Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Men, Women, and Workplaces
June 1949. The American Medical Association’s annual convention was held in Atlantic City, filling the run-down seaside town’s parking lots with out-of-state Cadillacs. One of the main events of the weekend was demonstrating a new tool for training doctors, medical color television, a futuristic-seeming replacement for the tiers of ringed seats of the traditional operating room surgical amphitheater. But TV was too poor a teaching substitute until color came along. After an elaborate luncheon was over, a spokesman for the manufacturer, Smith, Kline, and French, strongly suggested that the doctors’ wives leave the hall, as the live images would be very graphic.
To his surprise, most of the ladies stayed and watched, most of them impassively sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes. (I mentioned it was 1949, right?) Someone explained to the SKF man that the women were, or had been nurses, and had seen far worse. “They met their husbands on the job”. In 1949, that was as common a fact of women’s lives as hats, white gloves, and handbags. For women, getting ahead in life generally involved marriage, with the goal of marrying “up”. It had always been the way of the world.
November 1977. A brave new world for men and women, after the overlapping but different ‘50s–‘70s cultural revolutions associated with Playboy, Cosmopolitan, and Ms. magazines, but far from a completely changed one. Xerox Corporation held its worldwide conference for executives in Boca Raton. The last day was Futures Day, when most of the attendees would finally get their first-ever look at the next-generation office technology that the company had been creating since 1973. To them, the Xerox Alto workstation was a TV you could type on, like the personal computers that were just beginning to appear. But Alto came with word processing (a new term) built-in, networking, and a new invention that played to Xerox’s strengths, the laser printer. Attendees were invited to step forward and spend some time using the new equipment.
The men were moderately impressed. “Interesting” was the consensus, but by and large, they weren’t that excited by seeing what a productivity step like this could mean for business. By contrast, their wives, nearly all of them well-to-do or outright wealthy, jumped right in, folded their Chanel tweed jackets, kicked off their high heels, and started typing and formatting, exclaiming to each other what an amazing thing this was. It looked incongruous, even funny as the rich ladies quickly figured the system out.
But it made sense. Almost all of them had been secretaries. That’s how they met their husbands: on the job. For the 1977 wives, many of the furtive office romances that led to matrimony took place in the Mad Men era, 1960-’70, back in that mixed time that fell between Playboy and the phenomenon we’d come to call, simply, the women’s movement. In 1974, New York Magazine did an issue about the world a quarter-century back. The lead article was titled 1949: Feminism’s Nadir.
Only a few years later, now forty years ago (where does the time go?), I encountered that “future office”, even the very same networked computer system, now christened the Xerox Star. A friend of mine, a fledgling lawyer, got me a temp job in a large, busy law firm when another job offer fell through and I needed rent money fast. I was there for a couple of months, first as a file clerk, then as organizer of their rapidly growing stock of magnetic media.
The law firm was a well-oiled machine that ran lean and stacked up the billable hours. Think litigation, not Perry Mason. Except for the three partners, the other two dozen or so lawyers spent their long workdays reading documents, dictating into a microphone, or (more rarely) talking on the telephone.
The product of all this endless, day in and day out, talking and dictating and interviewing and deposing was handed off to a large secretarial pool, pounding away at IBM Selectrics. Only the three partners had their own assigned staff; everyone else competed for resources. And if the firm were an army, the officers were all men, and the enlisted ranks were about 90% women. That was pretty typical in those days.
Not one of the lawyers so much as had a typewriter in his office. There were no computer keyboards on their desktops either—not quite yet. By contrast, by 1981 there had already been generations of college women who’d helped their boyfriends by typing their papers. Wives typed their husbands’ ways through law or medical school. That was perfectly normal in those days. Unless they’d been clerks in the armed forces, few men even knew how to type. Many men prided themselves on it.
The costly Xerox Star system was, so far, only used for editing and formatting the most valuable of their legal documents. Only the top echelon of secretaries, the firm’s uncompromising Bene Gesserit, was permitted to work with it, and the elite corps of young women at its three terminals were accompanied by one full time (male) systems technician who I suspected, even 40 years ago, of merely pretending he was needed.
