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Rapidly increasing numbers of women entered the field of real estate brokerage from the 1930s through the 1950s. "Rosie the Realtor" took advantage of the postwar building boom to create an expanding career niche, capturing residential brokerage as a female domain. In the process, she stretched gendered boundaries in the masculine world of brokerage to the breaking point. Employing a complex and internally antagonistic mix of liberal feminist and conservative ideologies, female realtors created their own professional space, expanding career opportunities for women at the same time that their economic and political practices reinforced the constraints of domesticity.

The man customer likes to deal with a woman in real estate for several reasons. If he has a wife, or female relatives, he assumes that a woman will know better what they would like. Then, once he's made your acquaintance, he's amazed and delighted to find someone who can handle business like a man, and still make him feel like a superior being.

-Realtor Mary Amelia Warren, 1941

I believe in my America, the Land of Freedom and the Home of peoples from all the earth, who have and seek the comforts derived from the pursuit of free enterprise. ... I will encourage every mother to instill in the minds of her children the joys and privileges of living in their own home.

-"Creed for Women Realtors," 1950

"Stay out of real estate," one of the town's leading citizens advised Laura Hale Gorton. "If there was a living in it, I'm quite certain that a man would have tried it years ago!" The world seemed pretty gloomy to Gorton in 1931, and this admonition was no consolation. Recently widowed, supporting two young daughters and a large home with a mortgage, she possessed no special training but had to earn a living for her family. Intrepidly ignoring the warning, Gorton acquired a real estate license and opened an office in Glastonbury, Connecticut. She reasoned that she would "sell that which I know best and believe in-my community" to people "seeking a home in the country and a pleasant neighborhood in which to bring up their children." In 1952 she handed over the business to her nephew, and in retirement she looked "with deep satisfaction" on "hundreds of homes, miles of streets winding through hills and a booming shopping center," a "monument to her vision and courage."1 In her twenty-plus years in real estate, Gorton was not only successful financially; she was also an institution builder. She was among the earliest members of the Women's Council of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, founded in 1938 by the leadership of the National Association to help women brokers establish firm footing in the profession. Gorton became president of the Women's Council in 1948. She also served on the Realtors' Washington Committee in 1949, leading female realtors' protest against public housing, against which they used their influence as businesspersons, condemning it as "socialistic" and an affront to true American family values.

Laura Hale Gorton was typical of women entering the real estate field in the 1920s and 1930s, but real estate women contrasted sharply with the rest of the female labor force. Many women realtors were married, and most were at least 44 years old.2 The composite picture of women in real estate in the 1930s and 1940s looked much like the female labor force in the 1960s and beyond. The rise of "Rosie the Realtor" foreshadowed the emergence of the late-twentiethcentury American businesswoman.3

In the first decades of the twentieth century, women flooded into real estate sales and brokerage at rates of entry five to fifteen times higher than those of men. In 1930 women made up 14 percent of the field; twenty years earlier, they had accounted for a mere 2 percent. In 1910 there was one woman selling real estate for every 6,654 families; in 1940, the ratio was one to 814. As in other sectors of the labor force, the Great Depression decimated the ranks of women brokers, with a total attrition of about two-thirds between 1930 and 1940. Nevertheless, women's participation in the field rebounded much more quickly than did men's. While the number of male brokers increased barely 19 percent from 1940 to 1950, in the same period the number of women increased by 97 percent. An even more pronounced differential occurred in the next decade, with personnel increases of 24 percent for men and 130 percent for women (see Tables 1 and 2).4 The massive wave of housing construction in the late 1940s and 1950s produced tremendous demand for real estate brokers and salespeople, particularly in residential real estate, and women took advantage of the situation to create a large and growing niche for themselves. Women literally took over residential brokerage in the postwar period.

Unlike other occupations that were "feminized"-most notably, secretarial work-residential real estate brokerage did not become a ghetto for cheap female labor. Although male brokers tended to dominate the generally more lucrative industrial and commercial re- alty sector, their retreat from residential brokerage was not entirely voluntary. Women brokers employed a sophisticated combination of strategies to enter the field, mixing a liberal, egalitarian argument about female competence with a perspective that may be called "business maternalism"-a claim to a distinctive role in the economy based on what was thought to be women's special knowledge. Male brokers first attempted to resist women's incursion onto their turf, and then to accommodate women realtors in a limited way, but ultimately women's claims for inclusion were very difficult to resist. The consequences of the rise of "Rosie the Realtor" were profoundfor the real estate field, for female brokers and white middle-class women in general, and for American housing policy in the postWorld War II period.

Gender Trouble on the Home-Selling Front

The movement to professionalize real estate brokerage from the 190Os through the 1920s was almost entirely a male affair informed by various notions of masculinity. In the 1920s the leaders of the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB), in cooperation with academic economists such as Richard T. Ely, attempted to "scientize" the field. In the process, they elevated technocratic masculinity to a preeminent position in the occupational culture of the 1920s. As in other fields, the realtors' attempt to masculinize the occupation through science came as women began to enter in significant and rapidly increasing numbers: from 1920 to 1930 women's rates of participation in real estate brokerage increased by 240 percent, besting the previous decade's figure of 215 percent.5

The attempt at scientization was not entirely successful. In addition to the complex cultural and social obstacles to achieving science-based professionalism in a commercial endeavor, there was a very prosaic gender tension at the heart of real estate brokerage. Since the early days of the attempt to professionalize the field, male brokers had tried to construct their calling as manly and heroic.6 Yet most still considered the primary commodity that they sold, the family home, a "woman's place." The home had emerged as an object of scientific knowledge at the end of the nineteenth century, underpinning claims for professionalization in a wide variety of fields, including social work, home economics, housing reform, and real estate brokerage. However, the home-centric professions were largely marked feminine.7 Thus, from the outset, discourses of masculinity were a problematic source of cultural support for the professionalization of real estate brokerage.

