![]()
Literary criticism examining representations of the secretary or the typist in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature typically focuses on two aspects of this figure: her association with the new communication technologies and her striking and almost immediate sexualization. While this scholarship is often illuminating, the typist tends to emerge from it as a marginal figure, uneasily poised on the border between popular culture and canonical literature.1 By giving careful consideration to social histories of secretarial work, and analyzing less commonly read literary texts, I will argue that the “feminization” of clerical work played a central role in the transformation of literary authorship in the first decades of the twentieth century. This process of “feminization,” which was facilitated by the emergence of the Fordist mode of production, effected a major shift in the gendering of different types of labor and in the values assigned to the cultural forms associated with them. As my reading of Lewis’s work will show, the ubiquitous female secretary reminded authors of the gendered nature of mechanical office work, causing them to dissociate their writing from this kind of activity. The emergence of the female secretary could therefore be seen as a catalyst to the rise of the professional model of modernist authorship, which will be discussed in Chapter 2.
In a note entitled “Americanism and Fordism” in the Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci characterizes the cultural and institutional changes that accompany rationalization2 in the United States as “the biggest collective effort [ever made] to create, with unprecedented speed and a consciousness of purpose . . . a new type of worker and of man” (Gramsci 215). While Henry Ford is often remembered for perfecting the assembly line, Gramsci is struck by the system Ford put into place in order to exercise control over the workers’ lives. By 1914, the year when the “profit sharing plan,” or five-dollar day, was instituted, “scientific management” was already practiced in the motor factory. Ford, like other entrepreneurs, realized that while Taylorist methods allowed for faster production, they caused a high turnover and discontent among the workers (Harvey 128). The five-dollar day aimed to solve the problem of employee loyalty by transforming unruly laborers into “rational” consumers. In order to qualify for higher pay, however, the worker had to submit to visits from Ford’s Sociology Department and “demonstrate thrift, good habits, and good home conditions” (Hooker 112). In effect, the worker’s gender, marital status, race, and ethnicity factored into the Department’s decision. Women and racial minorities were excluded from the plan; immigrants were encouraged to “Americanize” and exchange crowded boarding houses for individual family homes (ibid. 112, 115, 129–130). The ideal workman Ford endeavored to create was also his target consumer: the head of a middle-class American household.
While perhaps few employers adopted Ford’s intrusive and paternalistic methods, the institutional and ideological practices that became prevalent in the 1920s were similarly intended to transform individuals’ domestic habits and sexuality with the aim of producing good workers and consumers. By representing the individual as an object of self- and social scrutiny, advertisers were able to set new standards of conduct and create new needs (Ewen 181–184; Marchand 18). In the white-collar workplace—the focus of this chapter—employers maintained a gendered division of labor and encouraged employees to conform to (new) normative gender roles (Hedstrom 159). As David Harvey argues, “Fordism,” the dominant mode of production in the period between the 1920s and the 1960s, was informed by the insight that, by regulating the workers’ home lives, the industry could secure an amenable workforce and a reliable consumer base (Harvey, 124–126).3 The domestic sphere, whose separation from business and industry was once sacrosanct, became a battleground for corporate interests. While turn-of-the-century suffragists and feminists challenged traditional gender roles, Fordist business recast women as wives, mothers, and consumers. Hoping that women would impart desirable habits of consumption to their families, advertisers bestowed an aura of modernity on women’s roles, often addressing the female consumer as the family’s “purchasing agent” (Marchand 168).
Similarly, female office workers, or “business girls” as they were called at the time, became both objects and agents of Fordist ideology and practice. When women first entered the office in large numbers around 1900, the relation between clerical work and gender was not clearly defined. Some felt that women’s sexuality would be compromised by working in close proximity with men, while others regarded clerical work as a respectable occupation that would prepare women for work within the home (Davies 80–81). Although women were usually hired for routine jobs with little opportunity for advancement, these jobs were preferable to most occupations available to women at the time (Fine 42). Middle-class women often chose clerical work over teaching—the only “respectable” occupation with comparable pay—because the former offered greater personal freedom (Davies 71). Women’s magazines and advice books spoke positively of girls or women in “business,” at times representing women’s clerical work as a step toward greater gender equality.4
However, as white women became a majority in most low-level clerical jobs, these occupations began to be associated with inherently feminine traits. Although the “feminization” of clerical work was not directly caused by Fordism, Fordist ideology and practice seem to have determined the positions women came to occupy in the workplace during this economic era. Constituting a cheap and reliable workforce themselves, female clerks also helped maintain the loyalty of male employees by mitigating the effects of rationalization. As secretaries, telephone operators, or simply stenographers, women in the modern office “humanized” the experience of labor in the increasingly hierarchical and impersonal corporations (Yates 15–17, 75). In the 1920s and 1930s, a parallel between the duties of the secretary and those of a wife was often invoked to justify the routine tasks and affective labor assigned to female clerical workers. Institutional practices such as unequal pay and refusal to employ married women perpetuated conventional gender roles and distinguished women’s clerical work from professional and skilled occupations.
