"You see them every morning at a quarter to nine, rushing out of the maw of the subway tunnel, filing out of Grand Central Station, crossing Lexington and Park and Madison and Fifth avenues, the hundreds and hundreds of girls. Some of them look eager and some look resentful, and some of them look as if they haven’t left their beds yet. Some of them have been up since six-thirty in the morning, the ones who commute from Brooklyn and Yonkers and New Jersey and Staten Island and Connecticut. They carry the morning newspapers and overstuffed handbags. Some of them are wearing pink or chartreuse fuzzy overcoats and five-year-old ankle-strap shoes and have their hair up in pin curls underneath kerchiefs. Some of them are wearing chic black suits (maybe last year’s but who can tell?) and kid gloves and are carrying their lunches in violet-sprigged Bonwit Teller paper bags. None of them has enough money."
-- The Best of Everything, by Rona Jaffe

This was another one of those mid-century career novels I read on my Alaska cruise. Even more so than the "Gray Flannel Suit", I felt like "The Best of Everything" was speaking directly to me, even if it was written for the young career women of the 1950s. Turns out not that while women today of course have much more opportunity, better pay, and more legal protections than our foremothers, the challenges that young women face at the start of their careers, the tradeoffs and choices we have to make, are not, really, so different than what they were. Though fortunately we now have such a thing as the sexual harrassment lawsuit to provide some measure of protection against what these women went through.

The women in "The Best of Everything" are career girls for sure, but with their minds on love as well as work. Many consider it a Sex in the City forerunner for the Ozzie and Harriet set. I appreciate any novel that shows a different side of women in the 50s outside of sock hops and Marilyn Monroe. I think it's a hugely complex decade that is too often plastered over with cultural cliches, and definitely so on the female side. So while guilty of several cliches itself, "The Best of Everything" is well worth a read, both for its portrayal of its times, and for what it has to teach us about our own.