Gender in the Corporate Workplace
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An important note about sources: Although it's perfectly acceptable for you to complete all your research about your topic online, you must use reputable sources. In the example below, I decided the Early Office Museum was a reputable source even though I had never heard of it before because its author cites sources that I know to be reputable. You must use your good judgement in determining whether an online source is reputable. Wikipedia, for example, is a good starting place as it has a lot of good information, but you need to find more reputable sources than Wikipedia because anyone can edit Wikipedia--they need not be an expert on your topic.
Gender in the Corporate Workplace
by Leslie M-B
Between 1870 and 1930, college- and high-school-educated women who were willing to work for lower wages than were men sought jobs as clerical employees, particularly in the financial service industry: banking, trusts, real estate, and insurance. The result? The all-male nineteenth-century office became a workplace inhabited mostly by women (Kwolek-Folland 3-4). In 1870, 2.5 percent of clerical staff in corporations were female; in 1890, 19 percent; in 1900, 30 percent; and in 1930, 53 percent. Women tended to be concentrated in positions as cashiers and stenographers. You can see more details on gender breakdown here at the Early Office Museum.
Because middle-class Americans living the late nineteenth century subscribed to the doctrine of “separate spheres,” which classified public space as male and private space as female, the infusion of women into office life was bound to provoke some awkwardness as well as some changes in socially acceptable behaviors on the part of both men and women (Kwolek-Folland 10-11). Lower middle-class women whose families did not wish for them to work in families trusted corporations to maintain decorum between male and female employees. Dress codes for both men and women, as well as rules governing personal hygiene—such as rules that women clerks could not loosen their hair, even in the restrooms, or that men were not allowed to chew tobacco—sought to ensure not only propriety but more importantly the appearance of propriety. In fact, for some time at Metropolitan Life, male and female employees used separate entrances, hallways, and elevators. Corporate jobs were thus seen by many as a safe, respectable haven for their unmarried daughters (Zunz 117).
Despite being segregated in some senses, men and women did share tasks in some departments at Metropolitan Life and in many other companies. They could mingle more freely than they could in situations regulated by traditional social norms, and thus rules were made and broken. Olivier Zunz explains: “Small groups of male and female clerks could and did meet each other on the building roof, where they occasionally danced. Such informal contact between the sexes at work had never existed before, and individuals pursued them outside the office in the new world of commercialized leisure” (121).
At the same time, women’s association with the private sphere of the home, a training ground for moral Americans, could not help but affect the workplace culture. This moral concern played itself out as an interest in employees’ welfare under scientific management (Kwolek-Folland 75). It also manifested itself as a domestic motif in corporations’ internal and external communications. Company logos, especially in life insurance and other financial services companies that needed to encourage trust in corporate services, drew on imagery of motherhood. Internally, companies also drew on familial imagery. Angel Kwolek-Folland elaborates:
As diversity of age, class, and, to a lesser extent, race increased among office workers, scientific management offered one way to play down differences among individuals. It also meant that tasks such as typing and filing became so routinized that they lost status within the office, in part because they usually were not encouraged to engage in big-picture thinking—that is, they might not understand how their tasks fit into the production process (Kwolek-Folland 73). Those who wished to advance needed to demonstrate higher-order skills such as planning and making decisions. They also needed to be male (Kwolek-Folland 37).
If men formerly had taken pride in becoming “self-made men,” why were so many of them so eager to sign up for middle-management jobs that, from the perspective of our era, quashed their individuality and all but promised that they would never advance to the top of the corporate hierarchy? In his study of one company, Zunz points out that even in the middle ranks of management, these men had the opportunity to build “the new bureaucratic structures” and controll significant financial resources. They gained, Zunz writes, “the opportunity to set in motion the capital of the new giant corporations. In helping allocate and expand that capital, they participated in some of the most significant and challenging tasks of their generation” (49).
Works cited:
The Early Office Museum. "Office Workers." n.d. Accessed 3 April 2006.
