Sunday, October 29, 2006

Career Romances for Young Moderns

Meet the new member of the family: I've started another Weblog focusing on a book collection of mine, the book series known as "Career Romances for Young Moderns."

Career Romances for Young Moderns were a series of books published from the 1950s-1970s about young women striking out in different career fields. But because these were career romances, the books usually ended when the women gleefully give up their career for a man. The books paint a hilarious picture of a business world that's thankfully out-of-date. They're a little hard to come by today, but can be found in used bookstores and online. I cherish them for their innocence, and I also use them as a tool to remind myself how thankful I am not to be job-hunting as a woman in 1950s America.

I hope to go through the copies I own and share their dated and jovial weirdness. Sure, it's mockery, in a way, I guess but I hope you'll also see through that to my genuine fondness for a genre long disappeared.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fantastic. Although I don't know about the "long disappeared" part, you might check out some of the Silhouette Romance lines. I think it's just been updated to "slightly less offensive".

Anonymous said...

Heh. Unfortunately, I don't think this genre HAS disappeared. I think it's just less obvious now.

Anonymous said...

I love looking at changing trends in societal attitudes. Thanks for the link.

Anonymous said...

I collect these too! What I find amazing about them is that I had no idea that back in the fifties girls were being encouraged in any way to be doctors, landscape architects and real estate agents. And they don't ALWAYS have to give up the careers when they get married... only mostly.