I almost didn't get through this one, kids. How can, on the one hand, a book take one of the most modern approaches I've run across towards women in male-dominated industries, but at the same time be filled with caricatures like the family's faithful retainers, Ben and Teneh, who speak in a minstrel-like, Lol-cat patois that's hard to read in about every way one can intend those words? And how could, on the one hand, Helen Wells be writing modern, thoughtful career romances while at the same time Ruby Lorraine Radford was writing about the hired hands being scared of 'haints?' That is, I suppose, the late '40s for you.

I don't recommend seeking this one out, so I'll give you the upshot. The Heroine, Peggy Parker, is a mechanical wiz who lives with her mother in a northern industrial town, doing work she loves for "the Dodson plant."

The Dodson officials gave every encouragement to inventive ability. Before Peggy had been with them a year, she made a suggestion that saved them a hundred hours a month on the assembly line. When she invented a gadget that doubled the efficiency of her own machine, she received personal commendation from the president himself. "It's not often a nineteen-year-old girl shows such inventive genius," Mr. Frank Dodson said at the annual banquet for the employees, when he was giving Peggy her first award.

When a great-uncle dies, Peggy and her kid brother Joe, recovering from "a spot on his lung" that requires a warm climate, inherit a Georgia farm called "Pine Island." The family relocates and finds the fort being held down by forementioned couple, Ben and Teneh, who are eager to see the farm returned to its former glory. The place is in rough shape, taxes are due, and everyone advises them to sell. But! Uncle Joe wouldn't sell land that some English King gave the Parkers, and Peggy and her brother regard this as a sacred trust.

Down South, people are always saying things like, "she looks more like a debutante than an inventor to me!" and "never thought a woman with that kind of turn would be a pretty, gray-eyed miss!" However, Peggy's family is very supportive: her mother is extremely proud of her technical ability, and her brother says things like, "Peg's smart as a whip!" and "Peggy's a real mechanic. She had two years' experience in an industrial plant - has inventions to her credit, too."

They quickly meet the Love Interest, "lean, handsome" Ted Marshall, a young lawyer who helps Peggy and Joe claim their property. She is thrilled that his family runs a "completely modern" farm, although Ted's southern belle sister mocks her interests. "In spite of teasing from the other girls, Peggy spent many hours in the fields, learning how various machines operated, and listening to Mr. Marshall as he pointed out their defects. She spent many hours, too, with tools in the sheds, studying how they were put together."

Then the villain appears: neighbor Andy Bateman, who has his eye on Pine Island and will do whatever it takes to get it. Accordingly, he spreads rumors of ghosts so Pine Island can't get any hands to help them out, destroys a bunch of timber, steals an invention of Peggy's, gets a crooked salesman, "Mr. Meyer," to sell them a busted cotton-picker, tricks them into mortgaging a choice piece of land, and prevents the corrupt sheriff from investigating anything. To add insult to injury, a gale knocks out the rest of their cotton crop.

Although their mother has taken on stenographic work in town and Peggy's managed to get a lot of machinery in working order, everything seems doomed! Peggy sells a few inventions to her old factory, but it's not enough to get the Parkers out of the hole or save their mortgaged land. And then! In quick succession, Peggy has a brainstorm for improving a cotton-cleaner, and a geologist finds the land Bateman so covets is rich with phosphate. Two execs show up, are impressed with cotton that's "cleaner than hand-picked!" and get into a bidding war. Ted, obviously, announces that they're going to get married.

Don't think I won't be still working on inventions even if I don't go into a factory again...with Ted over there to be the business manager of our concern, I'll have more time than ever for inventions.

Peggy Parker notes several times that the war has changed the way people think about women working, and while in hindsight this seems like postwar optimism, it's indeed heartening to read about a girl doing such challenging, "men's" work. But it seems shocking that an author who can appreciate the war's gains for women, see the equality it imposed between the sexes, can't make the leap towards viewing African Americans, who'd just helped win the war, as more than retrograde caricatures. I like these career romances because they're such a true window onto time periods and, especially, young women's experiences. But at times like this, that can be seriously depressing.

