by Nikil Saval
The fears about sexuality in the workplace played deeply on the status anxieties of male office workers as well, anxieties that went as far back as the countinghouse era, when white-collar men were seen as unmasculine. The presence of women in the workplace might have given men—managers particularly—a confirmation of their own middle-class superiority and power. But over the first decades of the twentieth century, as their failure to organize unions started to result in wage stagnation, costing them their economic advantages over blue-collar workers, their manliness once again came into question. In the 1920s, a scandalous and nationally publicized murder case managed to refract all these workplace fears at once.
At the offices of Chase National Bank in New York City, a woman in the steno pool, Shirley McIntyre, met Walter Mayer, an accounting clerk—in other words, someone not much higher up the totem pole. Mayer fell hard for McIntyre and impetuously asked for her hand. Initially she agreed; later, after she apparently had been taken out by superiors in the office who had given her a “taste of the high life” (Mayer’s words), she decided against the marriage. Mayer pleaded, threatening suicide; McIntyre responded by calling him an “inferior” whom she could no longer marry. Mayer’s response was brutal: he found McIntyre in her apartment and shot her to death before shooting himself. But Mayer survived. A few years later, sufficiently recovered, he was put on trial for murder. Mayer argued bathetically to an extraordinarily receptive jury that his fiancée had become materialistic, placing “things” over love. McIntyre’s mother was summoned, and even she testified to Mayer’s good sense and her daughter’s ill manners. It worked. The jury convicted him on a lesser charge than murder, adding a plea for leniency.24
What had intervened between the murder and the trial was a burst of sympathetic coverage in the newspapers. There was plenty of evidence for a conviction of first-degree murder; Mayer had clearly planned McIntyre’s murder well in advance (as some unambiguous letters he had written proved). Yet in the papers, Mayer was held up as a symbol of ailing white-collar manhood. McIntyre actually had a higher salary than Mayer did—she earned $60 a week and he earned $10 less. He had therefore only acted as any man in his situation would. In the nineteenth century, the papers adduced, Mayer and McIntyre would have easily settled into blandly contented matrimony. But now the tables had turned. Unlike women who were gaining financial independence, men like Mayer were marooned in dead-end clerical jobs. “There are big jobs for a few men but oars in the galley for all the rest of the slaves,” the papers reported Mayer saying to a friend. What might have been seen as sheer loserdom was converted into a story about the pathos of the white-collar man—which working women were expected to accept, or at least rebuff in a kinder manner.25
In the years following the Great Depression, which put a sizable dent in the confidence of businessmen and their not so upwardly mobile clerks, insinuating that women were ruining the office became a sport of popular culture. The film Baby Face (1933), made before the Hays Code put a swift end to Hollywood’s appetite for frank salaciousness, not only had the virtue of bringing a still-unknown Barbara Stanwyck to a starring role but also solidified the “gold digger” as a cultural archetype in the growing population of office women whom office men were supposed to desire and fear. Stanwyck’s Lily Powers comes from a mill town where she works at her father’s impressively grimy speakeasy, haunted by physically broken and socially desperate working-class men, from whom she fends off constant groping. She receives advice from a fatherly German émigré cobbler to settle down and tap her natural powers. “You don’t understand your potentialities,” he cries. “Didn’t you read that Nietzsche I gave you?” Later in the film, alone with Lily in his workshop, he leaps into a surpassingly strange, pseudo-philosophical oration on the nature of the female will to power: “A woman, young, beautiful like you, can do anything she wants. You have power over men. But you have to use them, not let them use you … Exploit yourself! Use men! Be strong, defiant—use men, to get the things you want!” When her father dies in a freak accident, she flees to New York, along with an African American friend, Chico (Theresa Harris), who worked in the speakeasy, to better understand her “potentialities.”
Thanks to sleeping with the hiring officer, Lily ends up establishing herself at the bottom rung of a bank, the fictional Gotham Trust Company, housed in an Art Deco skyscraper. (Chico becomes her maidservant, occasionally punctuating the film with blues renditions. Though Harris shares a good deal of time on-screen with Stanwyck, Baby Face takes for granted that her character would never be accepted as a white-collar worker.) In an ingenious and grotesque motif, the film pans up from window to window as Lily sleeps her way upward through the bank, from foreign exchanges to filing to the mortgage department to escrow to accounting, all the way to the highest ranks of the company. She even ditches a young John Wayne for his higher-up. “Wake up, kid,” a female clerk says to him when he gives a winningly jilted look, “Baby Face is moving out of your class.” Every time she seems to be trapped, she simply turns on the charm—something the film represents by focusing in on her glittering, smiling face, deliberately blurred by the camera to seem even more ethereal. But her desire is nothing but material: we keep returning to her apartment, and with each step she climbs, the larger and more luxurious her lodgings get. Finally caught in a scandal when one former lover shoots her latest beau, the president of the company, and kills himself, she ends up getting sent to Gotham Trust’s branch in Paris—where she’s back at the bottom. There, the new president, Courtland Trenholm, visits her and succumbs to her charms.