Women streaming into the real estate field, first in the 1920s and then again in the 1940s, forced implicit notions and barely suppressed gender tensions to the surface. At the same time that women began to enter real estate brokerage in appreciable numbers, they emerged as both authors and subjects of articles in NAREB's publications and began to appear regularly on the program at national conventions. In the 1920s real estate women were considered well suited to deal in residential property because of their "natural" role as homemakers. Women brokers writing in the National Real Estate Journal rarely challenged this premise, typically staking their claim for entry into the masculine world of sales on taken-for-granted, gendered knowledge: "Women know homes better." But asserting the right to intervene in the "public," masculine world of commerce, based on the cultural presupposition that women possessed special skills because of their traditional role in the "private" sphere, turned out to be a subtly subversive strategy. Women brokers appropriated a culturally dominant belief to stretch, and finally shatter, the boundaries that society expected all women to observe.8

Femininity worked in complex ways as women real estate brokers attempted to enter the profession as equal colleagues, albeit on explicitly gendered terms. Unlike the typical story of sex-segmented markets, in which men abdicated the field of, for example, secretarial work after a technological innovation made it possible to cheapen labor, in real estate women capitalized on structural weaknesses in the masculine professionalization project to capture the field.9 Like middle-class masculinity, middle-class femininity had at least two faces, which complemented each other as often as they antagonized. Real estate women's efforts to join the profession were informed on the one hand by liberal individualism: the "privatized" form of feminism, the ideology of the sexually and economically independent New Woman that gathered strength in the 1920s and asserted that women could do anything men could do, on their terms. On the other hand, a sort of business maternalism claimed that women could and should play a special role in the real estate world because of their innate moral qualities and particular experiences as women.10 In the 1920s and 1930s this latter theme prevailed, both within real estate and within larger discourses about business and gender. When Fortune magazine ran a three-part article on women in business in 1935, it focused almost entirely on women in helpmeet roles, such as secretaries and clerks to powerful men, and explicitly framed the "feminine invasion" of the office in terms of domesticity. Women were able to take over the functions in the office formerly held by men because, the Fortune writer argued, "what the [businessman] wanted in the office was something as much like the vanished wife of his father's generation as could be arrangedsomeone to balance his checkbook, buy his railroad tickets . . . take his daughter to the dentist, listen to his side of the story, give him a courageous look when things were blackest, and generally, know all, understand all."11 Though women were quietly streaming into "masculine" fields like real estate brokerage, mainstream culture in the 1920s and 1930s was not ready to cede symbolic space.

In the early 1940s women realtors shifted their emphasis from a taken-for-granted business maternalism-"women know homes better"-toward liberal individualism with a twist, employing the ideology of domesticity to regain the ground lost during the Depression. In this second phase of women's incursion into the real estate field, a leading element among women realtors openly derided the idea that they should fear threatening men by encroaching upon their prerogatives. These women brokers charged through the gender barrier by taking up the rhetoric of domesticity self-consciously and ironically to create a female dominion in real estate. But with this "progressive" task of entering the field of real estate on more or less equal footing achieved, women realtors again shifted the emphasis back toward maternalism to fervently-and effectively-oppose public housing and other "socialistic" ventures in the late 1940s and 1950s. By the 1950s women realtors were on the cutting edge of the movement of women into business. The Cold War provided the context in which they could augment women's established role as homemakers with political activism. American culture had long enshrined women as protectors of the home and thereby as guardians of the virtue of the republic. Real estate women now became strident advocates of the free enterprise system as well, touting it as the sole means of achieving an abundance of "true homes." Traditional gender assumptions and women's growing prominence in the economy came together in a powerful new combination in American culture.

Creating Women's Space in Real Estate

By the early 1920s women appeared with increasing frequency as authors and subjects of stories on the pages of the National Real Estate Journal, the official organ of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and by mid-decade they began to play high-profile roles at annual conventions. In recognition of women's increasing participation in the field nationwide, NAREB held a Conference of Women Realtors during its twentieth annual convention in Seattle in 1927. The keynote speaker, accomplished San Francisco broker Grace Perego, declared to the women assembled that "woman's place is not in the home when she wishes to embrace real estate as a career." Nor were women to be confined to the home-selling business. Perego made an impassioned plea for gender equality: "Which branch of real estate would women best be fitted for?" she asked rhetorically. Though many women made their "start in the real estate business selling homes because they seem naturally adapted to this line because of their familiarity with home requirements," there was no necessary connection between gender and home sales. Women would sell homes only until they "found" themselves and developed a broader knowledge of real estate; then they would "invade any branch" they chose. Perego's career path seemed to be a case in point. She had begun as an apartment builder and moved into selling country real estate before establishing a large brokerage firm. Attacking the notion of "women's place" in business, she noted that her own firm included gender-segregated and gender-mixed work environments. There was no intrinsic reason for women to deal exclusively with women or to remain in their putative sphere of residential property. Nevertheless, a gendered division of labor was, indeed, normal practice in real estate in the 1920s. The typical female real estate broker managed the women's sales department, and her assignment was selling suburban homes.

Grace Perego's strong gender-equality argument was premature in 1927, a virtual voice in the wilderness, at least in the world of real estate at the national level. Much more prevalent was the belief that women possessed a particular "women's point of view" by nature. Clearly, most articles written by women brokers in the National Real Estate Journal in the 1920s expressed this perspective, purporting to give "the Woman's Angle" on real estate. Louise Slocomb, "Realtoress" of Portland, Oregon, contended that women possessed "certain qualities" that made them "peculiarly fit" for the profession. "Women's intuition" helped the woman realtor "enter into the prospect's psychology, to grasp the situation quickly and thoroughly." The realtor could then use her "sharp wit" and "readiness to grasp detail" to "make the best of a given situation." On the one hand, men had "courage, strength and foresight"; on the other, women possessed the "ability to handle details" and to understand "fellow women." Slocomb suggested that these were complementary traits and implied that a firm with both male and female brokers would be most efficient. Since women were homemakers by "nature," it was equally "natural" for them to succeed as home brokers. "A woman has a definite idea of what a home should be; she appreciates its comforts and conveniences as no man can." Most importantly, to the woman, selling a house was "more than a mere business deal." The woman realtor took "a personal interest in every home" that she sold. Her enthusiasm was "contagious," and this was "transferred to the prospect."12

In the context of popular culture's discovery of, and anxiety over, the New Woman in the early 1920s, real estate women treaded lightly, taking care not to appear too aggressively intrusive into the presumptive male world.13 Apparently worried that men reading the National Real Estate Journal might feel threatened by women's entry into the real estate field, female realtors were quick to declare that they sought not "to deprive men of their laurels" or "to take unto themselves masculine prerogatives." They were simply taking advantage of the natural, sexual division of social labor that endowed men and women with different qualities. Given that women possessed "alertness, sympathy, vision," and "that elusive intuitiveness," all invaluable aids in selling homes, and because of the assumption that homes must appeal first to women, women were bound to succeed as residential realtors. In the 1920s, society almost invariably framed women's claims for incursion into the masculine world of real estate in terms of the inherent qualities that distinguished women from men. Women, it almost went without saying, were "extremely well fitted to sell homes."14

Undoubtedly, this essentialist argument helped women find a place in the profession in the 1920s, as rates of female participation doubled from 1920 to 1930.15 The apparent compulsion on the part of both male and female brokers to reiterate the assertion, however, suggests that perhaps it performed some sort of boundary-maintenance function in the face of living proof-high-powered women brokers and developers like Grace Perego-that women could succeed at any branch of real estate.