Kwolek-Folland, Angel. Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870-1930. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Smithsonian Institution. "Office Workers." Online exhibit: From Carbons to Computers: The Changing American Office. 1998. Accessed 3 April 2006.
Zunz, Olivier. Making America Corporate, 1870-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
An important note about sources: Although it's perfectly acceptable for you to complete all your research about your topic online, you must use reputable sources. In the example below, I decided the Early Office Museum was a reputable source even though I had never heard of it before because its author cites sources that I know to be reputable. You must use your good judgement in determining whether an online source is reputable. Wikipedia, for example, is a good starting place as it has a lot of good information, but you need to find more reputable sources than Wikipedia because anyone can edit Wikipedia--they need not be an expert on your topic.
Gender in the Corporate Workplace
by Leslie M-B
Between 1870 and 1930, college- and high-school-educated women who were willing to work for lower wages than were men sought jobs as clerical employees, particularly in the financial service industry: banking, trusts, real estate, and insurance. The result? The all-male nineteenth-century office became a workplace inhabited mostly by women (Kwolek-Folland 3-4). In 1870, 2.5 percent of clerical staff in corporations were female; in 1890, 19 percent; in 1900, 30 percent; and in 1930, 53 percent. Women tended to be concentrated in positions as cashiers and stenographers. You can see more details on gender breakdown here at the Early Office Museum.
Because middle-class Americans living the late nineteenth century subscribed to the doctrine of “separate spheres,” which classified public space as male and private space as female, the infusion of women into office life was bound to provoke some awkwardness as well as some changes in socially acceptable behaviors on the part of both men and women (Kwolek-Folland 10-11). Lower middle-class women whose families did not wish for them to work in families trusted corporations to maintain decorum between male and female employees. Dress codes for both men and women, as well as rules governing personal hygiene—such as rules that women clerks could not loosen their hair, even in the restrooms, or that men were not allowed to chew tobacco—sought to ensure not only propriety but more importantly the appearance of propriety. In fact, for some time at Metropolitan Life, male and female employees used separate entrances, hallways, and elevators. Corporate jobs were thus seen by many as a safe, respectable haven for their unmarried daughters (Zunz 117).
Despite being segregated in some senses, men and women did share tasks in some departments at Metropolitan Life and in many other companies. They could mingle more freely than they could in situations regulated by traditional social norms, and thus rules were made and broken. Olivier Zunz explains: “Small groups of male and female clerks could and did meet each other on the building roof, where they occasionally danced. Such informal contact between the sexes at work had never existed before, and individuals pursued them outside the office in the new world of commercialized leisure” (121).
At the same time, women’s association with the private sphere of the home, a training ground for moral Americans, could not help but affect the workplace culture. This moral concern played itself out as an interest in employees’ welfare under scientific management (Kwolek-Folland 75). It also manifested itself as a domestic motif in corporations’ internal and external communications. Company logos, especially in life insurance and other financial services companies that needed to encourage trust in corporate services, drew on imagery of motherhood. Internally, companies also drew on familial imagery. Angel Kwolek-Folland elaborates:
Executives had three interconnected purposes in mind when they used images of family life: to calm the public’s fears, to stimulate sales, and to encourage a parental relationship with employees. The language executives used outlined a set of fictive kindship relations that executives hoped would address the alienation of workers and personal bureaucratic relations, suggesting corporations were the economic and emotional equivalent of a supportive family.
As diversity of age, class, and, to a lesser extent, race increased among office workers, scientific management offered one way to play down differences among individuals. It also meant that tasks such as typing and filing became so routinized that they lost status within the office, in part because they usually were not encouraged to engage in big-picture thinking—that is, they might not understand how their tasks fit into the production process (Kwolek-Folland 73). Those who wished to advance needed to demonstrate higher-order skills such as planning and making decisions. They also needed to be male (Kwolek-Folland 37).