Earlier:A Career Romance For Young Moderns: A Flair For People
A Career Romance For Young Moderns: A Campaign For Pam
A Career Romance For Young Moderns: Designed By Stacey
A Career Romance For Young Moderns: Dreams To Shatter
A Career Romance For Young Moderns: A Special Kind of Love
Career Romance For Young Moderns: Patti Lewis, Home Economist
A Career Romance For Young Moderns: Lee Devins, Copywriter

The Heroine: Ann Roberts, idealistic college graduate. "Attractive, with an appealing voice," Ann is a "natural leader," although she has a fear of public speaking.

The Job: Personnel! Both Ann and the author are earnest about the challenge of helping people. "Ann knew that the ways people earn their living, the human problems they face at work, are anything but dull." In the course of her work at a factory, Ann helps a boy named Johnny who wants to go to night school (she persuades him to work for a promotion instead), a worker with man problems (switch to the engaging doll clothes department for distraction) and a high-strung, artistic neurotic who's ruining factory morale (Ann gets her her own line of "character dolls.")

Love Interests: Ann initially falls for a blond smoothie named Blake Walton who's doing some engineering work at her factory, despite the fact that he's obviously a self-absorbed jerk who sees employees as cogs in a machine. In contrast to the suave Blake, there's self-made Chips Simon – "a tall, lean, quick young man with dark hair and dark eyes full of laughter" – who can't take Ann fancy places but shares her passion for good works.

The Villain: The beautiful, callous store buyer, Carole Crane, who, "whatever Nature had given her, had made herself into a work of art."

The Plot: Ann is recruited to do personnel work in Gray's doll factory in New York (a "union shop") where "the employees are almost all women. That's why a girl rather than a man is wanted for their personnel." Ann moves into one of the "residential hotels" where everyone lives in these books. Says Mr. Gray, who is characteristic of the novel's unusually progressive universe,

We try to treat the employees the way we'd want to be treated ourselves, if we were working here…if there's any sign of prejudice, we clamp down hard and fast. We don't permit that.

Ann makes her bones as a sympathetic personnel director, but finds her idealistic and ambitious plans are thwarted by the conservative management, so she moves on.

Her next job is at shmancy Hamilton's department store, where Ann encounters her boss, Mrs. DeLacey (who "was probably sixty but looked forty, with white hair as satiny as her pearls, a trim, slim, commanding woman"), Chips, and her roommate, the wholesome Dorcas. They move into what, the super explains "apologetically," used to be a loft(!) and so is really cheap (!) Ann and Chips come up with a "plan" for employee morale that involves a more human touch and a Junior Board of store employees (which is always capitalized like that.) Unfortunately, the suave Blake shows up with some warring plan that involves firing everyone and treating them like robots. Ann sees his true colors and is shocked at his lack of compassion. Who will prevail?!

At just this crucial juncture, disaster strikes: Ann hires a sullen, insolent girl with a disfigured face and a missing tooth. The girl, Minnie, has a great desire to be around beautiful things, so she goes to work for the nasty Carole Crane, who is cruel to her. Then money and clothes start being stolen – and it turns out it's someone in the store! Minnie confesses defiantly that it's her – that she was hurt in a car accident and never received plastic surgery, that she was mocked and considered an ugly duckling in her family, and so needs money for some charlatan plastic surgeon. Oh, and she won't stop stealing. Ann is so moved by this story that, not only does she not fire Minnie, sullen and insolent though she is, but decides to give her an Extreme Makeover, as well as a second chance. In addition to raising money for a dentist and plastic surgeon, Ann enlists a team of store friends.

Mr. Don cut and waved her hair so that her face no longer looked bony, but slender and clear cut. The make-up expert performed some artfulness that brought Minnie's features into harmony, gave light to her eyes. The buyers of junior misses' clothes put Minnie into tawny colors which lent her warmth. Lily, the model, stayed after hours in order to teach Minnie how to stand, walk and sit with grace. The actress Alicia Weir-Bennett invited Minnie to her apartment on Sunday afternoon and taught her the elements of good diction and a pleasant speaking voice. On orders from the store physician she was eating to gain weight.