The Great Depression almost drove women out of the real estate field altogether. About two-thirds of female brokers left the field between 1930 and 1940, and although the number of women who let their membership in NAREB lapse is unknown, the economic crisis likely devastated the ranks of women realtors. In search of new members, the leadership of NAREB, executive secretary Herbert U. Nelson and president Joseph Catherine in particular, turned toward women, actively encouraging the formation of the Women's Council of Realtors in 1938. The Women's Council was initially intended to make women feel more comfortable in the masculine environment of the annual conventions, holding separate gatherings for female brokers and saleswomen. Nelson envisioned not a separate organization-that was unneeded, he claimed, because most local boards in fact did admit women-but an annual gathering that could serve "as a means for real estate women to get acquainted." Nelson told the forty or so women gathered at the council's initial meeting at the 1938 NAREB convention in Milwaukee that an "informal" women's organization within the association would "aid the real estate calling by helping to raise the standards of practice and ethics and advancing the National Association's educational program." President Catherine similarly invoked business maternalism, asserting that women's "good intuition" made them "especially well qualified" to sell homes and thus welcoming their participation in the affairs of the National Association. Meeting chair Cora Ella Wright suggested that one function of a Women's Council might be to conduct research into laws affecting women and real property. Echoing Nelson and Catherine, she asserted that women would naturally "promote higher standards of business procedure and ethics."16

Testimony given by participants during the first meeting revealed a wide range of experience and aspirations among women brokers. Several women were founders of their own real estate firms; others had worked their way up through the ranks of established real estate companies, and a few had transferred skills learned in other businesses to real estate. Several had been active in real estate organizations on the local and state levels, and a handful had served as presidents of local boards. The women realtors shared a sense of accomplishment through real estate. Interestingly, nearly all their testimonials mention men. Some drew the men in their lives into the business with them. Others were pulled into business by their husbands or brothers to act as partners or to fill a vacancy left by a relative's death. Elva Gofer of Portland, Oregon, stated that she was "in charge of seventeen men" and that "women should cooperate more actively with men and seek their advice." Maude M. Butler of Tulsa told her colleagues that she had "been building houses ranging from $5,000 to $12,500," having become a member of the Tulsa Board "at the invitation of the men." Henrietta T. White of Los Angeles noted that in her city, where the board had long accepted women as members, separate women's meetings had allowed women to "open up" more than they would in the board's regular, male-dominated meetings.17 California women would take the lead in advancing women's position in real estate. In the Golden State, an active women's division had existed since 1924, and most local boards accepted women.

The inaugural meeting of the Women's Council provided an important space for women realtors to come into their own. The laughter and camaraderie led one participant to claim, "My whole viewpoint with respect to real estate changed": "Not only did I get more commissions. I got more pleasure out of my work." Hazel M. Long of Cleveland, noted for her national advertising campaigns, regaled her sisters with a story about a "feminine house-hunter" who had been thoroughly pleased with a place until she noticed the bathroom's purple tiling, which she feared would clash with her underclothes.18 Long's playful anecdote suggested simultaneous identification with and distancing from the butt of the joke: real estate women could imagine themselves in the same embarrassing position. The partial identification with "feminine house-hunters" provided a basis for women realtors to advance their professional claims both as women, with special women's knowledge, and as aspirants to gender-neutral equality with men. Echoing the men's rhetoric about the "curbstone broker," women realtors identified "kitchen operators"-the "many hundreds of untrained unaffiliated women . . . who hold real estate licenses"-as the "big danger" to their legitimacy and professional aspirations.19 It was incumbent upon female realtors to utilize their expertise as women both to understand and to overcome the concerns of the "feminine house-hunter."

Though NAREB'S membership began to rebound after hitting rock bottom in 1935, the organization was financially strapped in the years leading up to the Second World War, and the Women's Council was not a priority. Even the most supportive men, like Herb Nelson, saw the council as a mere "device for letting the women get together at conventions," not as any sort of incipient institution or formal division. Still, the council's annual gatherings provided women with a social space they had not had in the past and did not feel they could have in the larger convention. Miami realtor Mary Avery reported to Nelson in late December 1940 that the demand for a formal Women's Division within NAREB was growing. "A great many women are not at ease in the presence of men either in business or socially," she noted: "These same women will speak up very definitely in a women's setting and in a women's group do a lot of good work and get a lot of pleasure out of it."20

The evidence suggests the stirrings of a female realtors' consciousness. It was a divided consciousness, however. The founding members of the Women's Council split over their long-range objectives: did they seek self-liquidation and assimilation into the "malestream," or did they want to create a niche for women within the profession?21 Were women realtors supposed to assimilate into the professional culture as established by the real estate men who had founded the National Association, or was there to be a specifically "women's way" of doing real estate? At first, the latter, business maternalist view predominated, though with some subtle twists. Inviting women brokers to attend the Women's Council meeting at the 1939 NAREB convention in Los Angeles, Cora Wright stressed the opportunity to "cash in on the women's angle" in real estate practice. During the 1940 meeting in Philadelphia, the Women's Council pledged itself to increase the membership of the National Association and to support fully the new Urban Land Institute in its advocacy of private enterprise solutions to the problem of urban blight. At the same meeting, women realtors discussed "why women naturally specialized" in residential real estate. NAREB president Newton C. Fair, whose own Chicago Real Estate Board continued to refuse to admit women to membership, found himself in hostile territory when he insinuated that women tended to dabble in the business rather than take it on full-time. He was met, one source noted, by jeers and heckling from the all-female audience, who asked him why an unethical and part-time male broker should be eligible to apply for membership in the August Chicago Board while a full-time, ethical female broker was not.22 The meritocratic, egalitarian argument made by Grace Perego 13 years earlier was beginning to bubble to the surface in the space provided by the Women's Council. The world war would provide a new context in which women realtors could advance claims for inclusion on more egalitarian grounds.

