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OCR for page 63
"Machines Instead of Clerks"
Technology and the Feminization
of Bookkeeping, 1910 1950
SHARON HARTMAN STROM
The nineteenth-century office was a world inhabited by men.
Chief clerk, bookkeeper, copyists, and messenger boys supervised
the office, kept financial records, produced documents, and trans-
mitted information. In the 1870s and 1880s women were recruited
to use the telephone and the typewriter as the production of doc-
uments and transmission of information were mechanized. But, to
most observers it seemed that financial matters and record keeping
were still where they belonged: in the secure grip of the mate book-
keeper. The bookkeeper, C. Wright Mills said (1951:191), "was at
the very center of the office world. He recorded all transactions
in the day book, the journal, the cashbook or the ledger; all the
current orders and memoranda were speared on his iron spike; on
his desk and in the squat iron safe . . . were all the papers . . .
which the office and its staff served.
But the traditional bookkeeper was soon to lose his importance
and more often wouIcl be a woman and not a man. Women were
only 5.7 percent of the bookkeepers, cashiers, and accountants in
1880, but were 38.5 percent of them by 1910. Along with the rising
number of women classified as stenographers, typists, and machine
operators (many of whom were doing some sort of bookkeeping),
these women, newly classified as bookkeepers, caused the number
of females working in offices to triple between 1910 and 1920. By
63
OCR for page 64
64
THE FEMINIZATION OF BOOKKEEPING
1930 the Census showed that more than half of all the bookkeepers
were women. In 1940, the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Department
of Labor (1942:2) found that women were 42 percent of the hand
bookkeepers and 82 percent of the bookkeeping machine operators
in Philadelphia, a major center of office employment.
Why did women become bookkeepers and why was the femi-
nization of bookkeeping linked to the mechanization of office work?
This paper will argue that management initially sought women
workers to use bookkeeping machines because they could pay them
less and because they thought women would offer less resistance
to the deskilling of bookkeeping than salaried male workers fa-
miliar with the traditional craft of posting books by hand. Yet
the extent to which bookkeeping could be deskilled and mecha-
nized remained problematic. Workers continued to apply hidden
skills of judgment and to integrate a number of tasks, particularly
to jobs in the middle levels of bookkeeping, even though these
jobs required the use of machines. Work done by machine opera-
tors had to be supervised, checked, and prepared for use by head
bookkeepers and accountants. Some of the machine work was sta-
tistical or inappropriate for "factory~-like regimens. Most of this
kind of work had never been performed by traditional bookkeep-
ers. The increasing numbers of women holding these jobs before
World War IT were thus neither "unskilled" nor "deskilled," yet
their duties remained largely unarticulated in official job titles and
descriptions.
Workers responded to these changing conditions in the office
in a number of somewhat contradictory ways. Some male office
workers sought to protect their jobs from feminization. Postal and
railroad clerks, who had powerful craft unions at the turn of the
century, were largely able to do this. Men might try to move into
the new profession of accounting, more clearly off limits to most
women. Some women tried to improve their status in the once
hierarchy by moving up to more interesting and better-paying
positions. Some women and men joined together and began to
· · .
unionize to resist the worst aspects of mechanization, speed-up,
and deskilling. And some women began to agitate for new job
titles and higher salaries because they recognized the "hidden
skills they were using and because they perceived that male
clerks received more pay than women for the same work.
Before taking up these issues, however, it must be explained
why the changes in bookkeeping and accounting after 1910 had
OCR for page 65
SHARON NARTMAN STROM
· . .
65
such wide-reaching consequences for American office workers.
Both the size of business and government and the number of
bookkeeping and paperwork functions they performed increased.
The cost of producing these functions became a matter of con-
cern as overhead costs rose and margins of profits declined in the
1920s and as depression hit in the 1930s. New kinds of corpo-
rations and agencies based on extensive financial record keeping
appeared, such as department stores, public utilities, life insurance
companies, savings and loan companies, the Internal Revenue Ser-
vice, and the Social Security Administration. The technology of
the fine machine too} and die industry made possible significant
breakthroughs in the mass production of office machines. At the
same time a vast supply of women workers suitable for office work
were available to employers when sufficiently educated male work-
ers were in short supply. The typewriter and telephone had already
established a link between the mechanization and feminization of
the office. Finally, there was an explosion in the volume of finan-
cial record keeping after 1910 due to the widespread introduction
of cost accounting. Corporate and government managers, under
internal pressure to produce more information in comprehensible
form, and under external pressure to make themselves publicly
accountable, turned to new methods of accounting and office man-
agement, which necessitated, from their point of view, both the
mechanization and feminization of traditional bookkeeping.
