Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930.

As I was driving to my office recently I caught the end of a National Public Radio report about the failure of American unions to organize the nation's clerical workforce. While this did not seem like a particularly new critique of American unions, it fit right in to Sharon Hartman Strom's analysis of modern office work. In her detailed account of the development of the modern corporate office, Strom suggests that neither the unions nor feminists have been able to meet the challenge of the expanding female clerical workforce. Instead, she argues, managers and executives (largely male) have set the terms for office work, terms that perpetuate a hierarchical and segregated workforce in the name of efficiency, productivity, and control. The result, her book suggests, can be seen in continued low pay and low status associated with office work.

Strom's book tells two separate but related stories. The first concerns the expansion of clerical work and the development of gendered hierarchy in corporate offices. In this she focuses on the application of Taylorism and scientific management to the office setting, suggesting that the drive for efficiency, control, and productivity characterizing the shop floor shaped the front office as well. While neither the gendered nature of office work nor its hierarchical character were inevitable, Strom insists, both resulted from conscious management choices and strategies.

Strom points out that neither business historians nor labor historians have fully appreciated the role of women as clerical workers in the creation of the modern corporate economy. It was the office, she argues, staffed predominantly by women, that characterized modern industry with its accounting, personnel procedures, and record keeping. Influenced as much by Taylorism's drive for efficiency and control as by any preconceived ideas about the gendered nature of office work, managers and executives developed elaborate office hierarchies of skill, class, gender, and race. The need for new office systems, accounting, bookkeeping and the associated paper work seemed an ideal setting for women precisely because of the need for control in the workplace. It was an office hierarchy based on class and gender that enabled scientific management to be applied on the shop floor and that facilitated the growth of the modern corporation.

Strom's second focus is the choice of women themselves to enter clerical professions and secretarial work. Strom argues that the feminization of the clerical workforce rested on a more complex process than simple market demand. While women's choices of employment were limited by the labor market, their choices also were shaped by the relationship between business and education and by personal and class ambition as well. Offices expanded, she points out, just as women's education began to expand. Secretarial and office work appealed to women anxious to avoid factory work and to families looking for paths to upward mobility. While the vocational training programs that proliferated during the 1920s encouraged working-class and immigrant daughters to seek office work, nativist prejudices continued to create hierarchies within the occupation. Thus, Strom suggests, women themselves often perpetuated the distinctions of race and class that kept many offices lily white and relatively elite until well into mid-century.

Given the expansion of the clerical workforce and the centality of office work to the modern economy it is remarkable that neither unions nor feminists have focused on this arena in any sustained way. Unions (as well as business and labor historians) have largely ignored the ways in which clerks and secretaries gave the "visible hand" greater control over managers and workers. Without new office systems and office workers, Strom points out, "the application of scientific management to the workplace would have been impossible" (3). Women "manned" personnel offices, entered payroll data, tracked records, and kept accounts. In many ways, women office workers were as central to the control of production, the pace of work, and the regulation of output as the skilled worker on the shop floor. Yet unions rarely considered women in the office either as potential support or as a potential membership base.

Liberal feminists of the early twentieth century also failed to take advantage of the potential support office women might bring to the cause of women's equality. Instead, as one of the book's most intriguing sections demonstrates, feminists actually supported and perpetuated the hierarchical tendencies in office work. Feminists, including the elite of college educated women, saw in scientific management a route to equality through the practical application of standards and merit. Women interested in the business professions, personnel, accounting and administration, as well as those in the new field of psychology, fully expected that merit and efficiency would be gender blind in the new managerial ethos. In fact, however, these fields quickly excluded women from management and administration, allowing even college educated women access to only the lower, less skilled clerical jobs. Management used the doctrine of efficiency to segregate the clerical workforce and to create ever greater distinctions within the office environment.

Strom attributes the failure of feminists to unite office workers to women's prejudices as well as male managers' gender bias. Early twentieth-century feminists, she notes, were as committed to their own class prejudices as they were to equality (221). While college educated women wanted an opportunity to demonstrate their potential, it was often "so that they could take their proper place" rather than challenge office hierarchies (116). In fact, college educated women frequently blamed working-class high school graduates for not displaying the style, ambition, and dedication which would upgrade all women. The result was increasing segmentation within the female office workforce itself.

By the 1930s, Strom concludes, office workers shared the potential for "womanly ambition, sisterly solidarity and class conflict" (367). But office culture was as marked by divisions of class, race, age, marital and sexual orientation as the world outside. Still, Strom sees in the office a potential for overcoming divisions. The end of the marriage bar after World War II, for example, she argues, created a more unified office worker culture and the ability to make organized demands. Feminism and unionism still offer, she concludes, potential strategies for solving the problems of women clerical workers. Given the continued lack of organization among office workers either as feminists or as unionists, it is difficult to share her optimism.

Susan Levine East Carolina University