Five days a week until well after five, the two dozen men with fancy sheepskins on their walls were separately trapped in their surprisingly small and un-fancy offices, although making a lot of money. By contrast, the five dozen or so women were all massed in big, noisy open-form offices, a vast, busy, and very social unit that amounted to a female company-within-a-company. They spent most of their work lives typing, correcting, and editing the work product they got on tape from the lawyers. The rivers of talk led to rivers of printed text, which led to rivers of money, which led to all of our paychecks.
The older ladies frequently showed patience while tacitly helping teach newly hired-but-“green” young male lawyers how to deal with the firm’s assembly-line pace. The women weren’t lawyers, and in that era had rarely expected to be. They expected, deserved, and got, respect for the jobs they did choose. So it was with muted, oddly mixed feelings that they greeted a young woman, fresh from a Florida law school, newly admitted to the California bar. This wasn’t a rarity by 1981, but it was still new to most of the lawyers and secretaries.
If this were a Lifetime made-for-TV movie, the women would have stood up as one, proud and sassy, with a big, smiling round of applause for the new attorney. Sure, a couple of unattractive, clueless men in the office might have tried to get handsy with her, but she’d have effortlessly put them in their place. Gestures of sisterly solidarity would have covered her path like rose petals.
In real life, though, it didn’t work out as simply as that. So far as I could tell (admittedly, a real limitation, but there was little to no privacy there), the men didn’t try to hit on her. She got an office and staff support equal to her male coworkers. A no-nonsense sort, she got right down to business. A brisk, successful transition, by all appearances.
But the stereotype-breaker was: the women didn’t like her and didn’t like working with her. Partly it was her chilly personality. She didn’t go out of her way to relate, and she clearly didn’t see herself as being much like the other women. In effect, she saw herself as needing to prove herself as if she were an officer among enlisted ranks; they saw her as a stuck-up snob who thought she was better than the rest of them. Neither was entirely wrong. Despite what the era’s slogans said, Sisterhood isn’t always powerful.
There was another, entirely human and understandable element in the secretaries’ reactions that did track with female dissatisfaction with the workplace, a mixture of only semi-admitted envy and an undercurrent of self-blame: here she was, making the big bucks and giving orders. What did I do wrong?
My temp job lasted four months. The managing partner offered me a full-time gig, which was more than decent of him, but the real job that I’d been holding out for came through. About a year later, out of nowhere, a lawyer sent me an invitation to one of their elite social mixers at the Beverly Hills Country Club, which I was happy to attend.
As the evening drew to a close and I started drifting towards the exit, I fell into the conversational circle of an elegantly dressed woman in her late forties. I’d later learn she was the wife of one of the partners. I was introduced, rather generously, as someone who’d once worked at her husband’s law firm. When I told her I wasn’t a lawyer she perked up. “Oh, thank God!”, she said, laughing. She asked what sort of things I’d seen in my time there and I told her.
I wasn’t surprised that she was conservative; in Beverly Hills, it was not nearly as rare then as it would be now. The boards of directors of L.A.’s other country clubs went after studio chiefs as marquee names; BHCC went after Buzz Aldrin. One of the other guests lit her cigarette while the valet ran to fetch her car. She turned her attention back towards me. “I know you’ve heard lots of bad things about the Fifties, but for me, it was a wonderful time in my life. I liked being an office girl”. She looked amused at my (no doubt) doubting expression.
“Oh, I knew I was luckier than most. There were some drawbacks once in a while. But I met a fine man and married him. Women today don’t get a full picture of back then”.
That old quote came to mind: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there”. Its lessons are rarely simple or one-sided. She was talking about her life twenty-five years earlier. It’s been forty years since this conversation took place.
She sighed, stubbed out the cigarette, and donned her fur coat. Blackgama, the best of its time. The valet re-appeared with the car. She smiled and nodded goodbye. The big black Cadillac swallowed her up and she vanished down Wilshire Boulevard.
Published in General
Lol. I think so. This is a public site.
The men might have had a better recollection of how much – or how little – that blouse exposed.
You forgot breasts.