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT, THE COST ACCOUNTING
REVOLUTION, AND THE ACCOUNTANT
Braverman (1974) and Davies (1982) have both noted that by
the turn of the century principles of "scientific management," first
developed for use in industry by F.W. Taylor, were being applied
to office work. These principles included scientific observation of
work (time and motion studies) to develop more efficient work
patterns, the subdivision of tasks, standardized forms and office
furniture, rewards for employees based on measured output (bonus
plans), a pace of work which encouraged workers to work as fast as
possible without loss of efficiency, and close supervision of workers
to prevent siow-downs, sabotage, and error. What is not as widely
known is that the scientific managers also urged reconstruction of
not only how the office worked but the kind of work it produced.
Bookkeeping, accounting, and statistical analysis were intrinsic to
OCR for page 66
66
THE FEMINIZATION OF BOOKKEEPING
the new systems because they allowed corporate managers to gain
real In ~$ `~
entific management and cost accounting had been introduced, was
far more than a ~paper-pushing" sideline to real production and
in fact became the nerve center that kept everything functioning
smoothly (Galloway, 1921:ix):
' Van art;- e;~or'~uU~ or~an~za~ons. -' ne ounce. once ~~i-
When it is seen that the activities of production and distri-
bution are made possible only through the operations covered by
the term Office work, then we approach the truer appraisal of
the office as a necessary economic factor. The office managers and
employees cease to be passive agents.... They at once rise to
the dignity of active forces which furnish constructive ideas, and
co-ordinate the activities of the business into smoothly working
units of enormous size and power.
The chief goal of the new management thinkers was to co-
ordinate factory and office by first defining and then integrating
such functions as purchasing, production, inventory control, pric-
ing, and personnel management through a series of administrative
units which did not exist before 1900. At the heart of these
changes lay a new concept of bookkeeping which pinpointed the
actual cost of components of production and distribution: labor,
overhead, materials, energy, shipping, and the like. Nelson (1975)
argues that Cost accounting" thus demanded the breaking down
into smaller operations of jobs once performed by the bookkeeper
and the foreman and a consequent reduction of their control over
the workplace.
At the same time federal and state government investigations
of railroads, life insurance firms, and public utilities were revealing
that the largest economic institutions in America had the shod-
diest accounting procedures imaginable. A progressive reformer
like Louis Brandeis argued for standard cost accounting partly
because he admirecl efficiency but also because agencies like the
Interstate Commerce Commission or the New York State Public
Service Commission needed better records to review rates charged
to consumers (Brock, 19813. The term "scientific management"
was coined after a meeting between Taylor and Brandeis during
the Eastern Railroad Rates cases in 1910 (Merkle, 1980:59~.
During World War I government contracts spurred the growth
of both cost accounting in private industry and government ac-
counting procedures, which were rapidly becoming more and more
OCR for page 67
SHARON HARTMAN STROM
67
sophisticated. A wave of municipal reform after 1910 modern-
ized many town and city accounting systems. Widespread growth
of department stores and retail chains necessitated mechanized
billing procedures and inventory control. The corporate income
tax ant} the Federal Reserve System forced banks and corporations
to audit their books more thoroughly and responsibly.
Chandler (1962) argues that cost accounting was instituted
also in response to a series of crises which faced the larger cor-
porations after 1900, including overexpansion, excess inventory,
growing labor unrest, and a sharp drop in demand in 1921. New
"strategies and structures" for meeting these crises led to the cre-
ation of the multidivision form of corporate organization. At the
heart of the multidivisional corporation lay a new level of exec-
utive management, "company headquarters. Here the financial
managers sought and manipulated the pieces of information which
aDowed them to account for costs, manage inventory, analyze sales,
gauge profits and losses, raise capital through sale of stock or com-
mercial loans, and, above all, plan for and predict the future. In
contrast to the old offices, which had often been located in or near
plants and-whose executives roamed between factory and office
with ease, the new headquarters were geographically and psycho-
logically separated from plants, and were often housed In towering
buildings in the center of town.
At the center of the new style of financial management was
a relatively new professional: the accountant. By 1910 some
state universities, commercial business schools, and prestigious
educational institutions like the Wharton School or the Harvard
Graduate School of Business Administration offered accounting
degrees. The schools advertised that accountants were needed
everywhere (System, November, 1918:767~:
Accountancy firms need them. Business concerns need them.