"Rosie the Realtor"

On the eve of U.S. entry into World War II, nearly twelve million American women were in the paid labor force, constituting onefourth of all workers. The American work force had always included women, particularly after the advent of the factory system in the early nineteenth century, but before the 1920s few married women worked for wages. By 1930, one in nine married women was a wage earner, and most working wives were from the 42 percent of families who lived at or below the subsistence level. The Great Depression intensified this tendency, and by 1940 about one in six married women worked outside the home. Nevertheless, in the 1930s men and women generally held different jobs: men were concentrated in manufacturing; women, in the service sector. Those women employed in manufacturing were concentrated in nondurable goods production. After 1941 the Second World War drew many homemakers and female students into the paid labor force (particularly into durable goods production) to replace men drafted into military service. In 1944, at the zenith of the war mobilization, married women outnumbered single women in the work force for the first time in U.S. history.

As economist Lynda de la Vifta has demonstrated, however, the influx of women into "male" jobs during the war was an aberration. By 1950 women had largely abdicated "male" jobs in manufacturing. Fields such as finance, insurance, real estate, and sales and clerical occupations became more broadly feminized. In other words, the residual impact of World War II on the gender composition of the sectors in which women participated most heavily during the war was negligible: after the war, they reverted to the same patterns of gender segregation that had existed in 1940. The most enduring changes wrought by the war on the structure of the labor force were in the management, clerical and sales, and service sectors. Of these, clerical and sales, including real estate brokerage, manifested the most notable increase in female participation.23

Before the war, the composition of the real estate labor force and the character of the work differed markedly from the aggregate labor force, particularly for women. In 1930, 45 percent of the 30,000 women in real estate were married, 40 percent were widowed or divorced, and only 15 percent were single. In the overall white female work force of 1930, however, fewer than 30 percent were married, 54 percent were single, and 17 percent were widowed or divorced. Over 70 percent of professional women were single (see Table 2). The age distribution of real estate women was also atypical. Nearly 70 percent of women in real estate in 1940 were 44 years old or older, but in the overall labor force, fewer than 25 percent were in that age demographic.24 From the perspective of 1930, or even 1940, real estate women were anomalous in almost every way. On the other hand, from the perspective of 1960 or 1970, real estate women of the 1930s and 1940s look quite typical. In 1960 23.6 percent of the female labor force was single, 55.1 percent married, and 21.3 divorced, quite close to the 1930 figures for real estate women. In 1960 over 60 percent of the female labor force was over age thirty-five. In 1970 over 75 percent of women in real estate were age thirty-five or older.

"Rosie the Realtor" was a bellwether for labor market trends in the postwar period, particularly the entrance of married women permanently into the labor force. Exploring the rise of Rosie the Realtor helps bridge the gap between scholars studying women's work in the 1940s and 1950s: some interpret the war as a watershed during which a nascent feminist consciousness emerged as a precursor to the social changes of the 1960s and 1970s; others see the war as an aberrant moment in which women's participation in wage labor was largely a "temporary extension of domesticity."25 The history of real estate women is the history of the divided consciousness of twentieth-century middle-class femininity: independent women staked their claim to economic participation on both liberal notions of equality and maternalistic ideas of women's special role in society.

World War II provided an opportunity for women to rethink their place in the labor force in general and in the real estate profession in particular. Early in the war years, women realtors began to assert vigorous claims to full and equal membership in the profession. They shifted their strategy for entering the field toward a more liberal, individualist approach that employed an explicit awareness of the tactical usefulness of gender assumptions. The transcript of the 1941 Women's Council meeting in Detroit provides an extraordinary record of this realization in the context of the war mobilization. NAREB executive secretary Herb Nelson opened the breakfast meeting with a notable, unabashedly confessional address on "Visual Nuisances and Their Effects on Real Estate." Expressing implicit gratitude to the Women's Council for the opportunity to escape the hard-headed, masculine world of the larger convention in order to discuss important issues only women would understand, he prefaced his talk with a somewhat awkward disclaimer: "This subject [billboard regulation] is a hobby of mine toward which men in the organization express themselves with a certain amount of tolerance but concerning which I think they are rather indifferent." He proceeded to make a case for a campaign against ugliness by drawing analogies with other nuisances: "We recognize that you can't put a boiler factory where people have to sleep and eat, but we go on year after year tolerating billboards and outdoor advertising which is just as destructive of amenity values." Assigning the blame for the proliferation of unattractiveness explicitly to excessive "commercialism"-that is, the unfettered entrepreneurial activities of men such as those beyond the walls of the Women's Council meeting-he im- plored the women to join his crusade. "I don't know where a job like this belongs," he admitted sheepishly: "I doubt if I could get a committee of men in the organization to take an interest in this matter, which is so important to real estate, but I feel very strongly that somebody in [your] group should take a hand in it." If the women realtors were to make any special contribution to the real estate field, it would have to be "a matter of this kind, in which I assume women have perhaps a better understanding and a more sensible mind and spirit than the men." Speaking in women's space, Nelson was obligated to lay bare his premises. His speech served its purpose. The Women's Council voted unanimously to adopt "visual nuisances" as their annual project.26

Nevertheless, Nelson's earnest, sensitive-male petition received an ironic response from a following speaker, Mary Amelia Warren, a young and ambitious California realtor. She used the women's space to deliver a rousing address decrying male superiority and sketching a plan for a female invasion of residential real estate. She began with a brief gloss on the Darwinian struggle for women brokers to survive the Depression by working harder than men, by basing their conduct in real estate on knowledge gained by the imperative for household economizing in the 1930s. When brokerage firms were collapsing and incomes and real estate values were plummeting, "real estate WOMEN stepped in and began to make order out of chaos." The rules of the domestic economy shifted: "People were shopping for bargains as they'd never shopped before. Commissions were HARD TO MAKE. But women were accustomed to making that extra effort to please people ... to making dollars go as far as they could." Women, experienced in economizing during hard times, "attacked" the Depression-era real estate crisis with the "same methods by which they ran their households."27

The process of natural selection during the 1930s left women brokers well adapted to succeed in the post-Depression period. Warren noted that real estate advertisements in California in the late 1930s and early 1940s abounded with instructions to "call Jane Doe" or "Consult Mrs. So and So." Why? she asked. "If ANY of you think that the use of those feminine names is a mark of sentimental appreciation for the lifesaving services we real estate women rendered to our [male] brokers during the depression," she declared sarcastically, "then you've either got your psychology and economics mixed, or you DON'T know [male] California brokers!" Women were so active and successful in California real estate precisely because "Mrs. John Q. Public" had grown to appreciate the "EXTRA services the woman Realtor performs," as well as her subtly different approach to home selling. "All through the beautifully dead past," Warren mischievously contended, "when MEN were doing the house choosing, the majority of houses changed hands because one man convinced another that 'this is a real buy.'" In the new world of the 1940s, however, things were very different. Of course, women were interested in construction-"they demand that a house be adequately built"-but, reflecting the new sensibilities of the age of consumption, Warren asserted, "the majority of them are more interested in LIKING the house for twenty years than watching it endure for a hundred."28 The message was clear: women's values-consumer values-had become the engine of the economy.

