He has already explained how Myra is incapable of thinking: “‘Woman never can understand the different definitions of a word’ ” (p. 285). He even ferociously chastises the dreaded Zilla Riesling, saying she is “‘taking advantage of being a woman and springing every mean innuendo you can think of’ ” (p. 123). When Myra expresses some sympathy for Zilla, George taunts, “‘I might of expected you’d stick up for your own sex!’ ” (p. 124). Toward the end of the book, when Babbitt asks himself, “‘Why can’t women ever learn a fellow hates to be bulldozed?’ ” (p. 322), he never pauses to recall just how savagely he bulldozed Zilla.

For Babbitt, the word “girl” has a pejorative yet erotic usage. While Babbitt applies it to the enchanted fairy girl he fleetingly pursues in his dreams, he identifies his secretary, Miss McGoun, with her “black bobbed hair against demure cheeks” (p. 34), as a real-life substitute for the attractive dream figure. His wife has faded from being an object of his desire; “Myra was distinctly a Nice Girl” (p. 81), he muses, but is no longer either nice or a girl. And on the whole, “girls” are not “nice.” When he rebukes his son for his interest in girls, Babbitt criticizes what he himself is drawn to: “‘a lot of fool girls with their dresses up to their knees and powdered and painted and rouged and God knows what all as if they were chorus-girls’ ” (p. 74). The personification of these “fast” types is Eunice Littlefield, the flapper next door, whom Ted marries and whom, by the end of the novel, Babbitt has identified as the fairy child of his dreams. As Eunice amusingly puts it, after soothing the Babbitt men’s frazzled nerves, “‘It beats the devil why feminists like me still go on nursing these men!’” (p. 336).

The answer to Eunice’s puzzlement is evident in the way Tanis Judique is able to use George’s need for reassurance that he is masculine to her own advantage. “‘I don’t think any woman ever learns to drive like a man,’ ” she tells him. In the presence of such a seemingly sensitive and sympathetic listener, he responds, “‘I never did like these mannish females,’ ” and, “‘It’s a man’s place to take a full, you might say, a creative share in the world’s work and mold conditions and have something to show for his life’ ” (pp. 254-255). Mrs. Judique heartily agrees. Once George’s wife has returned and Babbitt withdraws from Tanis’s life, she pressures him to come back and soothes his ego by extracting from him “facile masculine advice” (p. 324). Yet in the long run, the seductive widow becomes yet another encumbrance for him: “He wondered whether she had ever been anything more to him than A Woman” (p. 306). Babbitt’s musings suggest that, even at best, the most “A Woman” can ever be for him is someone to confirm his own manhood.

In actuality, the need for males to assert themselves as men is one of the most pervasive themes in the novel. Not only is Babbitt’s real estate brochure written expressly for male readers (“SAY OLD MAN!”), but the literature sent by correspondence schools to the unsuspecting Ted plays more explicitly with the same myths about virility:

The first displayed the portrait of a young man with a pure brow, an iron jaw, silk socks, and hair like patent leather. Standing with one hand in his trousers-pocket and the other extended with chiding forefinger, he was bewitching an audience of men with gray beards, paunches, bald heads, and every other sign of wisdom and prosperity (p. 70).

In a box next to the text, the flier insists that it teaches “How to be a MASTER MAN!” (p.