Blake and Carole consider this behavior "coddling" and Ann and the forces of good prepare for a showdown in front of the store's president, Miss Parker. Blake and Carole are all for soulless mechanization and have a dazzling array of facts and numbers at their disposal. Will Ann and Chips be outclassed? No! Conquering her fear of public speaking, Ann launches into an eloquent description of Minnie's case and the need for the personal touch. What do you know? Miss Parker used to be poor and love pretty things, too! She approves of Ann's approach of giving makeovers to sullen new employees who've stolen hundreds of dollars in merch! Blake and Carole are routed and left fuming; Ann and Chips, triumphant, get engaged. In Ann's words,

It's so simple. People, employees, are the core of any business. No number of machines or methods or merchandise are of any use unless you have efficient, willing employees. They're human beings. You have to treat them humanely.

Earlier: A Career Romance For Young Moderns: A Campaign For Pam
A Career Romance For Young Moderns: Designed By Stacey
A Career Romance For Young Moderns: Dreams To Shatter
A Career Romance For Young Moderns: A Special Kind of Love
Career Romance For Young Moderns: Patti Lewis, Home Economist
A Career Romance For Young Moderns: Lee Devins, Copywriter

The Heroine: 19-year-old brunette Polly Wallace, who is forced to drop out of art school and abandon a promising career in ceramics to care for a neurotic mother prone to migraines and panic attacks, and her three younger siblings. Polly is initially resentful of the demands made on her.

I suppose I feel about clay the way a musician feels about his instrument. I only feel alive when I begin on a hunk of clay, wedging it, pounding it, throwing it on a wheel - and then the joy of feeling it grow from a blob of stuff into the form you had in your mind all the time. I only feel alive when I'm making a shape out of a no-shape.

The Industry: Ceramics! Just by chance, the area where Polly lives is home to some of the finest "natural ceramic clay" deposits in the world, and has attracted a famous bohemian potter names Sven Svensen. Although a recluse, Sven becomes Polly's mentor, encouraging her natural talent. Polly's mother initially dismisses ceramics as a messy hobby, by watching the magic of pot-throwing she comes to understand the art form.

The wheel turned steadily, hypnotically. The clay rose, rounded, was pushed back gently, evened out, bulged, was molded back. It was a bowl now, responding almost imperceptibly to the carefully controlled fingers, fingers that seemed rather to follow some preordained shape than to direct it.

The Love Interests:Polly has a long-term steady, Kevin, whom she takes for granted. Kevin is a reporter on Mr. Wallace's paper and doesn't really get Polly's passion for ceramics. So, when the dashing potter Josh MacIntosh comes to town, building her kick-wheels and talking kilns, Polly is smitten...but why does he seem immune to her charms?

The Supporting Players:Polly lives with her parents, a self-absorbed sister named Tish, a kid brother. Tommy, and the scheming 10-year-old Vicky. She has a frumpy but dependable best friend, Enid, and a circle of older acquaintances in town who run the "fine arts club."

The Plot:Polly is desperate to continue her ceramics, despite her mother's wish to control her and prevent her from building a small studio in the basement. When Polly and Josh discover an abandoned doll factory on the outskirts of town, they decide to try to turn it into a ceramics studio and offer lessons. But will the kiln work? Will Polly's mother relent? Will they find students? Will the town elders come to accept the ceramics workshop? Will Polly win the enigmatic Josh and, in the process, lose dependable Kevin to Enid?

The Resolution:Despite continued problems with the kiln and one very dramatic scene in which a collapsed chimney destroys all the pottery they've made for an expo, all is resolved: fired by a passion for the local clay, the town decides to spring for an Arts Center - with woodworking and weaving, too! Upon learning that Josh is married (although separated) Polly realizes she's loved Kevin all along - and that she can pursue her dreams without even leaving home.