The Federal Government needs them. Financial knots must be
uncovered and untangled. Waste must be cut down and output
speeded up. Operating plans must be worked out and operating
stabs organized and directed. Related branches of industry must
be coordinated and made to function together. These and similar
problems which confront the Government and Organized Business
are squarely up to the accountants the business technicians of
the country.
The emergence of cost accounting after 1910 did give the ac-
countant new prestige. Unlike the bookkeeper, who kept track of
all financial transactions, or the auditor, who checked the books
OCR for page 68
68
THE FEMINIZATION OF BOOKKEEPING
over for mistakes or fraud, the accountant was now as important
to a large company's well-being as a vice-president or treasurer.
Accountants purposely tried to emphasize the distinction between
themselves and bookkeepers. Accountants were to plan or manage,
not to actually ado the books" (Bennett, 1926~. One management
expert (McAdams, 1927, no. 26:2, in Office Management Series,
1967) described cost accountants as Business doctored who could
put a firm in the pink again by providing ~budgets, methods, stan-
dards, and measurement." The accounting division of Standard
Oil of New Jersey employed 51 people in 1912, but had doubled
in size by the m~-1920s, even though auditors and comptrollers
had been moved to a separate department (Gibb and KnowIton,
1956~. Nonetheless, an ongoing problem with affiliate divisions,
which were served by 20 traveling auditors from the home of-
fice, "made comparative cost studies virtually impossible...."
Standard Oil hired Price Waterhouse to prepare a comprehensive
accounting manual for in-house use, which was completed in 1934.
This new grip on the company's finances aDowed Standard Oil to
radically change its operating methods. A smaller and more pro-
fessionally trained executive committee was installed at the new
Rockefeller Center along with 900 office employees to oversee the
larger picture, to divorce itself from the petty interests of individ-
ual affiliates, and to reconsider all questions from the standpoint
of the general interest of the company" (I`arson, Knowiton, and
Popple, 1971:2027~.
Accounting seemed to be a man's world. By 1982 nearly
two-thirds of those studying business in high school were women,
but 84 percent of those majoring in business training courses in
colleges and universities were men (Morse, 1932:24~. Some women
were trained as accountants before World War IT but they were
sometimes excluded from taking CPA exams, and certainly women
were never seen as potential business executives.
The Census of 1930, however, reported more than 17,000
women auditors and accountants. Education for accounting re-
mained more accessible to the general population than for the
other professions. This was partly true because bookkeepers lo~
bled so effectively to keep an exam, not educational degrees, as
the chief requirement for certification. Anyone who could gain
permission to take and then pass a CPA exam could be certi-
fied, and would-be accountants could go to night school or take
correspondence courses from schools like Pace and Pace of New
OCR for page 69
SHARON HARTMAN STROM
69
York. While an advertisement (System, August, 1918:259) by
the Walton School in 1918 was clearly aimed at men, "Be a
Walton-Trained Man," Pace in the same year (System, November,
1918:767) claimed that "demand for trained accountants, both
men and women, is increasing daily, hourly."
During the Great Depression the interests of enlightened busi-
ness planners and progressive reformers came together in a body of
federal legislation which continued to transform accounting proce-
dures. The securities act of 1933 and 1934 required all firms selling
stock to be independently audited and to publicly disclose their
financial statements. The Federal Power Act of 1935 mandated
new systems of accounting for public utilities. FHA legislation
spurred the growth of monthly inst aliment home mortgages, and
the Federal Banking Act of 1935 brought far more banks~into
the Federal Reserve System and its accounting methods for credit
control. The new social security, unemployment insurance, and
income tax legislation required ~11 but the smallest employers to
adopt new methods of financial record keeping for employees.
The amount of financial paperwork that changes in account-
ing, management, and regulation created was staggering, and
without fundamental changes In the organization of the clerical
labor force, its composition, and the machines it used, the changes
would not have been possible.
OFFICE MACHINES AND THEIR HISTORY
Most of the technology required for the mechanization of book-
keeping had been developed by the late nineteenth century in small
machine too} and die shops near factories, in large manufacturing
cities by engineers, and by businessmen inventors seeking more ef-
ficient office methods. William Patterson, a former railroad owner,
built the first cash registers (adding machines on drawers) for use
in his Dayton coal yard business in 1882, and later founded the
National Cash Register Co. Joseph Burroughs, a former bank
clerk from St. Louis, named his adding machine the American
Arithometer, and sold a grand total of 1,435 machines between
1895 and his untimely death in 1898. After renaming the firm
Burroughs, hm successor sold nearly 8,000 machines in 1905 and
was producing 100,000 calculating machines by 1930 (Coleman,
1949; Morgan, 1953~. Frank Baldwin's machines were adopted
by the accounting department of the Pennsylvania Railroad and
OCR for page 70
70
THE FEMINIZATION OF BOOKKEEPING
a leading life insurance company. A young college graduate and
employee of the Western Electric Company, Jay Monroe, helped
Baldwin develop a higher-speed machine and by the m~d-1920s
the Monroe Calculating Co. had 165 branch offices in the United
States (Morse, 1932:83-85~.
