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Machines Instead of Clerks: Technology and the Feminization of Bookkeeping, 1910-1950
Machines Instead of Clerks: Technology and the Feminization of Bookkeeping, 1910-1950
Pages 63-97
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From page 63... ...
In the 1870s and 1880s women were recruited to use the telephone and the typewriter as the production of documents and transmission of information were mechanized. But, to most observers it seemed that financial matters and record keeping were still where they belonged: in the secure grip of the mate bookkeeper.
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From page 64... ...
Why did women become bookkeepers and why was the feminization of bookkeeping linked to the mechanization of office work? This paper will argue that management initially sought women workers to use bookkeeping machines because they could pay them less and because they thought women would offer less resistance to the deskilling of bookkeeping than salaried male workers familiar with the traditional craft of posting books by hand.
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From page 65... ...
New kinds of corporations and agencies based on extensive financial record keeping appeared, such as department stores, public utilities, life insurance companies, savings and loan companies, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Social Security Administration. The technology of the fine machine too} and die industry made possible significant breakthroughs in the mass production of office machines.
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From page 66... ...
argues that Cost accounting" thus demanded the breaking down into smaller operations of jobs once performed by the bookkeeper and the foreman and a consequent reduction of their control over the workplace. At the same time federal and state government investigations of railroads, life insurance firms, and public utilities were revealing that the largest economic institutions in America had the shoddiest accounting procedures imaginable.
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From page 67... ...
The emergence of cost accounting after 1910 did give the accountant new prestige. Unlike the bookkeeper, who kept track of all financial transactions, or the auditor, who checked the books
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From page 68... ...
26:2, in Office Management Series, 1967) described cost accountants as Business doctored who could put a firm in the pink again by providing ~budgets, methods, standards, and measurement." The accounting division of Standard Oil of New Jersey employed 51 people in 1912, but had doubled in size by the m~-1920s, even though auditors and comptrollers had been moved to a separate department (Gibb and KnowIton, 1956~.
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From page 69... ...
The amount of financial paperwork that changes in accounting, management, and regulation created was staggering, and without fundamental changes In the organization of the clerical labor force, its composition, and the machines it used, the changes would not have been possible. OFFICE MACHINES AND THEIR HISTORY Most of the technology required for the mechanization of bookkeeping had been developed by the late nineteenth century in small machine too} and die shops near factories, in large manufacturing cities by engineers, and by businessmen inventors seeking more efficient office methods.
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From page 70... ...
Its chief drawback was that it was non-listing; that is, there was-no printed tape which showed each item entered, only a window In which a running total appeared. Since the bulk of financial record keeping required simple addition, the comptometer was suitable to a wide variety of purposes.
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From page 71... ...
By the 1930s office machines were more likely to be electrified. They required less operator strength and were far more automatic and productive.
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From page 72... ...
special payroll machines to accommodate new social security legislation (Business Week, October 24, 1936:16~. By the 1920s, a handful of large diversified office machine companies had been created by merger or acquisition and dominated the industry until the 1950s: Adressograph-Multigraph, Burroughs, National Cash Register, International Business Machines, Remington Rand, and Underwood Elliott Fisher.
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From page 73... ...
But most were specifically hired to use office machines. Women and their machines sometimes replaced men.
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From page 74... ...
61:3, in Office Management Series, 1967) of the LincoIn Insurance Co.
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From page 75... ...
Another way to cut costs was to apply scientific management principles. So likely were mechanization, feminization, and scientific management to be applied to office work together in the 1920s that we think of them as being
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From page 76... ...
There were important areas of resistance to scientific management in the office; executives, supervisors, male clerks, and private secretaries resented measurement and rationalization of their jobs (Davies, 1982~. But young women who had never worked before could be placed at machines, stopwatched, and encouraged to work even faster through bonus plans and as a condition of continued employment.
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From page 77... ...
She recalled that it was important to keep your hand on the lower part of the machine to save time, So we seldom used a 9, or an 8, we'd just press 4 twice." She was so valuable an employee she worked for 2 years after her marriage in 1916 and wan later sent by the comptometer people to several other firms to teach the use of the machine-for inventory and payroll systems (Rhode Island Working Women, 1981~. At Roxana Petroleum, managers claimed that the 50 percent of the women workers who survived centralization came to enjoy the new methods of work.
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From page 78... ...
A similar survey of 300 companies employing 35,000 office employees in 1936 showed "a pronounced increase in the use of plans for measurement of production and wage incentives during the depressions (Slivers, 1936, no.76:6 in Office Management Series, 1967~. Complaints about both mechanization and speed-up were a common theme in office worker union literature of the period (Pell, 1937; Strom, 1985~.
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From page 79... ...
While machine operators were placed in a separate category of clerical work in 1930, the relatively small total of them compared to workers in other categories suggests that only those strictly designated as "machine operators by employers were so listed. It is also possible that some workers preferred to be thought of as clerks instead of machine operators and so reported themselves as clerks to the census takers.
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From page 80... ...