The Heroine: Stacey Harrison, a young woman so beautiful, so charming, so talented, so poised, everyone is awestruck by her amazingness. We are treated to many descriptions of her "slim height, the smooth and shining chestnut hair, swept high on her head above large, dark-lashed gray eyes...the tawny skin with pale gold freckles across the bridge of the tipped nose, and the well-shaped mouth parting over even white teeth." Stacey is returning home to San Francisco and her newly-married, successful architect father, after studying design in Paris.

The Industry: Stacey works for Madame Ninon, a top couturier. (Mme is French, wears "moss-colored" suits and has a severe chignon) with an exquisite atelier. She starts sketching ideas for clients who come in for custom fittings. "

'Line is everything,' Madame said emphatically in one of their sessions. 'A good couturiere can visually translate a woman into many different women, and this is done by line, not ornamentation. A couturiere must be like a writer and say what must be said in as few words as possible.'"

"'Most top designers are distinctive. Some like the draping, or fluid line; some, the tailored or the bouffant. And each house has its own style of mannequins...a good mannequin can give a couturiere an exact picture what a garment will look like.'"

Ninon's has three moddles: the "skeletal," "beige-haired" Lily (formals, furs and peignoirs); dark, dramatic Yvonne ; and the undisciplined gamine Gaby, "friendly as a kitten but very lazy," retained because of the dash she brings to playclothes and sport ensembles.

The Hero: The sullen, furious David MacLean, Madame's ward, who stands around smoldering most of the time because his mother abandoned him when he was young.

Decoy Hero: Kirk Dawson, a likable young lawyer with a weak personality.

The Villain: Stacey's stepmother Kay, a "cool and poised blond" with mysterious motives for keeping Stacey and her father apart.

The Plot: Stacey designs a gown — "the sheath is slim and long and of silvery turquoise lame. The overdress, loosely flowing from the shoulders, is brown chiffon; the beading across the top is of brown spangles" — that so enchants Madame Ninon that they have it made up, call it "Dusk" and give it its own launch party. But when Stacey shows up modeling the gown — lo and behold, their arch rivals Roxley have ripped it off! How? Then Stacey learns that her father has unexpectedly died. In short order, we learn that Kay was for unclear reasons concealing Con's ill-health from Stacey; that she's from a low-class (read: Jewish) background; that she had stolen Stacey's idea from her descriptions and leaked it to Roxley, and that Kirk is under her spell. David MacLean shows up, smolders, spirits Stacey away and confesses his love.

The Clothes:Think suits. A "smart, fawn-colored suit"; a "navy suit of thin wool lined in pale yellow with an overblouse of the same pale yellow silk. Her slender-heeled pumps navy and so was the big supple leather bag." At other points she sports a plum suit, "a slim brown satin suit with a gold satin lining and overblouse, and brown satin pumps," and various housecoats.

The Decor: Stacey lives in a brand-new apartment complex, The Towers, "a great spire of concrete, steel and glass" with "an arcade with excellent shops, maid service and transportation to any point in the city."

On either side of the foyer were two closets, one for linens, the other to be used by guests. A compact, glistening kitchen in copper and pale yellow was behind the louvered doors. The spacious living room was carpeted in pale lilac, and draperies of a deeper lilac framed wide glass doors at the far end of the room that opened out onto a wrought iron balcony and a panoramic view of the city spread far below. The tufted couch and chairs were of a green as pale as a new leaf, and the tables, lamps and bookcases were of off-white. To the right of the living room was a good-sized bedroom and another pair of big glass doors that opened onto a second balcony where there were a blue chaise and a small white iron table . The bedroom draperies were of a coarse weave of blue silk which let in under-water light. Adjoining was a second closet, this one a walk-in, and a glistening bath in blue tile."

The Verdict: For sheer lurid, page-turning, superb 60s descriptions, fanciful career notions, Designed by Stacey may well be the best book ever written. That is all.

Earlier: Career Romance For Young Moderns: Patti Lewis, Home Economist
•A Career Romance For Young Moderns: Weddings By Gwen
•Career Romance For Young Moderns: A Measure Of Love
•A Career Romance For Young Moderns: Lee Devins, Copywriter