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executive-level job, and none seems to have ambitions toward anything higher. Their competitiveness is directed solely toward other women; their energies are spent scrambling for little favors and petty advances within the lower realm of the company reserved for women only. That men are responsible for keeping them down does not seem to have occurred to them; in any case, they are not interested in getting up from under. What they are looking for is a husband. In the meantime, they want not a better slot but a comfortable niche, the warm feeling of working in a nice, big, air-conditioned, wall-to-wall carpeted office full of friendly faces and office parties. The office becomes their world, the employees their surrogate family. As one of the women explains: “[We’re] producing a product in close conjunction with brilliant men, just as married couples produce children.” The men—most of them married—dominate it all, flirt with them, date them, seduce them, string them along, and manage to convince them that allof it is worth it to spend time with such extraordinary creatures. “You have to learn quickly that the super-talented, super-creative geniuses in our company are different from other men,” says one of the women in the book. Says another: “The hotshots at The Company [are] so glamorous. How could I get interested in a fifth assistant teller at a bank in the Bronx, when the man in the next cubicle at the office has just got back from Hong Kong?”
    The parade of married men who traipse through these women’s apartments turns their lives into parodies of
Back Street
. The women wait, year after year, for the men to leave their wives. They never do. Year after year of one or two nights a week, furtive lunches, nooners at midtown hotels, tacky confrontations with their wives. Even the girls who manage to avoid the married men make a mess of their lives. A few become tough in a way that is simply inhumane: “I learned how to turn the men’s lust against them. I’d pretend to be interested in one of them and I’d get him to talk to me for three hours and let him think he was making a great successful pass, and then I’d turn around and leave!” The rest manage to come up with relationships with single men that are quite as demeaning and unhealthy as those with married men. One woman Olsen calls Jayne Gouldtharpe has an affair for a year with an insurance man whose idea of rebellion is to throw egg yolks at the wall. After a year or so of what Nichols and May used to call proximity but no relating, he comes over for dinner one night. “We were taking a shower together,” Jayne recalls, “and he said, ‘You know, all we ever talk about is you. I have problems too.…’
    “ ‘What do you mean?’
    “ ‘Well, I’m going to Italy tomorrow for a long visit, and my big problem is how to tell you that this is the last time we’ll ever be together.’ ”
    After two days of misery, Jayne takes a week off from work, flies to Rome with no idea of where her lover is staying, and spends seven days looking for him. She returns to New York, only to find that he had never intended to go to Italy in the first place. “He was a sadist dealing with a masochist,” she concludes, “and the ultimate bit of sadism was to stand in my shower naked and tell me that we were through.”
    There is another woman in the book Olsen calls Gloria Rolstin, who falls in love with an executive named Tom Lantini. (Names are not Olsen’s strong point.) Lantini is divorced and lives with his invalid mother in a town house downtown. Within a few months, he has moved Gloria in as an ersatz nurse’s aide: she changes his mother’s clothes, takes her to the bathroom, cleans up after her, feeds her medicine, plays honeymoon bridge—“And the old lady barely able to tell what was trump!” All the while, she sleeps alone on a couch downstairs while Tom and his mother sleep in adjoining bedrooms above.
    The affair between Gloria and