I can’t believe I’d never heard of this! The plot follows Vassar’s ‘class of ‘33’ ( the ‘group’ as they navigate a world in which university women are somewhat superfluous, some even wonder have they ‘crippled’ themselves with their education?
As they navigate friendships, men, work, family, sex and babies you see that in a way they have been set up to fail. The only job opportunities open for them are working in the big department stores, Saks, Macy’s etc. and if they have a higher ambition it must be realised through their husband’s careers and not their own. SPOILER- the only member of the group that seems to escape this fate is the cool, rich and remote ‘Lakey’ who it turns out has secretly been a lesbian and doesn’t have to do anything but travel the world and ‘live deliciously’ as Robert Eggers would put it. Even her economic equal ‘Pokey’ lives a life of quiet anonymity, having child after child out of the way in the country. Marriage as a means to ecsnomic survival, and escape from one’s parents was as evident in the 30s as it was in Jane Austen’s time, only Austen women were never given a University education that taught them that they could do anything, if only the world was different. A really good snapshot of the old world meeting the new, where the gendered boundaries of economics, sex, politics and education were in the middle of being re-drawn.