Listing adding machines required two motions: punching the
keys and turning a crank. Any additional functions made them
bulkier, heavier, and more difficult to use. While electrical adding
and calculating machines became more common during the 1930s,
the fancier machines were still very large, expensive, and most
likely to be used by accountants or statisticians. Consumers
wanted more lightweight and affordable machines. Heavy com-
petition developed between companies to produce the most reli-
able lightweight adding machine in the teens and early 1920s. In
1899 there were 18 establishments making cash registers, calcu-
lators, and tabulating machines valued at less than $6 million in
total, but by 1919 65 firms made more than $83 million worth of
products (Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce,
1933:1120).
The comptometer, developed by Felt and Tarrant in Chicago,
was often more popular than the calculator because it was key-
driven, lightweight, and inexpensive; and once a special system
was learned, it could be used to do subtraction, multiplication,
and division. Its chief drawback was that it was non-listing; that
is, there was-no printed tape which showed each item entered,
only a window In which a running total appeared. Since the bulk
of financial record keeping required simple addition, the comp-
tometer was suitable to a wide variety of purposes. Some of the
first machines were ordered by the U.S. Treasury Department and
the Equitable Gas Light and Fuel Company (Derby, 1968~. The
Comptometer Corporation developed training schools for opera-
tors, and in 1930 placed an estimated 27,500 operators in offices
in the United States and Canada (Morse, 1932:78~.
Bookkeeping and billing machines, used to enter transactions
and to make up bills, invoices, and purchase orders, were sim-
ple combinations of typewriters and adding machines. Remington
made an "adding and subtracting typewriter in the teens, but
both typewriter and calculating machine firms made all kinds of
bookkeeping and billing machines after World War I. The produc-
tivity of both bookkeeping and duplicating machines was greatly
enhanced if used in conjunction with the addressograph, which
OCR for page 71
SHARON HARTMAN STROM
71
permitted the mechanical reproduction of alphabetized names and
addresses on mailings and statements.
Tabulating and keypunch machines became well known to
the general public because of their role In compiling the Census
of 1890. The principle was to mechanically keypunch individual
pieces of data onto a small card and then use a mechanical sorter to
compile the cards into different categories. Although any number
of patents for such machines had been filed in the 1880s, Herman
Hollerith, an engineering graduate of Columbia University, was the
first to receive assurances from the Bureau of the Census that his
machines would be used once produced. A variety of agencies and
corporations began to use the machines, including the Surgeon
General's office, the Baltimore Department of Health, and the
New York Central Railroad.
Most of the renown went to the compilation of vital statistics,
but the cost-accounting possibilities of the new machines were also
significant. The New York Central could, after the installation
of its Hollerith system (Austrian, 1982:125), uteri on a nearly
current basis how many hundreds of tons of freight were moving
East or West, which of hundreds of stations along its lines were
profitable; where freight cars should be sent or returned; which
freight agents were being paid. It would give the railroad a much
firmer command of its far-fiung business." By 1900 Hollerith was
at work on a standardized cost-accounting machine to be used
in conjunction with tune tickets filled out on the factory floor. In
1910 a renamed Russian immigrant, John Powers, was hired by the
Bureau of the Census to supervise production of the Bureau's own
census machines. He developed a new keypunch machine which
more closely resembled a typewriter keyboard Ed a method for
printing tabulated Formation onto rolls of paper. Hollerith's
machines eventually served as the basis of IBM's empire, and
Powers' machine was picked up by Remington Rand.
By the 1930s office machines were more likely to be electrified.
They required less operator strength and were far more automatic
and productive. The International Labour Office reported In 1937
(p. 495) that An employee addressing envelopes by hand could
not do more than 500 in a day's work; a hand-worked addressing
machine can print 1,000 addresses in an hour, and the number rises
to 1,500 for machines worked by the foot, and 2,000 for those actu-
ated by electric motors, or even 10,000 in the case of special work
for which the machine has been prepared." Considerable progress
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72
THE FEMINIZATION OF BOOKKEEPING
had been made in combining office machines in fairly compact
electrified systems to perform more complicated functions. At the
1934 office equipment manufacturers' show in New York, IBM
offered a new check proofing machine for banks {Business Week,
October 20, 1934:14~:
The operator rune an adding mechanism with her right hand.