Thus, Warren continued, reaching the climax of her speech, "for reasons that we actively engaged in the profession readily understand, in BUYING a home more and more people are saying, re RATHER DEAL WITH A WOMAN. . . . Those six words have endowed you and me with a profession."29 This new slogan was tantamount to a new strategy for women real estate brokers: to capitalize on society's gender assumptions, to employ hitherto taken-for-granted notions about innate female differences instrumentally. She explicated the basis for her contention that women were poised to dominate real estate brokerage:

Throughout history womankind has been credited with the virtues of gentleness, honesty, sincerity, and unselfishness. Whether we actually possess these attributes in undue measure would be a subject of academic interest. But tradition has endowed us, and being human, we've striven to merit the reputation. . . .

The man customer likes to deal with a woman in real estate for several reasons. If he has a wife, or female relatives, he assumes that a woman will know better what they would like. Then, once he's made your acquaintance, he's amazed and delighted to find someone who can handle business like a man, and still make him feel like a superior being. And, on the average, he endows you unquestionably with a noble character (seeing that you're in such a difficult and competitive field) and likes to feel HE'S helping you carry your burden by dealing with you.30

If this new breed of women realtors claimed the territory of home sales as their own sphere, that claim was no longer a declaration of innate moral prerogative, but only an attenuated Victorian domesticity tagged onto a self-interestedly gendered "expertise" in manipulating home buyers. Real estate women possessed "that element that presupposes you'll act as an interested human being"-that is, as a woman instead of as a "commission minded salesman." The new slogan for woman realtors in the 1940s and beyond-"I'd rather deal with a woman"-was a perfect collapse of the commercial motives and gendered morality that the doctrine of separate spheres was intended precisely to avoid. Victorian women did not "deal," at least not so obviously or in those terms, but women realtors appropriated the vestiges of Victorian ideology for their own purposes, playing ironically with the language to cash in on stereotypes.31 They had, in a sense, taken the ideology of domesticity to its logical extreme: societal assumptions about women's "natural" inclinations were refashioned as cultural capital, readily convertible to the cold, hard cash of commissions.32 It should come as no surprise, Warren declared, that "more and more of the FEMALE OF THE SPECIES are selling more and more houses," getting more involved in real estate organizations, and taking advantage of the growing opportunities for real estate education.33

But, alas, there was a dark side to the story of feminine progress in real estate. "The MALE ANIMAL FEARS women in business," Warren seethed. Perhaps because women were "doing pretty well" in their new roles, male brokers in many offices would "permit" women to "draw in the business, initiate sales, and work out most of the details," then step in at the last minute to close the transaction. Warren related an anecdote about a female rental agent who took some prospective renters out to see an apartment only to discover that they were actually interested in buying the entire building. She rushed the people back to the office to meet a salesman but found him missing. "No doubt he'd just run out for a haircut," Warren quipped. The agent took them back out to inspect the property thoroughly, and she piqued their interest enough that by the time they returned to the office they were ready to place a deposit. By this time, the salesman was back, "so he graciously stepped in, gave the customers the usual receipt to bind the deal, and 'earned' his commission. Wasn't it wonderful?" she scoffed.34 Even worse, there were real estate boards that still refused to admit women to membership. Warren implored her sisters to apply pressure to open them up.

What could they do? "Why are we attending a meeting of the WOMENS Council? For sociability? To be sure!! There is no greater pleasure than the meeting of kindred spirits." However, "besides just the pleasure" of women's solidarity, "WE MUST COUNCIL!" That was the true task of the Women's Council, to Warren and her ilk: to use the women's space to inspire each other, to convince each other that "we 'belong,'" to construct a female business identity. She envisioned women realtors developing the self-confidence to claim positions of greater responsibility within their firms, demand that closed boards open themselves to women members, and insist on treatment as equals rather than inferiors. She entreated her fellow women realtors to take advantage of their historically conditioned talents for accommodation and compromise, to "believe in the essential soundness of the scheme of things," to remain the moral foundation of American society. "The effective way to inspire other women is to be, yourself, an outstanding success! re RATHER DEAL WITH A WOMANI" she closed, to an ovation by over one hundred female brokers. The transcript made no note of whether Herb Nelson remained in the room during this speech, but the entire membership of the National Association could soon read it in the National Real Estate Journal.35

Philadelphia realtor Madeline Spiess, chair of the Women's Council from 1942 to 1943, heeded Warren's call to demand that closed boards admit women. Spiess had become a real estate broker almost by default when her husband, prominent Philadelphia broker Richard T. Spiess, died suddenly in the mid-1930s. From 1939 to 1940 she oversaw the formation of the Philadelphia Real Estate Board's Women's Division, which grew steadily throughout the war years, and she was the first female member of that eminent board. She pledged to help "organize the real estate women" in Pennsylvania and throughout the country "to such degree that wide pressure can be brought to bear upon the boards to give full recognition to the women as realtors, without any group separation as to sex." She instructed state chairwomen to canvass the boards in their states and discover which had "definite rulings" against women members. Their report revealed that, in the West and Southwest, virtually all boards were open to women, but in the East and Midwest, many boards were closed to women, either by statute or by custom. Spiess urged the formation of local Women's Council chapters in cities such as Columbus, Ohio, where boards did not permit female members.36

Opposition to the formation of local councils arose from both women and men realtors. Some real estate women, particularly in California and other regions where women enjoyed free access to the privileges of board membership, feared that "separatism," as they called it, would lead to erosion of the equal status they enjoyed. Men worried that separate women's organizations might detract from the strength of the local board and divide the loyalties of women brokers. If there was also a fear that women might develop autonomy in their own space, might conspire against men, this remained unvoiced. Spiess argued that a separate organization would ultimately allow for the development of a "non-separation point of view" in the industry.37 She wanted local councils to serve as semi-autonomous spaces, like the Women's Division she had helped found in Philadelphia, in which women realtors could gain the requisite confidence to join the "malestream" of the profession. Spiess and others viewed local council chapters as something more than a ladies auxiliary to the local board but less than a fully autonomous group of women brokers plotting their own course. Tension over "separateness" hung over the Women's Council throughout the 1940s.