I think that’s covered by “flagrantly sexy.” Even then, they might not notice what color the blouse was.
You forgot, “But that secretary is hot.”
I’m not saying that’s not true, but a fair number of the men who believe they don’t get women because of that fail to see that they aren’t complimenting in the right way. Or that there are places and times when a woman doesn’t want to be complimented, at least on her looks.
If we’re picking on redheads, we ought to invite @she.
Women compare themselves to and compete with other women.
Try “Abby Cox” on you tube. She has a website about clothes in particular the 18th and 19th century that is very interesting. She has dressed daily as an historical reenactor and tells why she actually prefers the styles of the 18th and 19th century. Many of those who have commented here would, I think, find her videos interesting.
I take this to mean the natural man and woman. Rational capability enables humans to control their nature.
Make-up and skin care are pretty intertwined; women are often using make-up (especially medicated make-up) to cover up flaws which aren’t just considered unsightly, but are physically painful. I’m not saying that the lion’s share of the equation isn’t on outside enjoyment, but it’s not 100% the case.
Also, some women enjoy make-up for themselves because they see it as a chance to be artistic, and experiment with different colors and textures and shapes, as an expression of their creativity and individual style. Or simply find it a cathartic part of a morning routine.
Yes. Why must women project their breasts into every interaction?
The one thing guaranteed about fashions is that they change. Sometimes things are relatively stable for a handful of decades, but then what was in is out and what’s in is a bit mad-seeming for awhile.
I think they do, because that part is basically natural, but they’re not taught how to appreciate responses to it, or even worse they’re taught to resent responses to it.
I’d certainly rather be stylish than fashionable.
I don’t think that skin care is why women wear make-up, though. If anything it tends to create skin problems.
A lot of times, the fashions do have practical purposes. Wigs were to cover up hair loss due to syphilis, for instance.
(Also, let’s be real; a non-trivial number of the men who say that are going almost exclusively after women way outside of their league. It’s not some particular cruelty of the feminine sex to say, ‘if I’m gainfully employed, educated, and put time into my physical health and outward appearance, and you do none of those four things, but sidle up to me to grope or act like G-d’s gift to womankind, this isn’t going to end how you want.’)
The only male secretary (they weren’t called assistants yet) was middle-aged and obviously gay, although in 1981 he would not even have dreamed of putting a picture of his boyfriend on his desk, not even in Los Angeles. He was not only gay, but cheerful; they don’t always go together. He did things like buy flowers for Valentine’s Day, “From the Men of (company name) to the Women of (company name)”. Everyone liked him for it. Public acceptance of his life wouldn’t have reached 2021 levels in those days, but it was already closer to today’s than it was, say, to 1951’s.
Depends on the specific application and product, really. There are a lot of foundations, for example, especially from Korea, that have high SPF to protect the skin from sun damage without layering on all of the pore clogging heaviness of traditional sun screen. Medicated tinted lip balms operate on the same principle.
I would extend that response and say they fail to gain an understanding of when these things are appropriate/acceptable and when they are not.
A more apt comparison might be, he shouldn’t look at her “too much,” and she shouldn’t get all dewy-eyed if he writes a romance novel, or something.
Style is more or less timeless. Look how elegant the dresses Myrna Loy wore in the Thin Man series still are.
How about Nell Gwyn’s?
But they are different, and it isn’t right to “Criminalize” the normal behavior of men but not pay equal attention to the normal behavior of women.
This seems a bit ambiguous. I took it to mean that many men prided themselves on NOT knowing how to type, but following the part about some men being clerks in the armed forces I can’t be sure.
I am sorry, but if a man is who the woman is interested in, he can be pretty crude and she will ignore it. If he is not who she is interested it, there is almost no safe approach.
Men are tasked with initiation and we have made that approach so dangerous, it is just less likely to happen.
My wife has never rejected a comment from me when I complimented her on her looks. But she is my wife.
It is all designed to make the woman more attractive.
If he is not the right man, these things are never appropriate/acceptable.
Like you need SPF in London. 😉
Okay, sure. But what are the women supposed to do?
*maniacal laugh*
*disappears over horizon*