Her left controls 24 sorting keys for alphabetical division, clearing
house bans, and other classifications. After recording the amount
of each check, she presses one of the 24 keys and drops the check
in a slot. The checks come out sorted in 24 bundles. A master
tape gives a complete listing with code designation opposite the
amount.
Remington Rand offered a "central records controls system to de-
partment stores, which combined the dial telephone, punch card,
and tabulating and adding machines. In 1935 National Cash Reg-
ister sold a machine that Avouch perform all the bookkeeping
required under the new Federal Home Loan Act," and in 1936
Burroughs and Monroe offerer] special payroll machines to accom-
modate new social security legislation (Business Week, October
24, 1936:16~.
By the 1920s, a handful of large diversified office machine
companies had been created by merger or acquisition and dom-
inated the industry until the 1950s: Adressograph-Multigraph,
Burroughs, National Cash Register, International Business Ma-
chines, Remington Rand, and Underwood Elliott Fisher. While
all firms showed a drastic decline in sales in 1931, by 1935 the
industry had regained its highs of the 1920s and saw record profits
in 1937 and 1938. The year 1941 was a banner one, and office
machine firms received handsome war contracts because of their
fine machine-tooling capacities. Many of them made war materi-
als such as bomb sights and rifles as well as office machines. The
war spurred demand for more diversified and sophisticated ma-
chines as the size and complexity of institutions and their functions
grew; most new developments in technology were commissioned
and financed by the federal government. The government literally
devoured most office machines for its agencies and war-related
industries during the war (Fortune, August, 1944:127-132, and
December, 1944:15~154, 194-196~.
Soma (1976) argues that ad the technology needed to create
the digital computer was available by WWl, but that no one in
OCR for page 73
SHARON HARTMAN STROM
73
government saw the need to provide massive funding for its re-
search and development until WWIT. While his assumption that
government capitalization of computer research was inevitable is
somewhat perplexing, it points out how important government pa-
tronage of the office machine industry was and continues to be. We
might add that the growing size and complexity of both business
and government in the 1940s made it inevitable that computers
would be used if produced. The development of office machine
technology responded to demand for machines more than inven-
tions influenced demand. As Mills (1951:193) argued, machines
were mass manufactured because they complemented the chang-
ing social reorganization of the office: Thus machines did not
impel the development, but rather the development demanded
machines, many of which were actually developed especially for
tasks already socially created.
MECHANIZATION, FEMINIZATION, AND
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT
Substantial numbers of women began to work in bookkeep-
ing departments in the decade before WWI. Some had studied
in business schools, were hired with the title of bookkeeper, and
held jobs comparable to those of men. But most were specifi-
cally hired to use office machines. Women and their machines
sometimes replaced men. Edward Page (1906:7683), a dry goods
jobber, instituted the use of carbon forms, loose-leaf ledger sheets,
a vertical file, a typewriter, and some computing machines in his
office at the turn of the century. Six male clerks were replaced by
one billing clerk and a 'girl who sits at a desk with a comptometer
and an arithometer. She adds the yards on the comptometer and
then extends the bills on the arithometer, and does the work of six
men with great ease."
- In a scientific management text from 1914, one expert (Ban-
ning) titled his chapter "Machines instead of Clerks" and gave
a number of examples of how women machine operators might
replace male hand clerks. In the payroll department of one manu-
facturer, it had taken six clerks two days to compute the payroll.
Two women using calculating machines could do the same work in
the same time with fewer errors. Felt and Tarrant reported that a
Kansas City steel firm had eliminated the jobs of three men in the
estimating department by installing a woman machine operator
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SHARON NARTMAN STROM
87
WAGES AND CLERICAL WORK
One of the most important consequences of the rising literacy
of the work force and the feminization of the office was a steady
lowering of clerical wages compared to those in manufacturing.
Male clerks particularly lost ground. Douglas (1930:363-366),
after taking the rise in the cost of living into account, found that
while all wage earners in manufacturing earned 29 percent higher
wages in 1926 than they had in 1890, all salaried and clerical
workers earned only 3 percent more. Certainly women clerks
earned far less than male workers In industry and substantially
less than the average male wage earner. Until WWIT, however,
they were likely to earn more than women in manufacturing jobs.
