Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  With hiring practices tilting toward women in typing and steno functions, these jobs became so associated with them that the workers themselves were often referred to simply as “type-girls”; sometimes, dispensing with the need to distinguish humans from machines, women were just called “typewriters.”8 Advertisements for the Remington typewriter—the first widely adopted typewriter in the office—were populated almost exclusively by stereotypically supple-wristed female angels, their delicate, elongated piano fingers hovering expectantly over the keys. Christopher Sholes, the designer of the first commercially produced typewriter in 1867, called it “obviously a blessing to mankind, and especially to womankind.”9 One advertisement for the Remington typewriter, appearing in the depths of the depression of the 1870s in the Nation magazine, suggested it would be a way for the genteel to help some young woman make her way out of poverty:

  No invention has opened for women so broad and easy an avenue to profitable and suitable employment as the “Type-Writer,” and it merits the careful consideration of all thoughtful and charitable persons interested in the subject of work for woman.

  Mere girls are now earning from $10 to $20 per week with the “Type-Writer,” and we can at once secure good situations for one hundred expert writers on it in court-rooms in this city.

  The public is cordially invited to call and inspect the working of the machine, and obtain all information at our showrooms.10

  The private secretary, too, gradually became identified as wholly female. Unlike the tediousness of stenography and typing, it was the dead-endedness of secretarial work that supposedly made it appropriate for women. “A woman is to be preferred to the secretarial position,” wrote W. H. Leffingwell, Taylor’s disciple in office design, “for she is not averse to doing minor tasks, work involving the handling of petty details, which would irk and irritate ambitious young men, who usually feel that the work they are doing is of no importance if it can be performed by some person with a lower salary.”11 “They are steadier than boys,” a railroad official said, when discussing his preference for hiring women clerks. “They are not so damn anxious to get out and rustle around … They never think of themselves as General Managers of a railroad and are content to work along.”12

  By 1926, 88 percent of secretarial positions were held by women. Women were nearly 100 percent of typists, stenographers, file clerks, and switchboard operators.13 The lowest positions in any office were likely to be occupied by women. Even the term “office boy,” meaning the lowest-paid and most menial job in the workplace, came to designate someone of either sex: one employment ad from the 1920s said, “Wanted—a boy, either sex.”14

  Though it was obviously beneficial for companies to have cheap labor, there was nothing new about unequal pay for women at the turn of the century that made them instantly more preferable. Nor did men begin to consider women more suited for menial and repetitive labor overnight. The oversupply of women for the office, at least, was furnished by the convulsions in the economy. Before and immediately after the Civil War, family farms provided plenty of work for women—much of it unremunerated work, to be sure, but productive work nonetheless. Fathers and mothers were less likely to let their daughters pack up for the cities when they were needed at home. But as industries began to consolidate, many of the goods formerly produced locally by farms were now being manufactured in cities and placed in stores across the country. Factory-spun clothing, canned goods, and bakery-made bread replaced the handwoven, self-farmed, and home-cooked goods that women were supposed to provide in the home as a matter of course. Independent farmers themselves were being subsumed by larger farms; farmland by cities and industry. Here, again, was the large story of the old middle class dying out and a “new” middle class coming into being—but one whose specific consequences for the gendered division of labor would be profound. With money for small-business men drying up and less productive work for women to do in the home, the office proved to be an opportunity that women couldn’t turn down. The new supply of labor coincided marvelously with the new needs of management. On the industrial shop floor teams of skilled laborers were, with unskilled laborers, subject to managers. The office did the factory one better. For the “unskilled” segment of the force, there was a supply of women, who were doubly subordinated: they could be set up at machines that kept them doing monotonous work, and there was no chance of their ever becoming managers. The widespread acceptance of forms of scientific management in fact depended on women being in the office.

  When Upton Sinclair had coined the term “white collar,” it was to sneer at those lowly paper pushers who believed that they, unlike their poor, dirty factory brethren, were filing and copying their way into the ranks of the ruling class. As we’ve already observed, this distinction had become increasingly untenable (if nonetheless vigorously asserted) in the age of the massive factory-style office. But now all the lowly work was increasingly taken up by women; the pay for these jobs was also degraded (and degrading); and there was never a question that women would be able to move up the company ladder in the way men could, since it remained unfathomable for male executives to place women alongside them in managerial roles. So within the office itself, a class division sprang up that fell neatly along gender lines. Men were allowed to think of themselves as middle-class so long as women, from their perspective, remained something like the office proletariat, took office jobs to help their families until they married or, in the retrograde words of The Job, were kept “so busy that they change[d] from dewy girls into tight-lipped spinsters before they discover[ed] life.”

