Abby Goes to Washington (as Frances Dean Hancock)

[from back of Airmont Books paperback, 1963]

Abby IN WASHINGTON

To pretty Abby Rowland, being Food Technologist, Grade 5, with the Department of Agriculture had opened up a whole new world -- an exciting and challenging world -- in beautiful Washington.

It was part of the challenge that Abby's negative report on John Darling's plant in nearby Virginia should have aroused the ire of that irascible gentleman. Darling, to Abby's dismay, refused to change anything at all about his "perfect" plant. The only person who seemed willing to listen to reason was Darling's attractive son, Jack.

As a boy of twelve, Jack Darling had rescued a small and frightened Abby from the terrors of a frozen pond. Now Abby was skating on thin ice again...

Jeanne Judson was blessed with a long life (1888-1981) and a busy career. Along with being a reporter (printer, proof-reader, press agent, advertising copywriter, advertising salesperson, and an editor -- plus nurse in WWI) she wrote over 70 novels under her own name and the pseudonyms Emily Thorne and Frances Dean Hancock. Two of her earliest efforts were filmed: the serialized The Call of Life (Redbook, Aug-Dec 1918) as Beckoning Roads and the short story "The Church Window Angel" (Breezy Stories, Jan 1918) as Social Briars. After the teens, she really didn't publish again (except for the 1940 nonfiction What Every Woman Should Know About Furniture) until the early 1950s, when she began pumping out light romance novels -- like Abby Goes to Washington -- at a fairly good clip. Her picture on the author's page is from her 1919 passport, found, along with more biographical information, here, and there's a nice little 1918 piece from her about her journey to publication in the May 1918 edition of The Editor: The Journal of Information for Literary Workers, here.

Abby Goes To Washington is very much what we would call "career porn" -- where young female readers were offered enticing, explicit (in the "very specific, clear, and detailed" sense of the term :D) descriptions of work life and the ins and outs, no pun intended, of a particular job/career path available to women. The most popular of this genre in the mid-century , were, running away, nurse and stewardess romances -- Judson wrote a number of those, too -- so it's nice to see such a departure in Abby's scientific work as a Food Technologist for the USDA's testing laboratory in Washington, DC. I actually learned a lot about how food testing operates -- the book opens with Abby "spread[ing] a ketchup sample on a Howard mold-counting chamber" (5) -- and what the USDA grading system is and does. I didn't know, for instance, that getting your product USDA graded was optional, but useful in securing, among other things, large public contracts, or that the inspections measured quality, whereas safety was the province of the FDA in their enforcement of the Pure Food and Drug Act (46) (thank you, Vintage Bookfinder-featured Samuel Hopkins Adams!). There's lots of interesting narrative about young women's lives in DC in the 50's -- where it seemed like everyone was trying to work -- or date -- their way up the power scale and where there were, according to Judson/Hancock, more women than men and most of the latter married, but still on the prowl (23). There's also a nice description of what would turn out to be the tail end of the Watergate concerts and, during Abby's weekend visits home, some (overly-affectionate) discussion of the insularity of Virginia country club society. The romance is really not much of anything but she does quote Jane Austen at him -- "...in the words of Mr. Collins..." (28) and he, Dickens -- "nice girl and nothing but it" (41) -- at her, so there's that. And Abby gets an informal promotion to on-site inspector, which is almost as satisfying as winning Jack (about whom she's remarkably clear-eyed: he's a good kid, but "still far from maturity" (53)). Mid-century-flavored sexism creeps in a bit but the only truly domineering personality is an old lady so on that metric it's not really bad at all.