As my reading of Sinclair Lewis’s The Job (1917) and Winston Churchill’s The Dwelling-Place of Light (1917) will suggest, a modern discourse of sexuality helped normalize this new gendered division of labor. In the early decades of the twentieth century, liberal reformers began to assert the primacy of sexual desire in romantic love and marriage (Seidman 73). Advertising and popular culture likewise sexualized romance and the female body. This shift in the popular understanding of romantic love was especially significant for women, whose sexual desire was rarely acknowledged in the previous century. In Churchill’s and Lewis’s novels, the notion of female desire is used to affirm women’s roles as wives and mothers. Although in both texts young female stenographers derive pleasure and satisfaction from their work, the authors deny the possibility that, for a woman, the work itself could be fulfilling. Churchill and Lewis insist, often at the expense of the literary integrity of their novels, that women’s desire must be directed toward a prospective mate and children, not professional success. This use of the discourse of sexuality is consistent with later corporate practices that restricted women to subordinate positions, following similar assumptions about female desire.5
Both the increased feminization of clerical work and the spread of Fordism occurred in the 1920s (Harvey 128; Hedstrom 145).6 Written during the previous decade, The Job and The Dwelling-Place of Light do not offer a complete representation of the conditions of labor and the structure of gender and sexuality in the Fordist era. Rather, as texts from a period of transition, they suggest how the Fordist office came into being through institutional and ideological practices. Whereas in later representations the white-collar office appears as a place with a clear gendered division of labor and gender-marked spaces, in Lewis’s and Churchill’s novels the gendering of office work still figures as a problem. The authors’ responses to this uncertainty implicate them in the gender politics of the period and reveal some of the relations between the gendered division of labor in the modern office and the emerging cultural hierarchy, marked by a conflict between modernist high culture and popular culture.
Since the process of the “feminization” of clerical work has received little attention in literary studies, the first two sections of this chapter will focus on the social and cultural transformations in which it took part. As a realist novel with a progressive slant, The Job offers a broad perspective on the early institutions of secretarial work, absent from modernist representations of secretaries and typists. The typist’s integration into the mechanisms of corporate welfare, the rise of a new discourse of sexuality, and the changed relation between the workplace and the home, all contributed to the trenchancy of the view that women are inherently suited to secretarial and similar occupations, but not to professional or managerial work. The latter two sections will examine the implications of this structure for the sphere of cultural production.
The “feminization” of clerical work
On the face of it, Lewis’s 1917 novel The Job emphasizes the progressive aspects of women’s entrance into the white-collar workplace. A realist study with a narrative of a woman’s individual upward mobility, Lewis’s novel was advertised as “perhaps the first novel to give the real day-by-day life of women on the job, in the world of offices” (cover, 1st ed.). H.W. Boynton praised The Job in a contemporary review as “a feminist document” depicting the protagonist’s overcoming of the “parasitic” ideology of the “woman’s sphere” (312). Boynton and other critics were aware of the proliferation of popular representations of girls in business and favorably contrasted Lewis’s realism with female Horatio Alger narratives and romantic clichés.7 Indeed, in much of the novel, Lewis portrays Una Golden’s arrival in New York and her experiences in a series of white-collar offices both realistically and sympathetically. Studies by social historians confirm the 1917 critics’ sense that Una’s middle-class background, education, and initial employment were in fact typical of the majority of female clerical workers at the time.8
Despite his seemingly favorable view of women’s mobility, however, Lewis continually qualifies the implications of Una’s relative success. In the first few chapters, Lewis repeatedly characterizes Una as an “average” and unremarkable small-town girl, an insistence apparently meant to drive home the contrast between his realist representation and the clichés of popular fiction: “she was not—and will not be—a misunderstood genius, an undeveloped artist, an embryonic leader in feminism, nor an ugly duckling who would put on a Georgette hat and captivate the theatrical world” (5).9 Yet, almost in the same breath, Lewis distinguishes Una from other “average” girls, giving her inherent traits that would explain her later success. In her hometown of Panama, Pennsylvania, Lewis writes that “[Una] was a natural executive and she secretly controlled the Golden household; kept Captain Golden from eating with his knife, and her mother from becoming drugged with too much reading of poppy-flavored novels” (5). Even Una’s appearance curiously prefigures her future occupation:
While these characteristics point to a career in business, they also identify it as the career of a female office worker. Although Lewis calls Una an “executive,” the civilizing role she takes on is that of a successful housekeeper, or in the context of the business office, a successful secretary. The description of Una’s face suggests that spectacles, metaphorically and metonymically standing for office work, augment rather than detract from Una’s attractiveness and femininity. Both passages echo the “natural capacity” argument that was cited in debates about women’s suitability for office work from the 1890s through the 1920s.10 Unlike the proponents of women’s work in such debates, however, Lewis highlights Una’s talents so as to distinguish her from other women (e.g., Una’s mother) whose type of femininity makes them incapable of succeeding in the modern workplace. On the other hand, Una’s later ascent to managerial positions is explicitly linked to typically feminine traits and takes place in businesses where a “woman’s touch” could be an asset: a real-estate company specializing in suburban homes and a hotel chain in need of remodeling. Thus Lewis singles Una out as a particular type of woman, inherently predisposed to women’s office work.
In his depiction of Una’s sexuality Lewis repeatedly attempts to bring it in line with the norms of heterosexual desire. The adherence to the heterosexual paradigm creates a break in Lewis’s sympathetic engagement with his female protagonist and often in the realist discourse of the novel. As Martha Banta observes, at times there seem to be two different Unas in the novel: one is a “healthy woman,” the other “efficient” (Banta, Taylored Lives 189). Though more than a few passages suggest that for Una work is a source of pleasure and satisfaction, Lewis seems unable to imagine a woman who pursues a career out of genuine interest and passion rather than sheer necessity. Having described Una’s joy in attending the small, outdated business college as greater than that of the “yearner who has always believed that she has a talent for painting” and can finally attend an art school, and noting that “for Una this was the first time . . . when her labor seemed to count for something” (22), Lewis reinscribes Una’s desire within the normative heterosexual paradigm. Lewis offers the following as a justification for Una’s rejection of one of the suitors in the business college in favor of work:
