If I were a man, I’d be making darn good money by now. I’d be living the life of Riley (or at least Mickey Spillane) in a snazzy bachelor pad uptown, wining and dining a slew of glamour girls at the Stork and the Copacabana. But nothing like that happens to you when you’re a woman. When you’re a single working gal like me, you get paid a fraction of what your male coworkers earn. You live in a dingy little duplex over a fish store on Bleecker Street, and you dine alone on Campbell ’s soup and crackers at your secondhand yellow Formica kitchen table. You also risk your neck (as well as your hotly developing romance with the city’s most handsome homicide detective) to fight your way up the sexist professional ladder.
My best friend and next door neighbor, Abby Moscowitz, is really proud of me for having the courage (she calls it the chutzpah) to stick to my girlhood goals. She says a woman has to have “balls” if she wants to make it in America ’s biggest and hardest city. And, you can take it from me, Abby knows what she’s talking about. She’s a fabulous freelance magazine illustrator (the best I’ve ever seen!), yet the only way she managed to get any work in the field was by barging into publishing offices and threatening to camp out in the waiting room-cooking beans on a hot plate and washing her stockings out in the ladies’ lavatory-until somebody looked at her portfolio.