Roast Beef, Medium: The Business Adventures of Emma McChesney

Charming, light stories in chronological order about the adventures of Emma McChesney in 1913, as a traveling saleswoman for the T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoat Company. This is quite a feminist book, in spite of its good-natured humor. Each story is complete in itself, but they do follow each other in time. References to vaudeville and early movies. Emma is divorced and supporting a 17-19 year-old son. Husband was a rotter, and she accepted no support from him. She is 36-39 years old. Could be written into movie script. Ferber is the author of "Giant" and "Show Boat", the former not written til the early 50s. My copy has wonderful illustrations. The title refers to moderation in life as being the best way to survive.

I bought this reprint because of the James Montgomery Flagg illustrations, but I enjoyed the story a great deal. Emma is a "drummer" in her mid-30s, an agent to retail stores throughout the Midwest of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company. She's a woman in what was, before the Great War, decidedly a man's world, but she beats most of them at it all hollow. She's claimed to be the first businesswoman in American literature and she serves as a mouthpiece for Ferber's feminist politics and her Progressive attitude toward the commercial world. This was the first of three collections (all made up of stories serialized in magazines) and they were immensely popular in their day -- especially with women, though Theodore Roosevelt was a fan. too. In fact, Emma was Ferber's first real hit and paved the way for her prolific later career. The style, of course, tends somewhat to effusive overwriting, but you get the same in almost any popular literature written at the turn of the century. Good stuff!