Clerical Work, Professional Women, and the Rhetoric of Upward Mobility

This paper proposes that although the tenets of second-wave feminism initially propelled clerical workers to organize, ultimately feminist goals limited the possibilities of the office workers’ movement.  In the 1960s and 1970s, largely because of the influence of second-wave feminism, many clerical workers realized that they were not alone in feeling outraged when male employers passed them over for raises, referred to them as girls and gave them the task of buying gifts for their wives at holidays.  Responding to such frustrations, several secretaries in Boson founded 9to5 during the early 1970s.  Soon it became a national organization for working women who sought recognition as valuable professionals and who wanted tangible gains such as higher pay, precise, written job descriptions, and opportunities for promotions.

Yet certain goals of the second-wave movement undermined the clerical workers’ agenda.  The public conversation about women and work through the 1970s and 1980s focused largely on securing middle-class, college-educated women access to male-dominated professions.  In fact, professional women’s career ambitions further solidified clerical work as unskilled, lacking in prestige, and without upward mobility.  Federal policies such as affirmative action and equal employment opportunity guidelines urged businesses to hire women and minorities at management levels while these government regulations failed to help raise the low incomes of clericals.  Opportunities for women in management as well as in business, sales, marketing, medicine, law, and engineering negatively affected the office workers' movement as seen in Working Woman’s magazine articles and editorial letters (both published and unpublished) as well as in transcripts from a 1979 national conference on women and work.  Improving the status of clerical workers came to mean helping women move out of their dead-end jobs and into something that could be called a career.