Transcribing Class and Gender: Masculinity and Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Courts and Offices
336
Transcribing Class and Gender: Masculinity and Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Courts and Offices
336Overview
"Drawing upon census data, trade periodicals devoted to stenography and court reporting, the writings of educational reformers, and fiction, Srole allows us to better understand the roles that gender and work played in the formation of middle-class identity. Clearly written and thoroughly researched, her book reminds us of the contradictions that both men and women faced as they navigated changes in the labor market and sought to realize a modern professional identity."
---Thomas Augst, New York University
Transcribing Class and Gender explores the changing meanings of clerical work in nineteenth-century America, focusing on the discourse surrounding that work. At a time when shorthand transcription was the primary method of documenting business and legal communications and transactions, most stenographers were men, but changing technology saw the emergence of women in the once male-dominated field. Carole Srole argues that this shift placed stenographers in a unique position to construct a new image of the professional man and woman and, in doing so, to redefine middle- and working-class identities.
Many male court reporters emphasized their professionalism, portraying themselves as educated language experts as a way to elevate themselves above the growing numbers of female and working-class stenographers and typewriter operators. Meanwhile, women in the courts and offices were confronting the derogatory image of the so-called Typewriter Girl who cared more about her looks, clothing, and marriage prospects than her job. Like males in the field, women responded by fashioning a gendered professional image---one that served to combat this new version of degraded female labor while also maintaining traditional ideals of femininity.The study is unique in the way it reads and analyzes popular fiction, stenography trade magazines, the archives of professional associations, and writings by educational reformers to provide new perspectives on this history. The author challenges the common assumption that men and women clerks had separate work cultures and demonstrates how each had to balance elements of manhood and womanhood in the drive toward professionalism and the construction of a new middle-class image. Transcribing Class and Gender joins the recent scholarship that employs cultural studies approaches to class and gender without abandoning the social history valuation of workers' experiences.
Carole Srole is Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles.
Photo: A female stenographer working for an actuary in 1897. Courtesy Metlife Archives.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472026647 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 06/04/2010 |
| Series: | Class : Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 956 KB |
About the Author
Carole Srole is Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles.
Read an Excerpt
Transcribing Class and Gender
Masculinity and Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Courts and OfficesBy CAROLE SROLE
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2010 University of MichiganAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-07055-8
Chapter One
Performing Independence: Male Clerks, Bookkeepers, and Stenographers from 1820 to 1870
Shorthand has a long history going back to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians but it did not spread across the West until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Europeans brought it to the New World, where some colonists-like Roger Williams; John Winthrop Jr. and his wife, Martha; ministers; and some court personnel-wrote shorthand. In the eighteenth century, Thomas Lloyd recorded the first congressional debates and George Washington's inaugural address. American shorthand in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries continued to follow popular English styles, such as Samuel Taylor's and Thomas Gurney's systems and their adaptations. Shorthand became more commonly used in the United States with the popularization of Englishman Isaac Pitman's phonics-based "phonography" as part of an international movement to simplify language, with phonetic principles as its central feature. From his 1837 book, Stenographic Soundhand, phonography dispersed to English-speaking countries, spreading throughout the United States after Pitman's younger brother Benn's immigration in 1852 and establishment of the Phonographic Institute in Cincinnati.
Phonography took off in the United States within the context of efforts to reframe clerking in a changing middle-class world. Well before midcentury, a tension emerged: clerical workers depended on their families and employers, either as mercantile apprentices or employees, yet they hoped to remain in the middle class by becoming economically independent as proprietors. Until then, they chose among conflicting definitions of independence to maintain a middleclass male identity. For some young clerks living in the urban boardinghouse districts, independence meant freedom from parents and respectability. Both the excitement of city life and involvement in working-class leisure intensified the feelings of autonomy. In contrast to this tougher, more manly characterization, other clerks embraced a respectable middle-class connotation of independence, which advocated self-control over unrestrained license and development of character. This rendering, however, acquiesced to female standards of morality and gentility, although some young men managed to reframe respectability to account for their freer behavior. A final, more practical meaning of independence made room for both urban adventures and decision making by emphasizing movement, whether geographic or social mobility. Simple exercises in self-study could demonstrate steps toward improvement, the hallmark of a middle-class manhood that balanced manly mental preparation and morality. Stenographers eventually became associated with this last definition of independence, although they initially had their own unique ties to middleclass notions of progress.