What jobs they did in the office often remained unclear, although they must often have been using office machines other than typewriters. A survey of large offices in 193~31 by the Women's Bureau led Erickson to conclude (1934:5~: In today's offices with fifty or more clerical workers the bookkeeping and letter writing activities frequently are overshadowed in the number employed by those envisaged on the details of handling advertising, sales campaigns, market and credit analyses and collections, involved statistical and financial reports of costs, and a variety of other recording activities.
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From page 81... ...
were more accurate and more narrowly defined than those listed in the Census, these job classifications, like those of the Census Bureau, suffered from ambiguity and sex-stereotyping. Most office workers used machines, yet some were "operatives, some were "clerks," and some were "bookkeeper.
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From page 82... ...
82 U: 11 U3 to .
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From page 83... ...
Some management experts suggested that there were no longer real barriers to married women working except custom and tradition (Leffihgwell, 1934, no. 62, in Office Management Series, 1967)
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From page 84... ...
96, in Office Management Series, 1967~. Jobs for women clericals between 1910 and 1930 were designed for white women with some high school education.
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From page 85... ...
But a 1930 survey of offices in Chicago and AtIanta found not a single incidence of white and black women working together in the same office. Black women clericals were generally older, more likely to be married, and received lower wages than other clerical workers (Erickson, 19343.
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From page 86... ...
says, Universal public education meant that every literate person became a potential clerk." While the employment of clerical workers continued to increase steadily over the course of the twentieth century and to increase more rapidly than employment of inclustrial workers, the number of women and men seeking clerical employment increased at an even greater rate (International Labour Office, 1937~. As early as 1928 there were three to five clericals seeking jobs for every one available in New York State, a greater disparity than in any other occupation (Coyle, 1929:187~.
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From page 87... ...
As clerical wages increased somewhat during the 1940s, these perceptions of women's clerical jobs continued, and with good reason. The Census of 1950 still showed that median yearly incomes for women clerical workers put them closer to managers, proprietors, and professionals of the same sex than any other occupation.
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From page 88... ...
88 THE FEMINIZATION OF BOOKKEEPING TABLE 3 Average Annual Earnings of Clerical Employees Who Worked 48 Weeks or More in 1939, by Occupation -- Philadelphia Occupation Women Men Special office workers Rate clerks Secretaries Bookkeepers, hand Audit clerks Cashiers, tellers Bond, security, and draft clerks Clerks, n.e.c.,- public utilities Renewal clerks Statistical clerks Cost and production clerks Payroll clerks timekeepers Clerks, n.e.c.,- finance and insurance Stenographers Accounting clerks Clerks, n.e.c.a, federal and state government Claims examiners, adjusters Billing machine operators Actuarial clerks Bookkeeping clerks Billing, statement, and collection clerks Bookkeeping machine operators Tabulating machine operators Calculating machine operators Dictating machine transcribers Order and shipping clerks Keypunch operators Telephone operators Receptionists Duplicating machine operators Typists File clerks Credit clerks $2,010 $2,704 -- 2,280 1,469 1,920 1,446 2,016 1,413 2,099 1,412 2,231 1,404 1,716 1,360 1,948 -- 1,926 1,332 1,989 -- 1,791 1,227 1,561 1,225 1,415 1,223 1,463 1,213 1,667 1,202 1,838 1,190 1,931 1,183 1,583 1,181 1,209 1,171 1,467 1,169 1,701 1,169 1,161 1,552 1,151 1,508 1,147 - 1,144 1,585 1,106 1,095 1,061 1,060 1,056 1,054 925 __ __ 1,290 1,384 1,355 1,612 aNot elsewhere classified. SOURCE: Women's Bureau (1942~.
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From page 89... ...
The number of workers with the job title of bookkeeper grew until 1930, and from 1930 to 1940 the number of bookkeepers declined only slightly while the number of machine operators and clerical workers not elsewhere classified increased. There were nearly 47,000 new jobs for accountants and auditors.
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From page 90... ...
Bills of the Aetna Life Insurance Company (1929, no. 44:~l, in Office Management Series, 1967)
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From page 91... ...
Managers had intended women's office jobs to be held by "workers whose highest ambition will be realized when they are placed on your payroll as clerical workers the kind that can be depended upon to perform faithfully routine tasks day in and day out without thought of promotion" (Nichols, 1934, no. 65:26, in Office Management Series, 1967~.
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From page 92... ...
One industrial psychologist (Giberson, 1939, no. 87:27, in Office Management Series, 1967)
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From page 93... ...
Management expressed concern over the shrinking pool of women clerical workers, but an immediate solution was simply to open office jobs to married and a small but steadily growing number of minority women. The hiring of minority and married women workers allowed office employers to continue their major objectives in the labor management of bookkeeping: to steadily cheapen wages through feminization, to mechanize and deskill traditional salaried jobs, and to raise the productivity of office staffs by reducing the number of privileged males.
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From page 94... ...
Library of Office Management, 1. Chicago and New York: A.W.
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From page 95... ...
1927 Uncle Sam rates the efficiency of his office workers. Office Economist 9(May)
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From page 96... ...
Social Science History 7tWinter1:97-107. ~ , Office Management Series 1967 Once Management Series, 1924-1941.
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From page 97... ...
8:359-386. 1985 We're no Kitty Foylesn: organizing office workers for the CIO.
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