If men formerly had taken pride in becoming “self-made men,” why were so many of them so eager to sign up for middle-management jobs that, from the perspective of our era, quashed their individuality and all but promised that they would never advance to the top of the corporate hierarchy? In his study of one company, Zunz points out that even in the middle ranks of management, these men had the opportunity to build “the new bureaucratic structures” and controll significant financial resources. They gained, Zunz writes, “the opportunity to set in motion the capital of the new giant corporations. In helping allocate and expand that capital, they participated in some of the most significant and challenging tasks of their generation” (49).
Works cited:
The Early Office Museum. "Office Workers." n.d. Accessed 3 April 2006.
Kwolek-Folland, Angel. Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870-1930. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Smithsonian Institution. "Office Workers." Online exhibit: From Carbons to Computers: The Changing American Office. 1998. Accessed 3 April 2006.
Zunz, Olivier. Making America Corporate, 1870-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
posted by Leslie Madsen-Brooks at 8:50 PM
7 Comments:
Great post, however I don't think I understand why men were willing to take jobs that offered them little in the way of money, advancement, or autonomy.
As one of the sources points out, men, were willing to make sacrifices in order to build the "new bureaucratic structures" of society, yet I can't really think of a modern situation where, on a large scale, people are willing to take significant personal setbacks in order to pursue such abstract goals.
David,
I don't really understand the motivations of men in the 1890s. Suffice it to say that they lived in a different time than we do, and there must have been some excitement at getting in on the ground floor of a new kind of company--kind of like the heydey of the dotcom boom, only without slides and foozball in the office.
Today we look at bureaucracies very negatively, and yet many of us end up working inside them because they do tend to offer some protection from the whims of the economy. Still, I've only ever had one friend who told me she wanted to be "a career bureaucrat," and she was a bit of a weirdo.
There are a variety of possible explanations for the move to work within bureaucratic structures in industry. There could have been the thought that they could move up the "corporate ladder" -- Andrew Carnegie was, afterall, touted as a "rags to riches" story. However, given the economic climate and what was happening just prior to and during the 1890s (the end of the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, etc. flooded the market with both skilled and unskilled male laborers), stability was probably the most attractive feature of a position within a company's management for white men of that class. It seems to me that a redefining of the terms of self-sufficiency and the proverbial "self-made man" probably began to occur around this time because of the change in labor markets.
Thanks all for answering my first question,
We need to shed more light on the definition of the phrase "self-made man". Certainly under the contemporary definition, all that is implied by describing oneself as a "self-made man" (assuming one is male that is) is that one worked themselves into the occupation with little or no outside assistance. The definition we are using in the current discussion seems to be more along the lines of, “a person who makes a living independently of any large bureaucratic institutions”, needless to say these are two very different concepts. During the 1890s was it common to use the second definition? If so when did the meaning of the phrase change? Is there actual evidence of a lexical shift in the literature of the time, or are we simply assuming there must have been based on the types of work Americans were commonly employed in?
Given the fine line of gender convention in this era, I find the following somewhat puzzling:"Small groups of male and female clerks could and did meet each other on the building roof, where they occasionally danced". This obviously undermines the 'separate spheres' philosophy that this society followed. Based on the preceding notion,did 1890's America really find themselves suprised that both gender's would enventually fuse, in terms of falling astray from traditional gender roles?
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Good questions, everyone! I think we need to better hash out the definition of "self-made man"; I myself am not 100% sure how folks in the 1890s defined the term--I'll do some research and see what I can find.
Rahsaan, I'm guessing the Victorians hoped against hope that the sexes wouldn't mingle too much in the workplace, as gender codes among the middle class (and those aspiring to become middle class) were pretty strict. Perhaps there's an analog with some communities' calls today for schools to teach solely abstinence-only sex ed. After all, if we tell teenagers not to have sex, they won't, right? ;)
As far as your question on whether Victorians thought there would be some blurring of gender roles, I think that was one of their fears, one that became increasingly evident as more women entered the workplace and some traditionally masculine jobs in the corporate workplace became feminized.
Also, remember that it was pretty easy for a woman (and by extension, albeit to a lesser extent, the company that employed her) to lose respectability in the eyes of her community through a breach of gender etiquette.
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