YOUTHFUL DEPENDENCE
In the antebellum years, clerical workers were poised in a liminal space between youthful dependence and adult independence. Whether they worked in offices, sold in shops, or combined both types of labor as salesclerks, clerks were boys and young men in the process of preparing for owning a mercantile or manufacturing business. Despite the weakening of mercantile apprenticeship, many still depended on the paternalism of familial networks, especially fathers negotiating job placements and arranging and financing proprietorships. Once employed, these young men were supposed to absorb skills on the job by gradually learning increasingly complex tasks, from tallying packages to copying letters and invoices to duplicating letters. Even mundane errands of message and merchandise delivery and distributing handbills introduced them to commercial rhythms and connections.
As these young men plodded along in hopes of advancement, popular culture reinforced their liminality by questioning the middle-class manhood of those employed as retail clerks. According to historian Brian Luskey, contemporary cartoons ridiculed their eagerness to negotiate with and advise female customers about frivolous consumer purchases in a job some thought better suited to women. Conversely, when clerks toted goods, either in offices or stores, they risked appearing like lowly Irish or African American porters. In either case, these gender and class challenges reminded clerks of their precarious position.
This status uncertainty emanated from the recognition that their expectations for proprietorship might not be met, as large proportions worked in occupations that did not lead to self-employment. In 1821, nearly four of every ten Boston clerks (whether in sales, office, or mixed positions), accountants, bookkeepers, scriveners, and secretaries worked for a branch of government or a bank (see appendix, table A1). Clerks in government and, to some extent, those in banking did not become proprietors without leaving their jobs. Government clerks generally stayed year after year as employees, eschewing proprietorship. For example, Moses Bass merely transferred from the collector's office, where he was working in 1821, to the city treasurer's office by 1834. William Rowson, a customhouse clerk for at least ten years, died without ever advancing to proprietorship. Of those government clerks traced from 1821 to 1834 in Boston city directories, none advanced beyond more responsible positions in the same bureaucracy or left the government and established a business, although some did in the next ten years (see appendix, table A3). Not surprisingly, government clerks felt defensive about their jobs, despite earning relatively high salaries.
Men in these institutions hoped to earn enough money to invest, buy a business, or make connections. Those who already had succumbed to bankruptcy hoped to find less-risky commercial adventures to ease their way back into proprietorship. Even dead-end jobs could appear as apprenticeships by providing opportunities for training in skills, raising funds, and networking. The fading of youth, however, exposed their dependency. Clerks in their thirties must have felt pressure to settle down. Once they reached their forties and still worked as employees in offices, they undoubtedly worried about their futures, for they could no longer pretend that they were still apprentices. In 1860, 13.6 percent of clerks, 10.3 percent of bookkeepers, and 25 percent of accountants in Philadelphia and 37 percent who worked for the federal government were forty or over.
For apprentices and employees, dependence cast a shadow over their work lives. Both aspired to independence: apprentices to advance and government clerks to finance their own businesses. Once economically independent, they could achieve respectable, middle-class manhood; until then, they remained youths or failures.
INDEPENDENCE
Despite their economic dependence as apprentices or employees, antebellum male clerical workers became a symbol of potential economic independence. In the early nineteenth century, both manual and nonmanual workers continued to embrace the eighteenth-century belief in the importance of economic, political, and familial self-rule as a major component of manhood. As economic changes throughout the nineteenth century curtailed economic self-sufficiency for both groups, each struggled to hang on to some autonomy. By the antebellum years, Christian fiction and advice aimed at boys and young men shaped the self-made man as a symbol of the middle-class version of manly independence.
