in the late 1950s. She gets a job as a secretary at the Port Authority. She is also mentored by the Port Authority’s head of Public Relations, Lee K. Jaffe, or Mrs. J as she’s called. Mrs. J asks Maggie to take new hire Pauline Moreau under her wing. Pauline has arrived to New York City with a young daughter in tow and a shameful secret.
Mrs. J has big dreams. She envisions a towering skyscraper dotting lower Manhattan’s sky. Yep, you guessed it. The World Trade Center. And she goes through great lengths to make this happen.
As for Maggie, she befriends Pauline and acts a de facto auntie to Pauline’s daughter, Sonia. Sonia has a lot of health and disability issues, and taking care of her overwhelms Pauline. And it isn’t long before Pauline abandons Sonia and Maggie has to take care of her, which she does and remains committed to getting the education and help Sonia desperately needs.
And then Careers for Women goes all over the place. We also get a story in upstate New York, where an aluminum plant is poisoning the environment and somehow this is connected to the World Trade Center. And wouldn’t you know it. one of the executives of the aluminum plant, Bob Whittaker, just happens to be the father of Sonia. Pauline was his secretary and he got her pregnant one night when he convinced her a condom wasn’t necessary. This man is married has a stepson, and there was no way he was going to be there for Sonia other than giving Pauline some money to get away.
Furthering the confusion, is Bob’s wife, Kay, her son Robert, Robert’s fiancée, and the fiancée’s dead father whose demise may have come from working at the aluminum plant. Scott also brings up environmental degradation, the plight of some Native Americans, a factory fire, a murder of one main character, and finally 9/11 and the death and destruction surrounding the World Trade Center.
While reading Careers for Women I felt like I was being thrown all over the place. It’s as if Scott was trying to cram too many stories into one book, and not a single one was thoroughly thought out about in a way that made sense. I couldn’t keep track of whether we were in the 1950s, 1960s, or 1970s. Some characters just came and went. Maggie narrates the story in first person, but the others were in third person, and at other times, Scott addressed to reader.
By the end of Careers for Women, I just didn’t care how the novel would play out, which is a shame. There are so many women who made inroads back the 1950s-1970s, and their stories do deserve to be told. But not in the slapdash manner of Careers for Women.
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