  Yet the office offered a sense of freedom to many women that shouldn’t be underestimated. The office chose women, but women also chose the office. Nor was it the case, among women in the office, that the workers perceived themselves as wholly and universally degraded. For many children of working-class men and women, the office offered an escape route into an arena of middle-class respectability that also paid more than most other opportunities; for children of the middle class, especially those whose parents couldn’t afford a more expensive college education, commercial training and a clerical job were ways to get into business (and away from what had become habitual “women’s professions,” such as teaching). The testimony of Rose Chernin, a Russian Jew, is exemplary. She had spent World War I working in a factory making ammunition shells—while also attending high school continuation classes, so as not to forsake her education for work. She clung to the hope that education would at last allow her a chance to escape the factory and make it into an office:

  Do you know what it’s like, ten hours a day, looking at shells in a noisy, dirty plant? You turn over a shell, this way, that way, until your mind goes blank. And always you’re waiting for the break, the five-minute break to go to the toilet. This became the one meaningful thing in the ten hours of the day. You felt that there had to be another way. I thought, with the naïveté of a child, that to get an education, a high-school education, would give me a job in an office. In an office! When we crossed the yard into the factory, we passed the offices. I looked at those girls, sitting there, cleanly dressed at their desks. And I thought, There is another world.15

  The paths and opportunities for working-class women differed greatly from those of the middle class. Much of the difference came from education. Until 1900, hardly any Americans, men or women, stayed in school through to high school; a good number of fourteen-year-olds, particularly the children of immigrants and the working class, didn’t make it past fourth grade.16 Of course, the decision to drop out had a certain rationality to it: the few jobs open to the lower classes usually didn’t require special training, and in any case the public schools didn’t offer any commercial education. But industry had a growing hunger for competent clerical labor that wasn’t being satisfied. So business leaders turned to the schools. Progressive school reformers and executives united to devise a program to keep children in school—and to turn them into potential clerks. Since most city school
boards contained a preponderance of business leaders and professionals, it was relatively easy to add vocational programs to the curriculum of high schools. And it worked: high school dropout rates fell as children stayed in school to study the arts of bookkeeping and stenography, the promise of a job lying just beyond graduation becoming more realizable. If they wanted to continue their studies, they could go on to a commercial college. It was a major moment in the history not just of the office but of the system of education, for it had become the avowed goal of American public schools to train people for work in an office. The country was fast becoming a nation of clerks.

  The schools trained women and men, however, in considerably divergent ways. They constantly encouraged men to study bookkeeping and accounting, for the purposes of developing “business leadership” skills in them. By contrast, women were seen as naturally suited for stenography. Though this arbitrary division between the harder, numbers-driven executive commanding the subordinate secretary or stenographer—and the corresponding thinking that women were innately better suited for light, mechanical work and incapable of handling math—would stubbornly persist, even into the present day, some women, even more stubbornly, refused to uphold the division. Despite a plethora of guidebooks that proclaimed the joys of the steno pool and the proximity it offered to business, the few women who went into the business side of things found that they were the best-paid women in the office (though still paid less than men doing the same job). For middle-class women, by contrast, it was considered a particularly low form of employment to take on stenographic work. More suitable was working as a private secretary, which brought one closer to power. Secretarial guidebooks promised a fun and exciting rise up the corporate ladder that was nowhere borne out in the statistics on secretarial mobility. They were encouraged to be enchanted by the notion of their work being “professional” and by working in the upper-class, highly stylized parlors of banks and executive suites—many of which resembled homes. In a strange way, it was considered higher class to be essentially a domestic servant to a boss, attending to moods and whims, than to be a stenographer with demonstrable skills. The business historian and management theorist Rosabeth Moss Kanter would later describe this phenomenon—the way the prestige of the secretarial profession derived less from work satisfaction than from one’s proximity to (usually masculine) power and prestige—as “status contingency.” Stories were told of secretaries who gained the trust of their bosses and began earning enough to acquire offices with mahogany and carpet; in one instance, a secretary had an “office on the seventeenth floor of one of the buildings owned by [her] corporation with a magnificent view over the city.”17 She was in charge of the office anytime the boss was out. Such stories were extremely rare but nonetheless powerful inducements for secretaries.

  It was only natural that with so many unwritten rules governing the new world of the office, a substantial amount of confusion, panic, and ostentatious hand-wringing would circle male discussion of the presence of women, and the attendant problem of sex. Victorian America’s stern observance of the separation of spheres for women and men suddenly no longer held, and it remained an open question what kind of influence women would bring to the male preserves of the workplace. Would women, who were held to be innately superior moral beings, bring civilization and order, as well as a sense of manly purpose, to the lazy and effeminate clerks? Or would women, who were also held to be tempting and thereby destructive to the coolly ascetic male work ethic, orchestrate sexual chaos in the office and bring down the world of business? The urgency of these questions was exacerbated by the common observance of the “marriage bar” for women—that is, the convention that women would remain in the office only as long as they were unmarried, domestic servitude presumably being its own profession, incompatible with a seat in the steno pool.

