In the early 1970s, Jack Olsen gained access to fifteen women working at one of New York City’s most prestigious corporations. They were single, educated, well-paid, and by every external measure living the dream. He sat down with each of them and asked them to tell the truth.
What they told him was not what anyone expected.
Olsen steps back entirely in this book, letting the women speak without interruption, in their own words. What emerges is a portrait of lives lived under enormous pressure: the intra-office competition, the complicated relationships with the men they worked for and sometimes slept with, the corrosive gap between the promise of liberation and the reality of their daily lives. These women had the best jobs, the best apartments, the best of everything. And many of them were quietly desperate.
Their stories range from darkly comic to genuinely heartbreaking. A tough, no-nonsense boss who has lived more lives than most people dream of. A Southern belle who tears through the Village bar scene and arrives at her desk bright and early every morning. A fading cosmopolite terrified of aging out of the only world she knows. Fifteen very different women, sharing a common institution and, to varying degrees, a common disillusionment.
Published in 1972, The Girls in the Office reads today less like a period document and more like a warning that went unheeded. The questions these women raised about work, equality, ambition, and the cost of having it all are still being asked fifty years later.