In his study of the male-female earnings differential in clerical
work between 1880 and 1970, Niemi (1983) found that "male
earnings levels consistently exceeded female earnings levels. As
clerical occupations became more feminized the gap between men's
and women's salaries within clerical work narrowed from a range of
25-45 percent in the early twentieth century to a 15 to 20 percent
gap in the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, clerical wages were
falling relative to nonclerical wages.
From a working-cIass or middle-cIass woman's (or her family's)
point of view, the salaries paid for office jobs must have looked
good, even with the stagnating wages of the 1920s and 1930s,
and may partly explain why so many women were still looking
for office jobs before WWIl. Since some high school was now
compulsory for everyone, a daughter could receive free business
training and move right into an office job, where she made higher
wages than women In any other line of work except the professions.
Moreover, if she could advance into the middle ranges of clerical
work stenographer, bookkeeper, statistical clerk, or supervisor,
for exampIc she could earn more than most other working women
and even as much as some men (see Table 33.
As clerical wages increased somewhat during the 1940s, these
perceptions of women's clerical jobs continued, and with good rea-
son. The Census of 1950 still showed that median yearly incomes
for women clerical workers put them closer to managers, propri-
etors, and professionals of the same sex than any other occupation.
And while female professionals, who needed to invest in expensive
college educations to obtain jobs, made 65 percent as much as
men in a similar category, on average women in clerical positions
earned 71 percent as much as their male counterparts (Table 4~.
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88
THE FEMINIZATION OF BOOKKEEPING
TABLE 3 Average Annual Earnings of Clerical Employees Who
Worked 48 Weeks or More in 1939, by Occupation--Philadelphia
Occupation
Women Men
Special office workers
Rate clerks
Secretaries
Bookkeepers, hand
Audit clerks
Cashiers, tellers
Bond, security, and draft clerks
Clerks, n.e.c.,- public utilities
Renewal clerks
Statistical clerks
Cost and production clerks
Payroll clerks timekeepers
Clerks, n.e.c.,- finance and insurance
Stenographers
Accounting clerks
Clerks, n.e.c.a, federal and state government
Claims examiners, adjusters
Billing machine operators
Actuarial clerks
Bookkeeping clerks
Billing, statement, and collection clerks
Bookkeeping machine operators
Tabulating machine operators
Calculating machine operators
Dictating machine transcribers
Order and shipping clerks
Keypunch operators
Telephone operators
Receptionists
Duplicating machine operators
Typists
File clerks
Credit clerks
$2,010 $2,704
-- 2,280
1,469 1,920
1,446 2,016
1,413 2,099
1,412 2,231
1,404 1,716
1,360 1,948
-- 1,926
1,332 1,989
-- 1,791
1,227 1,561
1,225 1,415
1,223 1,463
1,213 1,667
1,202 1,838
1,190 1,931
1,183 1,583
1,181 1,209
1,171 1,467
1,169 1,701
1,169
1,161 1,552
1,151 1,508
1,147 --
1,144 1,585
1,106
1,095
1,061
1,060
1,056
1,054
925
__
__
1,290
1,384
1,355
1,612
aNot elsewhere classified.
SOURCE: Women's Bureau (1942~.
OCR for page 89
SHARON HARTMAN STROM
TABLE 4 Median Yearly Income for Non-Fartn Workers Working 50-52
Weeks/Year, 1949, by Occupation
89
Occupation
Men Women
Ratio of
Women's Income
to Men's Income
(percent)
Professional and technical
Managers, officers, and proprietors
Clerical and kindred
Sales
Craftsmen, foremen
Operatives
Laborers
Service workers
$4,030
4,327
3,136
3,270
3,378
2,924
2,366
2,405
2,600 64.5
2,536 58.6
2,235 71.3
1,632 49.9
2,265 67.1
1,920 65.7
1,900 80.3
1,137 47.3
SOURCE: Kaplan and Casey (1958~.
THE LIMITS OF RATIONALIZATION AND
THE ISSUE OF UPWARD MOBILITY
Not Al the new jobs for women in clerical work were for
standardized use of business machines. A 1927 survey of the sex
of workers managers preferred for certain jobs found that while
men were strictly preferred for shipping clerks and timekeepers,
and women for typists, stenographers, file clerks, and bookkeeping
machine operators, either men or women would be hired as ledger,
payroll, and statistical clerks or as bookkeepers (RotelIa, 1977:25~.
Women were also hired to supervise machine departments or steno
pools.