Toward the end of her tenure in office, Spiess urged the transformation of the Women's Council from a sort of women's club into a professional women's business association. A list of objectives prepared by Spiess's vice-chair, Belle Knowles, enumerated ten specific goals for the council, a mixture of liberal and maternalist ideas. Women realtors should "demand the same recognition for ability that is accorded the men of the profession" and should work to "secure general recognition of the importance of women in the real estate profession," goals premised on liberal ideas about equality. At the same time, Spiess and her officers wanted the Women's Council to help carve a special niche for women. The council aimed, therefore, to "keep women aware of the significance and responsibilities of women in a profession dealing in American homes," implicitly invoking a taken-for-granted premise that, as women, female realtors had special authority over matters domestic. Further, this objective implied that, as businesswomen, they had a special political duty. Finally, the council intended to extend Herbert Nelson's plea for help with billboard control into a broader objective of "enlarging] the concept of esthetic values among realtors, as important and significant factors in rebuilding our cities, reorganizing our industries and reconstructing a world for a new era of peace." The Women's Council, as a professional society, "should aim to make some contribution of its own toward the scientific understanding of real estate," Knowles argued, and who better than women to study the impact of "beauty and ugliness" on real estate values: "Is it too much to hope that women Realtors may find aesthetics a fifth [factor of production], and so add something to the science of real estate?"38 Thus, mirroring men's efforts of the 1920s, women realtors sought to appropriate the cultural authority of science to justify their claim to professional status. But, as we have seen, men's attempts were not entirely successful, and the Women's Council tended to ignore the suggestion in practice. There would be far more important women's work vying for the council's attention.

From 1938 until 1945, the Women's Council existed solely at the behest of the men on the board of directors of the National Association. For the first half-decade of the council's existence, the men who ran NAREB allowed the organization a great deal of autonomy, largely because it was perceived as a sort of ladies' auxiliary, a social club that made women feel more comfortable at national meetings. As women began to take a greater role in the industry during the wartime mobilization, and as leading women realtors attempted to transform the council into a professional businesswomen's organization, the NAREB leadership began to dictate the terms of membership and to exercise greater authority. Late in 1943 NAREB decreed that only women realtors could belong to the Women's Council and that the organization had no authority to collect dues. St. Louis realtor Carol Laux, Spiess's successor, seemed to concur with the men's implicit concerns when she voiced doubts about women's business sensibilities and maturity in her first letter to the membership in March 1943. Addressing anxieties provoked by large numbers of married women flocking into war work in 1942 and 1943, Laux, who ran a brokerage in partnership with her husband, challenged the council membership to prove (to men, of course) "that women can share the business world on a competitive basis, and not be petty." She implored women realtors to demonstrate that women "are progressive and not aggressive, workers and not 'queen bees.'" For Laux, male approval was the ultimate arbiter of women's achievement: she urged each woman realtor to "do a job that a man would be proud of."39

Thus, the Women's Council was divided between West Coast women like Mary A. Warren who had complete confidence in women's acumen and place in the business world and others, mainly midwesterners like Carol Laux, who seemed to harbor doubts. On the one hand, feisty liberal rhetoric met with broad approval. The council's Bulletin approvingly published the words of successful San Francisco realtor Geneve Schaffer, who, in response to criticism that women were not doing their part in war activities, retorted, "When women have equal rights, perhaps they will do more."40 On the other hand, the Bulletin also published Elsie Smith Parker's poem "For the Woman Realtor," which represented its subject as an older and demure woman, kind, diminutive, desexualized, and nonthreatening, who would make a home buyer, ostensibly male, feel completely at ease:

She's a quiet little woman,

Has a patient, friendly air,

Knows the costs of lots and taxes,

Has gentle voice and graying hair,

And SHE sells homes. . . .

Shows you to this place and that one,

Picks out one for you to see,

Never urges, never argues-

"Here you have an apple tree-"

For SHE loves homes. . . .41

Perhaps Parker was unconsciously responding to the terror expressed in Philip Wylie's indictment of the rising manipulative and emasculating power of women in American society. "Momism" and "momworship" burst into the American lexicon in 1942 when Wylie published Generation of Vipers, a vituperative attack on American gender relations inspired in part by Life magazine's publication, on Mother's Day 1941, of a photo showing American troops spelling out the word "mom" on a drill field. Surely the woman realtor was not part of Wylie's "huge class of idle, middle-aged women" who satanically manipulated men into believing that "the dowry went the other way" and then into "handing her the checkbook and going to work in the service of her caprices."42 Yet Parker's verse suggests an effort to temper the militant self-confidence of Mary Amelia Warren and Geneve Schaffer with a bit of kindly maternalism of the nonmomist sort. The woman realtor could be a successful and independent businesswoman, yet at the same time gentle and quiet.

The year 1944 was a boom year for the Women's Council. Beginning with seven local chapters and 733 members, it ended the year with thirty-two chapters and 1,146 members. By the end of 1944 women realtors composed about 6.1 percent of NAREB's membership, definitely lagging behind the proportion of women in real estate nationally, but nevertheless showing great growth potential. The male leadership of the National Association took note that hundreds of new realtors had been drawn into the organization by the Women's Council, and it became clear to some that the rapidly growing number of licensed women brokers represented a tremendous pool of future members. Hazel Long, who returned from war work in Washington to lead the Women's Council in 1944, finally convinced the National Association in 1945 to grant the council status as a NAREB division, thus allowing it to establish its own bylaws and to collect dues of its own, set at three dollars a year. This decision by the male leadership had both positive and negative ramifications. Before 1945 the National Association underwrote membership in the Women's Council, so it was cost-free and demanded little commitment. After 1945 the Women's Council measured its own achievements by the number of women realtors it was able to persuade to pay dues. Many women expressed ambivalence about formalizing the Women's Council, concerned that such a move would permanently institutionalize the separation between men and women in the field. Again, this was of particular concern in areas, such as California and Florida, which had long accepted women as equals to men.

Nevertheless, local chapters of the Women's Council continued to form, and the organization grew, especially in the aforementioned states. By May 1945 there were over 1,200 members. Equality-minded brokers Grace Perego and Geneve Schaffer formed a San Francisco chapter to increase women's participation in the San Francisco Real Estate Board, which admitted women but had very low female membership. Women realtors established a Berkeley chapter, even though the Berkeley Real Estate Board enjoyed strong female participation. In the East, NAREB president Van Holt Garrett pressured the Pittsburgh Real Estate Board, still closed to women in 1945, to invite Maybelle Alkire, secretary of the neighboring Bradsford Real Estate Board, to attend its annual banquet. Three years later the Pittsburgh board opened its doors to women members. As a further sign of the changing times, Simmons College, a business-oriented women's college in Boston, began to offer a real estate major in 1945.