  Though the proportion of women office workers who were married, or who got married and continued working, would increase over the early twentieth century, the fact that most of them were single made their presence potentially troubling to the largely single men and to the married ones as well. In a pamphlet about the relationship between the stenographer and her boss, put together by the writer Fessenden Chase, stenographers were branded, predictably, as prostitutes in waiting. “In the cozy den or private ‘studio’ of her employer, temptations and opportunities are constantly arising, and the susceptible employer is easy picking for the girl of brilliant plumage with tender glances that fascinate and lure,” Chase wrote, quietly amping up the lurid voyeurism of the scene. “It is only a step from the tender glances to the satisfying kiss, and we cannot escape that the ‘private-office’ girl is generally quite willing to kiss and to be kissed, in order to secure special favors and perhaps an increase in her salary from her susceptible employer.”18

  The entry of women into the office overlapped—not coincidentally—with the growth of the cause of women’s suffrage. Growing independence in the sphere of work naturally corresponded to claims for rights and freedom in that of citizenship. As a result, there was considerable discussion among women—in a burgeoning progressive female public sphere that sought to judge, at every moment—of the dangers and possibilities that the office offered women. Jane Addams, progenitor of the industrial betterment movement (the spirit presiding over the welfare policies of the Larkin Building), worried that the open environment of the office was teeming with irresistible temptation and that women would be forced to take money and gifts from their bosses in exchange for sexual favors; women of their own accord, she wrote, given the unbearable freedom of the workplace, would “fall into a vicious life from the sheer lack of social restraint.” Slightly more realistic were the fears that women would have to navigate an impossible path—between, as Janette Egmont wrote in one of the stenography trade journals, “the Scylla of prudery and the Charybdis of familiarity, to raise the standard (and in this generation, even establish the standard) by which men will judge [their] sex in this profession.”19 In the end, for writers like Egmont, the problem seemed inescapable: the specter of sex was simply irresistible; the business of the office would inevitably be compromised; and the solution was nowhere in sight. In the meantime, there would always be scenes where “there are two or three girls, the male clerks will compare the blonde with the brunette, and the discussion is apt to last too long.”20

  A cartoon in a stenographers’ journal, capturing early office sexual politics (May 1895). General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

  But naturally much of the fear of women’s power over men was expressed by men. And when men imputed the dangerousness of life in the office to women, they were likely to be rebuffed by the women office workers on whose behalf they presumed to speak. In 1900, Len G. Broughton, a popular evangelical pastor of Atlanta’s Tabernacle Baptist Church, traveled to Brooklyn, New York, where, speaking to an all-male audience at the YMCA, he proceeded to deliver a series of invective-laden perorations against the growing lewdness of the white-collar workplace. He claimed that stenographers’ diplomas were not tickets to business success, nor even to finding a successful mate, but rather “so many licenses to a life of lewdness. I’d rather put a through passport to hell direct in a young woman’s hands than that certificate which admits her to the upper office of her employer, behind closed doors.” Many female clerks got wind of his message; they were not inclined silently to suffer any implications about their weakness in the face of men. Their responses were not, however, always as politically salubrious as a modern reader might hope. A stenographer who identified herself as “Miss Ware” wrote in to the Atlanta Constitution to decry his suggestion that stenographers were “vicious and impure.” She insisted that at least “ninety and nine” percent of the stenographers who entered and exited the office were virtuous Christians; only those who were poor, desperate, and without religion would give in to aggressive employers. New York commentators went even further in separating office workers from what th
ey saw as lower orders, arguing that Broughton seemed to forget that “he is not dealing with the colored race of the South” but rather women of “a higher type of intellectual development.”21

  Whether women office workers were virtuous Christians or not (though, at least until the postwar era, they were almost all white), the workplace they entered was indeed without virtually any protections when it came to sexual harassment—a phrase that was itself unknown until late in the twentieth century. The responses that guidebooks and organizations offered were equivocal. Women were expected to respond to come-ons with patient silence or cheerful unawareness. One secretarial guidebook from 1919 argued, “She must learn not to see that his glance is too fervid, not to feel that hand that rests on hers or the arm that slips around the back of the chair.” And she was supposed to do so with “tact and politeness, for it is not the rebuff that counts so much as the way in which it is done.”22 One sees in the guidebooks a presumption that men were not to be challenged unless women wanted to lose their jobs. And they did lose their jobs: a survey of twelve thousand fired secretaries from 1937 indicated that at least two-thirds of them were let go because of their or their bosses’ “personality and character defects.” These included, according to some, “an unwillingness [on the part of the secretary] to go night-clubbing with the boss.”23 Like other office workers, white-collar women had to act as professionals, each responsible for her own work and her own success.