Accounting and bookkeeping functions were still growing ram
idly. The number of workers with the job title of bookkeeper grew
until 1930, and from 1930 to 1940 the number of bookkeepers
declined only slightly while the number of machine operators and
clerical workers not elsewhere classified increased. There were
nearly 47,000 new jobs for accountants and auditors. New urgency
was given to more sophisticated methods of cost accounting for
the office because of the establishment of government regulation
and the increasing need to justify prices and minimize taxes.
Scientific management planners initially wanted to create a
sex-segregated labor force in which male professionals and head
bookkeepers received salaries and female machine operators were
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go
THE FEMINIZATION OF BOOKKEEPING
paid on a piece-work basis. But the continuation, even growth,
of large numbers of jobs in between these two groups, and the
temptation to fill them with women, who were always paid less
than men, created a more complicated labor force. G.~. Harris,
active in the American Management Association and the author
of a textbook on office work (1935:163), noted that "expert book-
keepers are not so much in demand, but expert billing calculators
are. There are more opportunities for young women in the depart-
ments than there are for men, and such young women can advance
to responsible positions in the division. For many women the
chance to work in bookkeeping departments represented not only
slightly higher salaries but a chance to think of themselves as "ad-
vancing" in clerical work and even holding positions comparable
to those of men. It ~ also important to keep In mind that while
stenographers and typists used machines that were distinctly sex-
stereotyped, both men and women used adding and calculating
machines. And since so many educated m~le-ciass men and
women were unemployed ant! forced to take low-paying clerical
jobs throughout the 1930s, women and men held some of the same
jobs.
Once women worked in jobs also held by men, they were
likely to gain some of the job privileges and self-esteem of men,
if not comparable salaries. These privileges might include more
self-pacing, self-direction, and a wider variety of tasks to perform.
The comptroller of Fraton and Knight (Wilson, 1934, no. 63:18,
in Office Management Series, 1967) argued that bonus plans were
really only effective "when quantity is the predorninanting factor"
such as In transcribing, typing, ordering, and invoicing. For gen-
eral accounting, sales, and cost estimating, however, "we find only
the direct salary base is applicable." These employees "contribute
materially to the financial success of the company . . ." and "it is
evident that in this division quality of the work cannot be sacrificed
to speed." Marion A. Bills of the Aetna Life Insurance Company
(1929, no. 44:~l, in Office Management Series, 1967) disagreed.
We "find innumerable cases where people are still doing the sim-
plest routine work . . . but whose salaries have grown by small
increases so that they are paid two, three, and even four times
what . . . they are worth. For example, we have the much misused
term of 'bookkeeper.' In different companies we find bookkeepers
who are simply posting clerks, a job which they could learn in a
few weeks, and bookkeepers who need to be expert accountants."
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SHARON HARTMAN STROM
91
Yet her success at implementing these ideas beyond the all-female
departments at Aetna remained limited (Murolo, 19823.
Prior to 1928, women clerical workers at Roxana Petroleum
were scattered throughout various functional departments. When
the corporation announced plans for centralizing and rationalizing
its typing, transcribing, ~d comptometer operations into one
division, both male executives and female operatives were resistant
to the change (Jones, 1928~. The men were resistant because they
would no longer control the operations perfortned by the women
clericals, and the women clericals because "they seemed to think
their work might be more humdrum and difficult. They felt in
some cases that they might not be able to measure up to the
standard and quality of work expected, that they might lose their
freedom, that their chances for promotion would not be so good.
. . .~ These women workers, in other words, perceived that working
alongside men improved their chances of securing better positions
and working conditions.
Managers had intended women's office jobs to be held by
"workers whose highest ambition will be realized when they are
placed on your payroll as clerical workers the kind that can be
depended upon to perform faithfully routine tasks day in and day
out without thought of promotion" (Nichols, 1934, no. 65:26, in
Office Management Series, 1967~. But many women did receive
promotions to better jobs, held more responsibility than their job
titles indicated, and became ambitious far beyond the expecta-
tions of managers. Everyone knew, however, that there was an
unspoken law: advancement for women stopped short of the ex-
ecutive's door. Men, whether qualified OE not, had to be the top
managers and executives, and the shock of that reality must some-
times have disturbed women workers. One management specialist
(Barnhard", 1933, no. 61:~-19, In Office Management Series,
1967) worried about this problem in 1933:
Some of my studies have revealed the extent to which firms
employing women for doing certain kinds of clerical, especially
secretarial work have used and promoted women so extensively
that there is an absolute absence of men in the upper levels from
which promotions to junior executives can be made. We checked
the private secretaries and assistants to executives in one company,
and found that in eighteen cases, fourteen Assistants to executives
were women who, if the executive went out of the organization,
could not be promoted. Indeed at the time of our study some of
these women were already falling down an the job because they
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92
THE FEMINIZATION OF BOOKKEEPING
were sure they would not be promoted and could not see why
they should work very hard any longer. In this firm some of these
secretaries and assistants were college-trained women, high-grade
women.
