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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
Apparently, not.
Though, my guess is, if the man in question is one the woman is interested
in, then there is no problem at all.
The problem is, women feeling uncomfortable when the wrong man shows interest, be it a stranger, a coworker, or a friend.
Yeah.
Just to respond to the last part of that:
If I become friends with someone, I assume it’s because they enjoy spending time with me, like my personality, share some of my interests, etc, as that is what is motivating me to want to be their friend. We’re entering into a bond of mutual, platonic affection, one which, in some circumstances, can be seen as a haven from the messiness of romantic entanglements. When the male half of the friendship (for example) then says they actually want a romantic relationship, which the female doesn’t, the woman is left to wonder if he became friends with her for the reasons she did him, or simply because he wanted to leverage that into something to fulfill his desires. Then it becomes the fun game of, is this friendship going to last? Was it even real to begin with? Will he resent me for turning him down, and potentially air all of the things I told him in confidence publicly? What about my other male friends?
Of course the man is hurt, but it’s wrong to act like this is a zero sum game where he loses and she feels no fall-out.
(Not to say that men can’t ask, but they need to be aware of the potential risks).
It’s a bit of an oversimplification, but I’ve found that sometimes women do that because for both themselves and the Bad Boy, they don’t have other options: for example, they can’t call the police if there’s a problem, because they might both have warrants out, etc. Maybe it’s “only” for failure to pay child support, but the result is the same: if the police find out who they are, they go to jail.
So they hook up with a guy who carries knives/guns/whatever – which is also another crime if they’re already felons – and it usually continues to go downhill, sometimes rapidly.
At my age, 69, I can have women friends with no sexual overtones. I’m not sure it was possible when I was 20.
I think it is, and most of my friends are male, but maybe it depends on the people in question.
You don’t think we know there are potential risks? Of course we do.
Your thinking is black and white and simplistic, and I am sorry, adolescent. A man can get to know a woman as a friend and then develop romantic feelings for her. I know I did. I married her. If you insist on seeing all men as just wanting to get into your pants, or even if you insist on fearing all men are just trying to get into your pants, then that is on you.
You’re probably underestimating testosterone.
I think you’re talking past each other. It’s almost like men and women think differently or something.
Most of my friends are male, and I don’t see it that way. I totally understand that romantic feelings can come out of friendship, and often work out. I was just trying to make the point that “friend zoning” isn’t something that only negatively effects men, and that there are reasons a woman might have trouble trusting a man after that.
So are you saying you prefer that a man wants to get into your pants FIRST, and THEN expresses interest in finding out how you think etc?
Or is this yet another delicate balancing act that men are supposed to navigate perfectly and anything that goes wrong is automatically HIS fault?
(I’m starting to think – and not the first time – that… BBC…)
The 69-year-old widows might have other plans. :-)
This is, I think, that second time you made a distinction between sex and a sexual end, and friendship. Do you mean love and marriage and a lifelong commitment as a sexual end? I mean, there is also that he may be interested in you as a person and as a potential wife and companion, not a purely sexual object.
And by the way, all relationships have a sexual component, even purely friendly ones — even mother and daughter or father and daughter. Even if the girl picks up the check or opens doors for the guy, it’s still got a sexual context — not a sex act context, but an awareness and a distinction between the sexes that direct all kinds of roles and behaviors. If you want to be respected as a woman, that’s a sexual context.
But if that tinge exists, it doesn’t stand alone. It is overridden and even buried, by the man’s overall views, interests and character.
Ah, yeah, that’s a good distinction. I would be somewhat offended, I guess would be the right word, if a good friend suggested a casual sexual liaison, and more likely to question that friendship than if they were proposing long term companionship.
(Two of my relationships came out of friendships that were built on musical interest, one on economics and one on music, so I understand what you’re saying).
I think that’s more or less what I said.
Sure, but I’m really talking about a normal and emotionally healthy girl or woman who marries a bad boy.
Quite true.
But that could still be the case for him even if it’s not for her. Or at least not immediately so. That’s one reason the Bad Boys become Bad Boys, or can quickly lead it anyway. Is a guy who’s never actually been in a fight or whatever, really a Bad Boy? So there’s a pretty good chance, I’d think, that he already has a police record. Which could mean not being legally allowed to possess weapons, although if that’s why she picked him in order to get protection… see where it goes? If they did get into a physical altercation, SHE can’t call the police if HE’S a felon illegally possessing the weapons she wants him to have to protect her…
Our relationship started out with me wanting to get into my wife’s pants. It’s normal. We’re still married 42 years later.
I mentioned this conundrum to my wife. She said that the only way you could have a relationship with a guy where he wasn’t thinking about sex was if he was gay.
I’m not sure what you’re saying. Are you saying that she’s making the wrong decision for her desired outcome?
And then he’s still thinking about sex, just not sex with HER. (Or at least… not the usual kind of sex…)
Ultimately, yes. And that she can’t see it because of… something, I dunno. Maybe “childhood trauma” in some cases.