Prolific authors like Freeman Hunt, Timothy Shay (T. S.) Arthur, and then Horatio Alger focused on the actions of the autonomous man, in contrast to the dependence inherent in the paternalism of the family and apprenticeship system. They collapsed the various stages of apprenticeship into a process of individual effort. A youth leaving home as an apprentice turned into a young man seeking his fortune in the city or an abandoned orphan struggling alone in the teeming metropolis. Instead of absorbing the craft from an employer, he now prepared to improve himself. Each act of mastering a skill was recast as solitary decision making and effort. Individual acquisition of increasingly complex skills, first as an apprentice and then a journeyman and possibly a master, now signified movement, especially upward mobility. Initial jobs mattered very little, for he slowly climbed the rungs of a career ladder from one learning opportunity to the next. By choosing the right path, he ultimately succeeded both financially and morally, moving to a respectable and comfortable station in society, often as a merchant, sometimes as a manufacturer, but always upward until he reached the middle class (and sometimes beyond), all accomplished "on his own."
The maturation of the ideology of the self-made man in the antebellum years corresponded with a rise in commerce that inaugurated a shift in the availability of clerical work. As the economic expansion from the 1820s to the 1850s rocked the eastern seaboard states, the work of jobbers, brokers, wholesale traders, and storekeepers expanded, multiplying the number of proprietors, the ideal goal for the middle-class man. The clerking populace kept pace. The years between 1821 and 1844 saw a steady rise in the number of clerking positions in Boston, doubling between 1821 and 1834 and rising 35 percent between 1834 and 1844, more than tripling the total who were household heads in Boston between 1821 and 1834. Mercantile clerking grew at a faster pace than government and bank clerking.
As emphasis on the possibilities for success for those with initiative grew and as the number of new jobs in cities rose, many clerks became potential self-made men who grew restless and anxious to take advantage of these opportunities. Some rushed to acquire training. Young men like Edward N. Tailer Jr. relocated from job to job, impatient with the pace of the work and the slow stride of advancement. Such men wanted more money and responsibility sooner than clerks of a generation before, because they feared missing out. To keep their employees, merchants reassured their own clerks that they would soon become businessmen and advised young men about the importance of loyalty.
However, even in this heyday of mercantile clerking, the number of positions for clerking employees began to outpace the opportunities for proprietorships. The growth of commerce in the 1830s and 1840s initially boosted prospects for office workers, until midcentury, when supply outstripped demand. The number of clerks in Boston multiplied tenfold from 560 to 5,165 between 1846 and 1855, far surpassing the number of merchants and opportunities for economic independence. A smaller number of clerical men reached proprietorship in the 1850s than in the 1840s in Utica and Poughkeepsie, New York. With so many clerks, the proportion becoming merchants fell. Merchants began to perceive of their assistants as employees, not potential partners. The social distance between them increased, as office workers seldom boarded with their employers. Employers treated clerks impersonally and complained publicly about their dishonesty. In 1855, Hunt's Merchants' Magazine compared mercantile clerks to wives for their dependence. By the 1840s, clerks complained in their diaries about the boredom at work. Copying, in particular, already earned a reputation as wearisome. Advisors warned that remaining too long as a clerk might dull a man's senses. His brain would become "weary" while "living in an unnatural state, doing what was really of no advantage nor delight to any human being." Men rushed to leave clerking for independent positions as soon as possible.
Even while waiting for promotions, these antsy clerks sought to define themselves as independent by deciding their own educational and employment futures. If they relied less on their fathers and merchant masters, paternalism lost some of its impact. Along the way, these young men could imagine themselves as active risk takers, strengthening their own sense of autonomy. The next section explains how clerks transcended dependence to become the epitome of aspiring independent middle-class men by choosing and balancing varied gendered definitions of independence.
