RE-MEMBERING IDENTITY

“As writing researchers, we approach rhetoric . . . as a matter of history . . . woven, often tacitly, into our languages, institutions, and practices...”

Introduction

The feminization of clerical work has long been linked to the invention of the typewriter, but it took more than a new tool to turn "girls" into "Girl Fridays." In this web text, I illustrate the central role texts played in creating these modern office workers.

I take up the methods advanced in the core text here to help us better understand the central role texts and literacy played in the socialization of women office workers. Using a sampling of media (print, still images, and moving images) from the first half of the twentieth century, I show how these texts helped re-fashion a model of white middle-class womanhood fit for the white-collar workplace. (Read more on CHAT and textual networks.)

The Secretary's Day (instructional film, left) offers a visual/aural articulation of ideals that had begun to be worked out in print around the turn of the century. The 1947 film describes "the attributes of a good secretary" which, by the '40s and '50s, had become well-established in career advice and in the public imagination: alertness, efficiency, promptness, neatness, orderliness.

The success and effectiveness of the film is thus mediated by earlier texts and popular representations of office workers. Repetition and saturation of message (e.g., how women office workers act and dress) help naturalize the identities such workers are expected to enact.

In the following pages, I argue that the information networks that career advice texts created, and along which they operated, were crucial to the socialization of workers, and to the dissemination of representations and arguments that helped protect women's place in the office—even as their presence was challenged during the Depression. This staying power was due partly to the successful gendering of workplace activity and skill, which naturalized the work women were doing, and adapted traditional (hierarchical) gender relationships to the workplace.