At the end of the war, women realtors broadened the scope of their activities and started to discuss explicitly their particular political responsibilities as women in real estate. They began to view themselves as defenders of "private enterprise." As Ruth F. Ulrich, chair of the Florida Women's Council, put it, women had "discovered" during the war that it was "to their own interest to be more adequately informed on the legislation of their state and nation." New laws "might improve or detract from their right to private enterprise." In 1945 the Women's Council began to involve itself in the public policy arena, first lobbying for an enhanced real estate licensing law in Florida and then, at the national level, informing President Harry Truman of their opposition, as real estate women, to the continuance of wartime price and rent controls. Women had traditionally let men "do the work" of keeping track of legislation and expressing preferences with regard to such masculine issues as tax and fiscal policy, but no longer. "It is not morally right," Ulrich informed her fellow women realtors, "that women in the real estate field should enjoy the fruit" of men's lobbying efforts without taking part in them. The Women's Council could and should augment the political and social influence of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, should become a "good pressure group. . . working for the continuance of private enterprise."43

The leadership of the Women's Council began to discuss ways in which women realtors could be of particular service to the nation by preventing "the extreme leftists in our social planning from taking over our business lock, stock, and barrel." Maude Butler of Tulsa suggested that women realtors use customary women's networks, such as parent-teacher associations and civic and religious groups, to disseminate information on the most important piece of wartime legislation for the real estate industry, the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (the "G.I. Bill"). As realtors, they had a responsibility to ensure that veterans received the full benefit of the act, which supplemented the Federal Housing Administration's mortgage insurance program by covering down payments for veterans. In their "advisory capacity as Realtors" they were obligated to make veterans aware of their rights, as well as their responsibilities, under the law. Through the G.I. Bill, Seattle realtor Margery Dunham noted that "the government is attempting to help the veteran become established in life, and it is our duty to put safeguards around that little stake upon which the veteran is basing dreams of future security." Women realtors felt a particular responsibility to make sure that veterans were neither deceived into entering loan agreements for homes that Veteran's Administration appraisers would not approve nor sold homes that they would not be able to afford over time. Interpreting the law for veterans and safeguarding their interests "may mean a lot of work for us and it may not be very remunerative, but the question [is]," Dunham continued, "What do we owe our veterans? For those of us who have stayed at home and wished we could do something to help, this may be the opportunity to do our patriotic bit." Portland realtor Hazel P. Foster suggested that the Women's Council take advantage of women's organizational acumen and establish a "system throughout the local chapters" that would aid the many "wandering home seekers" to sell a home in one city and find a home in another. As businesswomen, they were not altruists. Foster suggested working out a system "so that we may both profit and render real assistance."44

By the end of the war, women realtors had institutionalized their place within the profession's leading organization, just in time to help the National Association of Real Estate Boards tap into the swelling ranks of female brokers. Women realtors began to articulate their particular place in the field in terms of patriotic service to promote and defend home ownership. They were divided in their loyalty within the profession, ambivalent about the Women's Council's aims of providing a separate space for the development of women's business confidence and applying organized pressure on boards still refusing to admit women. Women realtors perceived a special role for themselves as women in real estate; at the same time, they wanted to become part of the NAREB "malestream." The immediate postwar years would give women realtors a cause around which maternalist and liberal individualist impulses could converge: public housing.

Maternalism and the Struggle against Public Housing

As in other sectors of the economy, the mobilization for war had drawn many women into the real estate field to fill the gaps left by men drafted into military service. Unlike other sectors of the economy, real estate retained women after the war. While men's participation in the field grew by about 20 percent between 1940 and 1950, women's participation increased by 97 percent. This change reflected the major shift in the postwar decade of women into the financial, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector. Women constituted 33.6 percent of FIRE workers in 1940 and 44.3 percent in 1950. Although other industries returned to a "female industrial distribution" that, in Lynda de la Vina's words, "did not significantly differ from the prewar norm," the distribution in the FIRE sector did shift. Most women who entered the world of paid labor for the first time during World War II flocked to the manufacturing sector, dramatically altering gender distribution in that sector for the duration of the war. But by 1950, the occupational structure had reverted to the prewar norm of gender segregation. Women who remained in the labor force after the war did so in occupations feminized before the war. The major exception to this trend was in the sales and clerical category, where there was not only a "significant increase in females within the category," but also "a trend for women to enter formerly male" occupations such as real estate brokerage. In short, "Rosie the Riveter" was a far more ephemeral character than "Rosie the Realtor."45

Following passage of the G.I. Bill, a massive housing shortage gripped the country in 1945 and 1946. The National Association lobbied hard to get the Office of Price Administration to rescind price and rent controls, arguing that restraints exacerbated the shortage of rental housing. Taxes and other costs of maintaining rental properties had risen during the war while income from rentals had not, and owners of investment properties thus had strong incentive to sell them. A Census Bureau report in 1946 revealed that the proportion of owner-occupied homes had increased nearly a third between 1940 and 1946, despite wartime restrictions on building. Tenant-occupied dwellings had decreased by more than 2.1 million units. Proposals circulated in Washington that would have tightened controls on the sale of real estate, largely through tax policy. NAREB's president Boyd T. Barnard mobilized realtors to lobby against ceilings on real estate selling prices or credit restrictions, at the same time exhorting his membership to "use every effort to avoid transactions whose sole purpose is a quick profit." Federal legislation dealing with the crisis finally passed in 1947 as the Housing and Rent Act, which gradually phased out rent controls along with rationing of construction materials. A massive construction boom ensued in both single-family homes and apartments. Production of multiple housing units increased 30 percent between 1946 and 1947, and the construction of over 750,000 detached houses topped the previous boom year of 1925 by 31 percent.46

The already dominant ideology of home ownership gained force in the postwar period, and the vast majority of residential dwellings built from 1945 to 1970 were detached, single-family homes in lowdensity developments.47 Federal programs reinforced the ideology that subsidized the real estate industry and insured the market, making it cheaper to buy than rent housing in many parts of the country. But the plight of those not well served by these programs continued to be a major issue, and advocates of public housing for the poor persisted in calling for action from the federal government. In 1949 Herbert Nelson wrote Women's Council president Maude Butler and formally requested the women realtors' help in "the defense against socialism in housing." Nelson attended the Women's Council board meeting in January 1949. As in his address to the council nearly 8 years earlier, he proposed a special mission for women realtors. However, unlike his previous entreaty to help combat ugliness, Nelson acknowledged that the new task was fundamentally important to all realtors. He asked for women's help in NAREB's struggle against government-built housing to protect the nation's private property from "inconsistent taxation and the evil of confusing public housing with slum clearance." He asked the members of the Women's Council to appeal to American women, "especially to the American mother and the American women with property investments," to pay careful attention to legislation aimed at using the "slum-clearance slogan to get entry for public housing."48 His plea assumed a new moral role for women realtors, one in which their authority not only as women, but also as bus/nesswomen, could serve a vital purpose.

