Wife vs. Secretary

by Faith Baldwin

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Paperback

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

Faith Baldwin attended private academies and finishing schools, and in 1914-16 she lived in Dresden, Germany. She married Hugh H. Cuthrell in 1920, and the next year she published her first novel, Mavis of Green Hill. Although she often claimed she did not care for authorship, her steady stream of books belies that claim; over the next 56 years she published more than 85 books, more than 60 of them novels with such titles as Those Difficult Years (1925), The Office Wife (1930), Babs and Mary Lou (1931), District Nurse (1932), Manhattan Nights (1937), and He Married a Doctor (1944). Her last completed novel, Adam's Eden, appeared in 1977.

Typically, a Faith Baldwin book presents a highly simplified version of life among the wealthy. No matter what the difficulties, honour and goodness triumph, and hero and heroine are united. Evil, depravity, poverty, and sex found no place in her work, which she explicitly intended for the housewife and the working girl. The popularity of her writing was enormous. In 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression, she published five novels in magazine serial form and three earlier serials in volume form and saw four of her works made into motion pictures, for an income that year in excess of $315,000. She also wrote innumerable stories, articles, and newspaper columns, no less ephemeral than the novels.

Reviews

[Sophie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wife vs. Secretary gets top billing in this volume (and had a movie made of it), but I think the two follow-on novelettes are more interesting. Bank Holiday and Friday to Monday are fascinating glimpses into how much the depression turned people’s lives upside down. Bank Holiday especially provides an insight into what it must have been like as banks all over the country declared unexpected “holidays” leaving their customers scrambling for cash. It’s also a view into the hope that spread the nation as Roosevelt took office and began emergency actions to stabilize the banking system:

The resonant, warm voice of the new President of the United States cut through the rising smoke, a living presence in the room. All over the country...people sat clustered around radios...and listened, hopefully, prayerfully.

It was sometimes tough to read about that hopefulness, knowing that in 1933 the depression still had a long way to go (especially given recent studies that suggest FDR’s policies actually prolonged the depression by seven years.)

Friday to Monday is another view of how the depression affected people. In this case, the story is about poor people contemplating bad choices—expedient marriages and extramarital arrangements—to make their lives easier. My favorite part is when the father of a girl afraid to marry a working-class man tells her:

Certainty for the world rests in the hands of people like you, of people like Harry Godwin. Young men, young women, unhampered by what has gone before, breaking through the breaches in the crumbling walls, rebuilding those walls.

It’s a good portrait of a society in upheaval.

As for Wife vs. Secretary, it was interesting enough, but not particularly plausible. I understand the idea the author was trying to convey—that the two women were in love with two sides of the same man, (the wife in love with the husband, the secretary in love with the boss) but I didn’t really buy it. And as a wife, I would have had all kinds of problems with what happened between the boss and the secretary in Havana (neither relationship encroaches on the other, my a**) Either way, I found the ending too facile and the wife too complacent.

[Melinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story "Wife vs. Secretary" is alright I would rate it 2 1/2 stars. The four stars is for the novelette "Bank Holiday" which I found to the the best story in this book. It is about the affect a run on the banks during the depression had on people of different socio-economic groups. The 3rd story, also a novelette. "Friday to Monday" was fair I would rate it 2 stars.

[Eden Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

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Wife vs. Secretary seems an incendiary title for this 1933 novella, as both the wife and the secretary like and respect each other, but that doesn't sell books.

Vanning Sanford runs a Manhattan publishing empire and lives comfortably with his pretty wife Linda in a twentieth-floor penthouse on Park Avenue. After eight years, they are still in love enough to call each other loving nicknames; he still presents her with jewelry. Linda is adept at running the staff and the nightly dinner parties for a diverse selection of New York's elite. Publishing top-selling magazines, Sanford has his sights on acquiring Manhattan Weekly, and his secretary Helen Walsh knows as much or more about running his business, every department of which is housed in one skyscraper.
Clever, tactful, and intelligent at just 24, her beau Dave has proposed, but she doesn't like him enough for that. Helen and Linda have a mutual respect, and even pick out each other's gifts from Sanford, but it's Linda's friends who whisper and warn her: a pretty girl is too tempting to have around the office. When Sanford visits Helen in the hospital, gossip runs wild and Linda looks like a fool. She knows she is in real trouble when he flies to Havana for business, and Helen is forced to join him with important news from Manhattan Weekly. With half the cats in New York calling to console her, is Linda expected to believe there is nothing going on?

In 1933, Faith Baldwin was the most popular female author, and although we have seen this scenario many times, her take could be one of the first - fresh and engaging. Sanford jokes, "you can always get another wife, but good secretaries are unique," knowing in reality without her he would be just an incompetent businessman. Neither Sanford nor Helen would jeopardize their relationship with romance - it's all innuendo, and the women intelligently see this for themselves.
Wife vs. Secretary was filmed in 1936 with Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow, and Clark Gable. Reading it, I pictured Kay Francis, Myrna Loy, and William Powell, so I was close.