About this ebook
What they told him was not what anyone expected.
Olsen steps back entirely in this book, letting the women speak without interruption, in their own words. What emerges is a portrait of lives lived under enormous pressure: the intra-office competition, the complicated relationships with the men they worked for and sometimes slept with, the corrosive gap between the promise of liberation and the reality of their daily lives. These women had the best jobs, the best apartments, the best of everything. And many of them were quietly desperate.
Their stories range from darkly comic to genuinely heartbreaking. A tough, no-nonsense boss who has lived more lives than most people dream of. A Southern belle who tears through the Village bar scene and arrives at her desk bright and early every morning. A fading cosmopolite terrified of aging out of the only world she knows. Fifteen very different women, sharing a common institution and, to varying degrees, a common disillusionment.
Published in 1972, The Girls in the Office reads today less like a period document and more like a warning that went unheeded. The questions these women raised about work, equality, ambition, and the cost of having it all are still being asked fifty years later.
New York Times bestselling author Jack Olsen, known for his deep research and psychological precision, turns those gifts toward a world closer to home than any he had previously explored. The book inspired a 1979 ABC television movie of the same name starring Susan Saint James and Barbara Eden, at the time the highest budgeted made-for-TV movie ever produced.
About the author
Jack Olsen is the author of thirty-three books, published in fifteen countries. Olsen’s journalism earned the National Headliners Award, Chicago Newspaper Guild’s Page One Award, commendations from Columbia and Indiana Universities, the Washington State Governor’s Award, the Scripps-Howard Award as well as other honors. Olsen was described as “the dean of true crime authors” by the Washington Post and the New York Daily News and “the master of true crime” by the Detroit Free Press and Newsday. Publishers Weekly called him “the best true crime writer around.” His studies of crime are required reading in university criminology courses. In a page-one review, the New York Times described his work as “a genuine contribution to criminology and journalism alike.” Olsen is a two-time winner in the Best Fact Crime category of the Mystery Writer’s of America, Edgar award.