MEANINGS OF INDEPENDENCE
In affirming autonomy, clerks shaped their own meanings. Some who moved to the cities and lived in boarding houses defined independence as establishing freedom from parents and respectability, especially by participating in male-centered working-class forms of leisure. Others embraced the more feminine moral respectability by avoiding such forms of leisure. These men identified independence as exercising self-control and developing character. Still others found ways to reframe respectability to account for their new behavior. Lastly, the characterization of independence as movement, or steps toward success, had the greatest appeal, since it could blend with the other meanings.
City Freedoms: The Manly Working-Class Model
Clerks who lodged with relatives or employers remained integrated in household leisure activities, whether playing chess or whist in the parlor or ice-skating nearby. However, at midcentury, large numbers of unmarried urban clerks resided in the new boardinghouse districts of the burgeoning cities, such as New York and Boston, unsupervised by employers and family. Some felt homesick and anxious about this new independence, but they sensed the freedom of the city's energy and leisure. Vendors chanted rhymes to hawk their goods, while labor and patriotic parades, strikes, bare-knuckle fighters, street urchins, beggars, squealing pigs, rumbling trolleys, and petty crime filled the streets with color, pageantry, and spectacle. Horatio Alger's stories beginning in 1867 recounted the urban dangers of crime, traffic accidents from trolleys, and moral distractions, such as gambling, drinking, and oyster bars, all of which made life risky for the uninitiated. Alger also pointed out that these same dangers energized the city by offering entertainment for patrons of theaters, parks, hotels, restaurants, and sights, such as museums, hospitals, churches, the post office, banks, the city hall, the police department, the hall of records, and the Cooper Institute. Traffic noise and noxious odors added to the tumult.
Clerks pursued their own leisure enjoyment in this fast-paced busy atmosphere, without parents or employers to dampen their delight. Nineteen-year-old William Hoffman visited Fowler's Phrenological Cabinet, with its "Busts and Skulls of many distinguished characters," as a break from looking for a clerking job. Robert McCoskry Graham, a Parisian-educated clerk, wrote in his 1848-49 diary about the excitement of the "perfect jam" that he missed when Henry Clay came to New York. The next day, he reported that two hundred thousand onlookers lined the streets to witness a "melancholy pageant" as the remains of John Quincy Adams were carried through the crowds. Edward N. Tailer recorded the "bonfires, fireworks, illuminations, torchlight processions, and noisy speeches" during the 1848 election.
Only in the city could clerks view such a variety of novelties, some of which crossed the line of respectability. Since they lived in working-class districts and boarded with working-class men, clerks could participate in the urban leisure of the male working class, with its rowdiness, fighting, drinking, and theatergoing. Harry Hodges marveled at the "noise and excitement" but worried that it "causes a person almost to forget every thing he ever knew." Benjamin Tilton also felt uneasy that the "temptations and allurements of a populous city" offered "rare enjoyments to the unsuspecting youth" in a "more enlarged sphere of action." Henry A. Patterson placed bets with his fellow clerks, winning a dinner of oyster stew. In 1848, Edward N. Tailer, son of a wealthy merchant, celebrated the Fourth of July with his "cannon and horse pistol" and fired over sixty packs of firecrackers. To build muscles through gymnastics and boxing, he joined a gymnasium aimed at the middle class, but in a less-than-respectable milieu. Some clerks joined working-class men in firehouse companies, drinking, brawling, and participating in "ritualized displays of strength." Clerks in the 1840s and 1850s also attended raucous theater performances where working-class single men in the audience hissed and booed and threw garbage and rocks at performers. Tailer enjoyed the Olympic Theater, especially the character Mose, who he viewed as "a true specimen of one of the [Bowery] B'hoys." He might have even seen the play Glance at New York, about middle-class men reveling in the adventures of working-class urban life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Transcribing Class and Gender by CAROLE SROLE Copyright © 2010 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.