Both women who worked in low-pay~ng machine operator jobs
and women who had moved to more responsible positions re-
mained problematic for employers. Employers complained as early
as the 1920s about higher rates of absenteeism and job turnover
for women than for men in office jobs. These rates reached epi-
dem~c proportions in the banking industry by the late 1940s (Mc-
Colloch, 1983~. Other women expressed their dissatisfaction in
ways that sometimes perplexed employers. One industrial psy-
chologist (Giberson, 1939, no. 87:27, in Office Management Series,
1967) classified "wily females" with alcoholics, psychoneurotics,
paranoids, and other social misfits of the office. Their "devious
natures," she concluded, were partly attributable to the fact that
they are temporary workers frustrated by the A-consuming mat-
ter of pay levels."
One question that arises here is when and how the issue of
job classification began to emerge in management-labor conflict in
the office. As noted above, managers in government and private
industry both had devised job-cIassification schemes to facilitate
hiring, job placement, salary setting, and the justification of a
multiply stratified labor system. But once jobs were classified
and given job descriptions employees could also argue that they
were not being paid wages commensurate with their duties or
that they should be moved to a higher job classification. There
is some evidence that women and minorities in the expanding
clerical labor force of the federal government of the 1930s and
1940s, with its highly refined civil service classification system,
were the first to use this as a tool to achieve upward mobility and
to attack sex discrimination. When the Bureau of Agricultural
Economics listed a new position "for men only," women workers
protested and the designation was changed to Image or female"
(Federal Record, Jan. 20, 1940:6~. In 1941 ledger account clerks
in the Veterans Administration won what was claimed to be a
Midyear battle to upgrade their position to a higher grade because
"they did work which required a broad knowledge of laws and legal
opinion governing the accounts handled by their division. Thirty-
One clerks, led by Mrs. Marvel Lockhart Ball, drafted their own
appeal to the Civil Service Commission. As their union newspaper
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SHARON HARTMAN STROM
93
explained, "the greatest significance of this decision is that it raises
questions concerning similar type advances for thousands of clerks
in the Government service who are doing a calibre of work far
above their rank" (Federal Record, November 7, 1941~.
A flurry of such office workers' union activity between 1937
and 1950 began to address the issues of job classification, possibili-
ties of promotion, working conditions and deskilling, and adequate
compensation for men and women (Strom, 1983; McCoDoch, 1983;
Strom, 1985~. These unions were crushed by employers, govern-
ment, and rival craft unions during the McCarthy period, and it
was not until the emergence of the civil rights movement in the
1960s and the women's movement in the 1970s that the same issues
emerged as political and trade union causes. By then the sexual
composition of office work had changed dramatically. With the
coming of WWIT, men who had been willing to take office jobs dur-
ing the 1930s had a growing variety of occupational choices, and
competition for managers, accountants, and servicemen quickly
decimated many male staffs of bookkeeping departments. In the
Tong run the disappearance of men from the lower levels of clerical
work proved to be a positive development for managers because
it saved so much money. Management expressed concern over
the shrinking pool of women clerical workers, but an immediate
solution was simply to open office jobs to married and a small
but steadily growing number of minority women. The hiring of
minority and married women workers allowed office employers
to continue their major objectives in the labor management of
bookkeeping: to steadily cheapen wages through feminization, to
mechanize and deskill traditional salaried jobs, and to raise the
productivity of office staffs by reducing the number of privileged
males.
As the number of married women—now likely to be in jobs
for many years at a time and the number of single m~dle-
class college women—unable to enter the professions because
of discrimination- increased, managers apparently imposed new
forms of segmentation on the office in the 1950s. While male ex-
ecutives and to~leve} managers were still there to oversee things,
older women may have more and more been asked to supervise
young women and middle-class white women placed in more plead
ant jobs. Minority women may have more frequently been assigned
to machine operators jobs. There is every reason to believe that
this pattern of segmentation still largely exists. What obstacles it
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94
THE FEMINIZATION OF BOOKKEEPING
presents to worker solidarity is something that warrants further
investigation. But it should have come as no surprise that when
more mass-based union movements appeared in the 1970s they
emphasized higher wages, upgraded and fuller job classifications,
adequate working conditions for machine operators, an end to
sex discrimination, and the important connections between all of
these.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
office management
