The feminist workplace organization for clericals, 9to5, launched its first industry-based subcommittee, Women in Publishing, in 1973. In this much-needed study of clericals in American corporations from 1960 to 1990, Allison Elias details the publishing subcommittee’s decades-long campaign to open doors to managerial and editorial positions while supporting clerical unions and upward mobility for other female staff. Demonstrating remarkable cross-class unity, Women in Publishing fought for internal job postings, clear job titles, and expanded training opportunities to counter the industry’s male-friendly nepotism and dead-end pink-collar ghetto.
Women in Publishing (WIP) only partly achieved its goals. The group won access to new positions and formal hiring procedures for college-educated women. But narrow interpretations of equal employment law coupled with employer hostility to providing the training that would have created upward pathways within a firm constrained working-class women’s opportunities. Elias argues that WIP exemplifies clerical women's trajectory in corporate America: middle-class, college-educated women gained access to the managerial and executive track while working-class, high-school-educated employees remained trapped in a gender-segregated, internally stratified world of executive assistants, support staff, word processors, and data entry clerks. Corporations focused on widening opportunities for women “underutilized” in traditionally male-dominated positions and refused to address women’s overrepresentation in sex-segregated posts (pp. 103–104). Advocates fell short in performing the job analyses and pay equity audits that could have transformed the status and quality of clerical employment. “Ultimately,” Elias concludes, “corporate promotion of equal opportunity settled comfortably alongside occupational segregation by gender” (p. 2).
Elias narrates the development of these two tracks through a thorough examination of campaigns led by 9to5, providing one of the best accounts to date of this crucial women’s labor group. Building on studies of equal employment and affirmative action by scholars like Katherine Turk, Nancy MacLean, and Frank Dobbin, Elias teases out how clericals fought to widen career opportunities at the moment when corporations implemented new laws—and then how the women responded when possibilities narrowed. She rounds out the study by looking at popular self-help texts on women’s careers and by analyzing business literature on human resources management.
Along with demonstrating the split in career tracks for women in corporations, Elias also illuminates several other important facets of the changes for pink-collar workers. First, she documents the ambivalent relationship many secretaries had to the feminist movement, while also showing how feminist critiques of sex inequality and gender stereotyping changed the world around clericals, forcing them to adapt. Feminism joined with the expansion of civil rights to create substantial opportunities for Black women who took up clerical positions at a rapid clip. Elias contends that Black women were not drawn to the organizing work of 9to5, although others, who have focused on cities besides the white-dominated Boston studied by Elias, have found significant involvement by Black women and a tradition of pairing Black and white organizers. The labor movement also played a role in reshaping clerical work. The group 9to5 affiliated itself with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to form the nationwide clerical union SEIU District 925 in 1981, although Elias rightly points out that they made only modest inroads. Anti-union corporate leadership and Republican government officials created significant headwinds for unionization drives, as did internal divisions among secretarial staff, some of whom preferred a strategy focused on professionalization.
While Elias does not frame it like this, her study reveals how changes in women’s employment in corporations mirrored the broader labor market’s division between college-educated and other workers. Despite their battles to upgrade women’s work, clericals suffered the same fate as American workers more generally—hard-charging employment structures for the college educated but restricted low-wage opportunities for those without degrees. While Elias attributes this divided outcome primarily to personnel department actions, greater attention to executive suite leaders would have strengthened her argument, as they have consistently tamped down labor costs and fissured workplaces.
Elias also explores the impact of technology on clerical work, honing in on the effects of personal computers, which fostered a long-term reshuffle of the secretarial role despite organized clerical resistance. Finally, the book addresses how self-help literature valorized and reframed secretarial work from the 1950s to the 1980s, drawing out the role of advice writers in advancing a myth of individual career “choice” for both managerial and secretarial women in the 1980s.
As a book about the “secretary and her changing identity” in American corporations, Elias’s study is invaluable (p. 2). When Elias hangs her narrative on the rise of an “ideology of corporate feminism,” however, her analysis fails to hold up (p. 8). Elias concludes that the mostly white women entering managerial ranks settled into an individualistic, merit, and choice-driven vision of women’s advancement, which she characterizes as “corporate feminism” (p. 6). The problem is that it is not clear who actually embraced and pursued this vision as a feminist achievement. Not secretaries (who are the book’s focus). Certainly not 9to5 founder, and the book’s heroine, Karen Nussbaum.
Elias skips over the activism of women who made it into management. What were the agendas and projects of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, women’s business-school alumni groups, informal and formal “women in business” clubs, and businesswomen in mainstream feminist organizations? It is likely that some women embraced an individualistic, equal opportunity ethos as the ultimate feminist achievement, but a more robust examination would reveal a far broader range of concerns. For example, advocates in the work–family field, which developed in the 1980s, worked closely with professional-class women and human resources departments to advocate for maternity leave, childcare, and other benefits.
The narrowly construed “corporate feminism” that Elias identifies belongs to corporate leaders and journalists, not to feminist activists. Elias never makes the distinction clear, conflating a media construct that served business interests with feminist social mobilizations and beliefs. The study is at its best when it sets aside this frame and gets down to the business of showing us how secretaries fought to gain rights, raises, and respect in the American corporation.
Professor Swinth is the author of Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family (2018). In progress is Inventing the Working Family: The Birth and Triumph of a New American Ideal, 1970–2020, and the collection Care and Capitalism in the Twentieth Century, co-edited with Sarah Knott.