Barbara Stanwyck as Lily Powers in Baby Face (1933), using her “potentialities.” Photofest
But it’s the Depression, we’re meant to remember, and banks aren’t as stable as they used to be. The bank suffers a panic, and Trenholm has to put up a million dollars of his own money to save it. He begs Lily to sell all her things. “No, I can’t do it,” she concludes. “I have to think of myself. I’ve gone through a lot to get those things. My life has been bitter and hard. I’m not like other women. All the gentleness and kindness in me has been killed. All I’ve got are those things, without them I’d be nothing. I’d have to go back to what I was. No, I won’t give them up.” It’s a startling, revealing speech, the first time that Lily forthrightly admits her motives. Unfortunately, it’s all undercut by a lame, moralizing ending: Trenholm tries to kill himself, and Lily finally admits in the ambulance carrying him off to the hospital that she, in fact, loves him. She gives up her money to return to her class. Baby Face might be commended for at least giving the Lily character some agency—Stanwyck labors mightily to convey this—if only to suggest that in the end she’s like any other woman: looking for marriage, not power. Baby Face, like a number of films of its era, refracts the unconscious fears of an entire class of men, who saw their lack of willpower as being the cause of their ultimate failure in business. So, too, did the film—like many at the time—reassure classless America that its class boundaries were not being transgressed: though Lily sought to escape the working class, she marries a poor Trenholm.
Possessed by these deep-seated terrors, not all offices waited around to see if more male clerks would murder unreceptive women, or to have gold diggers destroy their companies. The generalized fear of what men and women working together might do to both sexes in the office, and to society outside it, led some companies to cleanse their work spaces of any vestiges of male privilege while simultaneously segregating their work environments by sex. In the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, one of the largest and most iconic Manhattan skyscrapers of the early twentieth century, the cuspidors of the old merchants’ clerks offices were forbidden, alongside smoking, except in certain permitted areas. The office itself, unlike most, was kept spotless—“a model of domestic cleanliness,” as the historian Olivier Zunz has written. Meanwhile, men and women had separate entrances, hallways, elevators, and stairways; rest areas were also segregated by sex. In the Taylorist fashion, w
ork was distributed in such a way as to keep people busy during their entire working day, and electric clocks kept rigorous time, while supervisors ensured that no quiet conversation, let alone loud talking or laughing, took place.26
At the same time, mirroring their less segregated social world of theaters, cinemas, nightclubs, and amusement parks, men and women found ways to interact within their office environs that prepared them for the more open sexual world outside the office. At the very least, women had to interact with men as subordinates, whether stenographers taking dictation or in the typing pool supervised by a male clerk. But more important were the recreational programs established by Met Life. One such program was dance instruction—inspired by the jazz dancing craze (the jitterbug, the Charleston) that was overtaking American urban centers everywhere. Though Met Life’s women—advertised in their brochures as the “Metropolitan Belles”—were permitted to learn only among themselves, groups of male and female clerks often gathered on the roof of the building to practice dancing.
The “Belles” of the Metropolitan Life Building. Museum of the History of New York
Even the relationship between a female secretary and her employer, as compromised as it was, could lead to new kinds of interactions between men and women. The term “office wife” began to enter the vernacular to describe the secretary who was closer to her boss than he was to his own wife. The novelist Faith Baldwin, an extremely popular documenter of the sexual life of the office, explored the idea in her bestseller The Office Wife (1929): “She felt very near her employer in the rather garrulous boyish moods which always followed a victory or the promise of one. She thought … how well she had grown to know him. She had learned to tell in the instant of their meeting if he was tired or out of sorts, if the day was going well or badly, if he looked forward to a battle or simply wearily girded himself for it without much enthusiasm.”27 In Baldwin’s novel, the secretary, privileged by occupying the inner sanctum of his office suite, rather than being stuck out on the steno pool floor, soon begins to accompany her boss everywhere, replacing all the comforts that his wife might otherwise offer. She becomes passionately good at her job, a model employee; then, in a fairy-tale ending, the office wife marries her boss—seeming to prove that the office is a place not of unwanted advances and harassment but of potential happiness. The other side of this, of course, is that the novel offers marriage to one’s boss as a consolation prize, in the place of career advancement. You’re good at your job, but you can’t move up in the world; your reward is that you can marry someone who can. It was a way of managing what now seems like an intolerable situation, of plausibly resolving what was a genuine and debilitating social contradiction.
These seem like trivial features of office life to us now, even unpleasant ones. But these kinds of interactions were new. For better or for worse, the office engineered so much of the sexual world we now inhabit. It made it possible for men and women to meet—if certainly not as equals, then at least on a terrain outside the fraught, unobserved world of the home. Though women remained a minority in office work for some years more, and among managerial ranks they were virtually excluded altogether, they became the chief source of common stereotypes about office life.
It also became true of media: the “white-collar girl” became the subject of an impressive number of popular novels throughout the second and third decades of the twentieth century. There was a certain congruence between the types of women depicted in these novels and the women who read them. Though women had worked in factories for decades, the difference was that these were almost exclusively working-class, immigrant women, without access to English media. But the middle-class women who worked in the office were often in the same class as the audience for novels, which was mostly female to begin with. This continued a trend with office novels and cinema, where the people depicted in particular media held jobs very similar to the consumers of the media.
