Girl amanuenses in little Leghorn straw hats and striped shirtwaists with huge shoulders that took up more room in the car than angels' wings dreamed with contrary feelings of what awaited them on upper floors of brand-new steel-frame "skyscrapers."
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"amanuenses"
People employed to write or type what somebody else dictates.
"Leghorn straw hats"
"contrary feelings of what awaited them"
I imagine those contrary feelings are steeped in the sexist culture and sexist work environment and sexist society and all its expectations and implications. The girl's contrary feelings probably stem from her work place being her main public locality to meet a potential husband (other than church) and so she perhaps dreams of meeting a genuinely good guy at work but knowing that mostly she's just going to get advances and sexual innuendo from cads and misogynists. Or maybe I'm thinking about this in too sexist a way, being programmed to think of everything in the past as even more sexist than the sexism pervading culture today! Maybe their contrary feelings are simply "work is boring" but "looking out of the windows of a modern skyscraper is exciting." Or maybe the contrary feelings were "working way up in the sky is terrifying" and "but I need this job to feed my starving kids!" I don't know! Just like a lot of Pynchon's writing, it leaves certain things vague so that the reader can fill in the negative spaces.
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