Jacqueline Lowther, 19, and Linda Price, 17, work on wigs at La Ritz Beauty Salon at 1245 Broadway in 1969. Their social worker teaches them that beauty is the only way a woman can succeed. Click to read full article from 1969.– From Sunday News article (BPL)

I was digging through the Bushwick files in the Brooklyn collection at the Grand Army Plaza library when I came across this gem from 1969 from the now-defunct Sunday edition of the News. It’s a classic example of the more blatant sexism of those times.

Trans World Airlines sponsored a "job training" program at La Ritz Beauty Salon at 1245 Broadway — it wasn’t about building a resume or writing cover letters, but about beauty techniques. Because apparently, according to Beverly Brooks, a social worker with the Bushwick Community Corporation, being beautiful was the only hope for these girls.

A social worker’s encouraging words.

"’Most of the girls will not be going to college after high school,’ Mrs. Brooks pointed out, ‘but they will be looking for jobs and the program is designed to help them get good ones.’…If I typed 100 words a minute and my appearance was bad," continued Brooks with certainty, "a girl typing 40 words with a good presentation would get hired over me."

The BCC, a municipal anti-poverty organization terminated in 1978, was a "rather ineffectual operation that funded programs that provided little of value," according to former community board manager John Dereszewski [pdf].

A Mega 99-Cents store now operates where La Ritz Beauty Salon once was. Trans World Airlines is also now defunct, bought out by American Airlines in 2001. Something tells me AA won’t repeat the program.

Somewhat fittingly, Broadway House Women’s Shelter operates out of the upstairs residential space.

Additional research by Jeremy Sapienza