Novels about white-collar girls were remarkable in their similarity, perhaps because for many years they tended to be written by men. In Lewis’s The Job, and the roughly contemporaneous Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington and the massive Depression-era best seller Kitty Foyle by Christopher Morley, the female protagonist is forced to take a white-collar job after the death of the male breadwinner—the protagonist’s father—who wasn’t doing too well to begin with. The commonplace of a woman thrown into work masks the whole history, in which many women were choosing, of their own will and desire, to enter the workplace. But Lewis and his contemporaries were indebted to the naturalist novels of the time, by Theodore Dreiser and Jack London, themselves following Émile Zola, in which inherited biological traits and massive social forces narrowly constricted and determined choices.
Only Lewis among them conceived of a feminist novel in which, however improbably, a woman achieves professional success. Una Golden, like her sisters in the office, expects only to suffer through its drudgery until she can find a marriageable office husband. She sees women much older struggling with the office machines and then breaking down over the meaninglessness of their work: “Epidemics of hysteria would spring up sometimes, and women of thirty-five or forty—normally well content—would join the old ladies in sobbing. Una would wonder if she would be crying like that at thirty-five—and at sixty-five, with thirty barren, weeping years in between.” She falls in love with a young co-worker, Walter Babson, a restless, fast-talking, slangily charming editor, who occasionally voices support for labor unions and socialism. But unable to advance up the company ladder and lacking money for a wedding, he goes west, leaving Una contemplating a future of single life. When Una’s mother dies, and in grief and a fit of uselessness, she marries a salesman, Eddie Schwirtz. A heavy-drinking habit causes him to lose his job, and he begins to leech off Una.
After years of abuse, she leaves him, takes another, better office job, and moves into an all-female residence. It is at this point that the novel begins to take a strange, even radical turn. Listening to the stories of other women’s lives gives Una a new confidence; she manages to talk herself into a low-level managerial position at White Line Hotels. Her skill moves her up through the ranks, leading her to hire an assistant—who turns out to be her old lover, Walter Babson. Una becomes an executive at White Line and marries Walter. At the end of the novel, she imagines having a child while staying in her position: “I will keep my job—if I’ve had this world of offices wished on to me, at least I’ll conquer it, and give my clerks a decent time.” This was an unusual, and strictly implausible, fantasy of individual achievement, no less hopeful than the Horatio Alger stories that were popular at the time. Yet the fantasy was a feminist one—one that imagined the “marriage bar” as no bar at all. It was one that virtually no woman at the time could realize. Yet the office managed to produce the fantasy nonetheless. The years that followed would witness the struggle to make it true.
If offices weren’t hospitable to women as equals, despite what secretarial manuals seemed to suggest, then, some others argued, at least they could be made as hospitable as possible. They had to be made home-like, efficient, and clean. Sexualizing the workplace endangered the middle-class virtues that the office was supposed to exude. Some women therefore took it upon themselves to ensure that at least the female office workers themselves would never compromise the sanctity of this milieu.
In 1909, a middle-aged Providence housewife, Katharine Gibbs, found herself suddenly adrift after her husband died in a yachting accident, leaving her widowed and having to care for two sons. Untrained in anything beyond housework, Gibbs desperately threw herself into entrepreneurial life. She first tried dressmaking, a venture that quickly failed. Gibbs eventually followed the path that millions like her at the time were taking: she enrolled in a stenography class at Boston’s Simmons College. Simmons was a different kind of secretarial school, one that taught foreign languages alongside stenography, imbuing the women who left it with both skills and an educated, cosmopolitan air that made them profession
ally attractive to companies that wanted their secretarial pool to exude braininess along with sheer physical magnetism. It was a lesson that Gibbs would take to heart.
Selling all her jewelry for $1,000, she used the money to start her own training institute, buying the Providence School for Secretaries in 1911. What became known informally as the “Katie Gibbs” schools were seen as the choice for smart women who only needed a little finishing. And the Gibbs schools did the finishing, and much more. They focused on turning out what they deemed were appropriate office personalities: demure, intelligent, efficient women who responded to their bosses without challenging them or making them feel ill at ease. Besides typing and shorthand, office procedures and telephone techniques, the curriculum consisted of law, math, and English.28 Later, it would come to include production management, labor relations, finance, accounting essentials, and current events.29 And the training naturally included tips on dressing and appearance. Katie Gibbs girls were to aim not for beauty but for “prestige appearance”—which reflected good judgment rather than sex appeal. In a BusinessWeek profile of the school on its fiftieth anniversary, “businesslike touches” included “street dresses rather than skirts and blouses; light use of cosmetics and jewelry; high heels and stockings; and for outdoors, hat and gloves.”30 Especially wealthy and particularly concerned parents were welcome to send their children to Bermuda for early spring classes.31 Only one man ever enrolled full-time.32 At Gibbs and competitive schools like it, the workload was strenuous: fifty hours a week, half spent in class, the other half on homework. And the discipline was equally intense: one student recalled a typing test where a woman made a mistake at the beginning, restarted by inserting another piece of paper—and was accordingly expelled.33