The battle centered on the 1949 Omnibus Housing Act. The proposed legislation provided for massive federal aid for slum clearance, something the National Association of Real Estate Boards had long favored because it would provide new urban frontiers for construction and foist the costs of clearance onto the general public. But the bill also committed the federal government to building over eight hundred thousand units of public housing-thereby, in NAREB's view, overstepping the bounds of proper government intervention in the housing market. Women realtors went on a veritable crusade against the proposal and against similar local and state laws. Syracuse realtor Dorothy G. Ingalls appeared on television to rail against New York's proposed public housing amendment. Milwaukee realtor Henny Mollgaard spoke on a joint radio broadcast with the Milwaukee Builders Association.

Mobilizing their collective authority as women, mothers, and businesswomen, women realtors argued that public housing did not possess true home spirit, would undermine the American family, and threatened the central institution of American society, the private home. Women realtors hoped to deflect some of the criticism leveled at the profession for operating solely in the industry's economic self-interest. Nevertheless, the 1949 Omnibus Housing Act passed with ample provisions for public housing. NAREB faced a tide of criticism, not only from traditional political opponents, but from many civic groups as well. The women's attempt to assert the profession's paramount concern for the public welfare more or less failed. Yet the men who ran NAREB still had faith in the women realtors' capacity to improve the industry's public image. In early 1950 NAREB president Robert P. Gerholtz appeared before the Wom- en's Council to ask them to do some damage control. "Let them understand we are not just selfish," he said.49

A sexual division of political labor was thus emerging in the real estate profession. The men largely waged the battle on the front lines in Washington. Though the Women's Council had permanent representation on the Realtors' Washington Committee, women realtors' main political task was community education on the home front. They proclaimed the "right of every man and woman to own a home built by and sold by private industry and institutions," in the words of realtor Anne L. Brown. As the Cold War heated up in Korea in 1950, NAREB president Gerholtz again addressed the women realtors: "Our industry is confidently counting on you, as we enter a period in which your patriotic work in behalf of our American heritage, and your closely related professional purpose of strengthening home ownership in America will be needed as never before."50 The women realtors accepted the challenge, responding with a "Creed for Women Realtors," which they published in the first issue of their revamped journal, The Woman Realtor:

I believe in my America, the Land of Freedom and the Home of peoples from all the earth, who have and seek the comforts derived from the pursuit of free enterprise, worship of God in their own way and self-expression of their own individual talents. ... I promise to defend, with all my strength of conviction, every movement which will help to maintain the right of individual home ownership, and to support a fair program of taxation based on economic thrift. I rededicate myself to serve the cause of my fellow man, to wisely use and preserve American soil, whether it be used for home-ownership, industrial or commercial expansion, or, for the pursuit of happiness. And, I will encourage every mother to instill in the minds of her children the joys and privileges of living in their own home.51

The creed, published two months after the North Korean attack on South Korea in June 1950, and a few weeks before Douglas MacArthur's landing at Inchon began direct American involvement in the Korean War, committed women realtors to serving as a link between the domestic sphere and the public policy arena. In 1952 women realtors in Los Angeles mobilized the women's vote against a $205 million public housing project, offering space in their offices to register voters and using their cars to transport women, "housewives, especially," to the polls. The referendum was defeated by a vote of three to two. If the Cold War was, as historian Elaine Tyler May and others have argued, at least in part about the "domestic containment" of women in the home, and if women's roles in activities like civil defense were part of a cultural tendency toward infusing the "traditional role of women with new meaning and importance" and helping "fortify the home as a place of security amid the cold war," then women realtors and businesswomen in general deserve an important place in that story. The Cold War may have been about taming female sexuality and independence; large numbers of American women may have "donned their domestic harnesses," as May asserts; but women realtors played a large part in perpetuating the ideal and purveying the yoke:52

Never, never try to sell a woman bricks and mortar or clapboards and stone. Always sell her the family scene before an open fire in the living room. Sell her a kitchen with ideas galore, the smell of pies baking and roasts searing. . . . Sell her happiness in a setting where she plays the leading role with very little fear of being replaced. Sell her security for herself and those she loves.53

Thus, women realtors' increasing public role and prominence in real estate served, ironically, to help reproduce an ideology and material conditions that kept some women "contained" in the home. Drawing upon culturally prominent ideas about women's proper place in society, women realtors carved a large and growing niche for themselves in the world of residential real estate, selling "home" at the same time that they participated in broadening the career options for American women.

Women realtors escaped stereotypes of femininity as they marketed the very products (the family home) and mobilized the very ideologies that depended on and reinforced those stereotypes. Women realtors often did this self-consciously; that is, they used stereotypical femininity in ways that helped them succeed at a "man's game." Even calling brokerage a "man's game" gave them an advantage: it made them seem more "human" and less like "pushy salesmen," and thus it helped them sell houses. Male realtors, realizing that women had successfully appropriated gender stereotypes, re- treated into the manly hustle and bustle of commercial realty. Men's entry into the real estate field overall slowed dramatically, and women came to dominate residential real estate brokerage. The challenge of "women's ways of selling" was fundamentally a challenge to deeply held notions about middle-class manliness and women's "proper role" in the business world. The story of Rosie the Realtor problematizes the ways in which business practices become normalized as "woman's sphere" or "man's sphere," how certain practices, like sales, become marked as masculine and others marked as feminine-and how these codings are challenged and change with time.

The liberal feminist impulse that provided at least part of the energy fueling women brokers' assault on the field in the 1920s and 1940s had largely dissipated by the 1950s. Women realtors in particular became important actors in a political culture that exalted "free enterprise" and vilified public solutions to housing and other social problems-in an industry, of course, that relied (and still relies) on public guarantees for mortgages, its main source of credit. Perhaps it is no accident that the seeds of the so-called neoconservative revolution-aimed in part at lowering property taxes-took root in southern California, long a bastion for women realtors.