Women—their potential, their success and failures; and America—its successes and failures, were … Edna Ferber's two great themes.

[In her novels] women were not "feminine first and human second," but women with a strong "dash of the masculine." From Dawn O'Hara in 1911 to Christine Storm in 1958, Ferber's heroines possessed not only "feminine" traits …; but also "masculine" traits—love of freedom, daring, adventure, excitement, independence, initiative.

Marriage was not the end of the story in Ferber's novels, but usually the beginning. Through an "ill-assorted" match, her heroines often found themselves in some strange new frightening world where their romantic dreams and illusions about male superiority collapsed, and they had to struggle out of some failure alone, often with a dependent to support. Their husbands, when they did not leave them, constituted obstacles against whom the heroines must struggle.

In making their way, her heroines developed qualities which helped them to succeed. Their pride would not allow them to go home (if they had a home to return to). Pride made them resolve to prove themselves, to make their husbands' businesses succeed, to make things the way they had dreamed or expected them to be. Pride made them resolve to provide for their children the security, education, opportunity, beauty, that they themselves had not had. Sometimes pride was a result of some failure they had seen in their mothers' lives that made them resolve not to make the same mistakes in their own. Thus motivated, Ferber's heroines displayed determination, competitiveness, ambition, imagination, initiative, bravery, endurance, hard work, scientific planning, business sense. They overcame their deference to the male and looked to themselves, to their own self-reliance, independence, and self-assurance, to succeed.

They had to overcome a variety of obstacles, chief of which was the "man's world" restriction. In the early novels this meant a world which was "no place for a lady," that is, a world in which a working woman was expected to be either masculine, hard-boiled, man-hating, and unattractive, or weak and liable to succumb to the familiarities and liberties of men. Her early women disproved this assumption by displaying maternal feelings, attractiveness to and interest in men, and by repulsing men who had the "wrong ideas" about them. After World War I this burden of proof was removed, and women freely entered into a man's world without having to prove that they were still "ladies."… Men in fact, in Ferber's fiction, became, not moral dangers, but high-spirited boys who were easily intimidated by the righteous female. In and after the thirties, Ferber had come so far from worrying about "ladies" that she allowed women to go out and get their own men, as a number of them did…. The "no place for a lady—no work for a woman" concept applied, after World War I, only to the occupations her heroines entered. Before the war they had engaged in business and journalism; after, they invaded farming, pioneering, newspaper work, politics, even grand theft, making contributions that were superior to those of the men by whose sides they worked. They were told that the Haymarket, the Mississippi River, newspaper offices, Congress, tobacco fields, gambling rooms, the Klondike, round ups, fishing boats, etc. were no places for women, but they pooh-poohed the objections, secure in the knowledge that American women have been the hewers of wood and haulers of water since pioneering days, and that there is no place and no work for which a woman is too delicate.

Besides the "man's world" obstacle, her heroines faced various obstacles such as loneliness; isolation from their kind; the savagery, crudeness and utilitarianism of their environment; poverty; social rejection; narrow customs; inner revulsions; etc. In and after the thirties, they began to face larger obstacles—the decline, demoralization, and ruin of society; the maladies of success poisoning—apathy, greed, isolationism, restlessness, the arrogance of power, waste, excess—in themselves and in those close to them.

Success for Ferber's heroines in her early novels was personal achievement in some worthwhile area, the contribution to society of their talents, the development of their powers. In 1917 Ferber began to contrast true and false success, illustrating in Fanny Herself a version of false success in big business. She then began her life-long task of separating the spoiled fruit from the sound fruit. False success consisted of an over-emphasis on the material aspects—wealth, fame, position, respectability, connections with the "right people." True success consisted of contributing one's own gifts to society, producing something creative, whether asparagus, editorials, plays, cartoons—whatever enriched society and fulfilled self. In her fiction Ferber began to illustrate more and more versions of false success…. She began to show the downfall, voluntary or involuntary, of these false successes. True success in the thirties began to consist of restoring America, fighting the sickness that Ferber had noted in Europe in 1922, and that had spread to America in the thirties. In the forties and fifties, protest, rebellion, even survival, became the triumphs of her heroines. (pp. 339-42)

In Ferber's fiction, women are always the stronger sex. She believed that women, especially American women, are possessed potentially of greater endurance, ingenuity, perception and initiative than men; that they, like the Jew, have had to become more intuitive, more practical, less romantic, less sentimental, less gullible than men in self-protection, in order to survive. She believed that they are less violent than men, that they could and might have to clean up the world that men have nearly destroyed. However, she believed that modern American women have failed to live up to their potentialities, to pull their own weight. They have concealed their strength behind a facade of femininity, clinging to old-fashioned privileges, spoiling and pampering themselves, wasting their energies manipulating husbands and children, ruling social cliques. Most women, she believed, spend their lives being "female only," without the "dash of the masculine" that she felt necessary to make the "whole woman." If women ever wake up to their potentialities, she wrote over and over, the world will be a better place. Her fiction presents images of women who "hit high C," against images of women who choose the easy, secure life which leaves them frustrated, nagging, hovering, bored and aged. (p. 343)