ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the feminization of clerical work in the context of the rise of Fordism. Following Antonio Gramsci, David Harvey, and others, I characterize Fordism through an array of social technologies, quickly adopted by expanding corporations. I argue that, in the white-collar office, the female clerical worker was both an object and an agent of Fordist ideology. Held to a feminine, caregiving role, the secretary fostered employee loyalty by mitigating the conditions of modern labor. The feminization of clerical work linked women’s gender and sexuality to the temporary and essentially domestic work of the secretary, while professional and managerial labor remained masculine. In Sinclair Lewis’s and Winston Churchill’s fiction, the modern discourse on women’s sexuality is used to justify women’s confinement to this type of work. In Lewis’s realist novel The Job (1917), the attempt to affirm the primacy of Una Golden’s sexual and domestic roles often rings false, straining the conventions of the genre. The emergence of the female secretary played a role in the formation of a new gendered cultural hierarchy and a new mode of authorship. Seeking to distance themselves from this newly feminized labor, male authors looked for new ways to conceptualize their work.
