Word: beauticians
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...this vituperation is a small (5 ft. 5½ in.), slender (124 Ibs.) Miami housewife who believes passionately in the virtues of middle-class monogamy. Now 39, she came from a poor family in Mansfield, Ohio ("I grew up on peanut butter sandwiches"), and worked as a beautician to send herself to Ohio State University. There she became May Queen, having previously been Miss Mansfield and Miss Talent and Congeniality. She is a born-again believer in Jesus Christ. She is inventively kind to her husband Charles, a shy, bespectacled attorney who acts as a lawyer for several...
...women do is vastly undervalued. To assemble her disquieting portrait of the work life of the average woman, Howe interviewed scores of women, met with unions and management and even took a job as a sales clerk. The vast majority of women, she writes, are in "pink collar" occupations: beautician, office worker, sales clerk, waitress. Among the problems contributing to their generally low wages: too many applicants and not enough jobs, indifferent unions, and company policy predicated on "A and P" (attrition and pregnancy) to hold down the office payroll. Wherever she can, Howe skillfully animates dry statistics with...
...Pink Collar Workers, Howe has tried to fill this gap. While statistics set the stage for her argument, the bulk of the book is a series of interviews with women in five overwhelmingly female lines of work--beautician, sales workers, waitress, office worker and homemaker. In all but one case, Howe got her information by spending time in one establishment which served as a paradigm for the industry; in the one exception, she actually worked as a sales clerk in "Ladies' Coats." She interweaves descriptions of specific working conditions and discussions of problems faced nationwide by women in each line...
...fact, the overriding impression the book gives is that most women in traditional spheres are content to be there, but that they are angered by the stigma attached to their situations, uneasy about the lack of job security, and fatalistic about the chances for advancement. As Suzy the beautician says: "The pay is lousy, the security is lousy, the benefits are lousy, the union is lousy--but it's nice here, isn't it? It's a happy place. That's why I like to work in beauty shops...
...Bradleyville are defined in all their loneliness by Southern Baptists and Red Groove's bar. Lust exercises itself on Saturday nights in dusty pickup trucks at drive-ins, and pays for itself in house trailers. The cycle of life is dramatized by Lu Ann: cheerleader at 17, beautician at 27, "howdy wagon" hostess at 37. For the Bradleyville young who go away and come back, the big news 20 years later is, "The Dairy Queen put in a new parking lot." As for social vision, Bradleyville sees little beyond the astigmatic pathos of the Knights of the White Magnolia...