Polina Kroik - Cultural Production and the Politics of Women’s Work in American Literature and Film

Cultural Production and the Politics of Womens Work in American Literature and Film

Cultural Production and the Politics of Womens Work in American Literature and Film emphasizes the interrelation among womens workplace roles, modes of authorship, and processes of subject-formation, pointing to some of the reasons for the persistence of the limiting gender roles and occupational hierarchies that arose during the first 60 years of the twentieth century.

The book interrogates three common narratives: The rise of Fordism as a masculine mode of production and the transition to an era of feminized work; womens liberation through the sexual revolutions; and the rise of a new form of literary authorship. Conversely, it suggests that womens labor was integral to the operations of the Fordist business sphere, where, unlike at the factory, the white-collar office proletarian work was casualized and feminized. This book argues that this workplace was an important site of subject formation, affirming dominant ideologies through economic practices.

Analyzing work by Sinclair Lewis, Nella Larsen, Anita Loos, and Sylvia Plath, the book presents an alternative history of American modernism, one that is more attuned to gendered discourses of labor and class. By looking at the micropolitics of power within cultural institutions, this study moves beyond the dichotomies of exclusion/inclusion to interrogate the terms on which women and minorities worked as producers, and the ideas and experiences that consequently entered the field of intelligibility.

Polina Kroik holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on gender, work, and migration in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and film. She has presented at numerous national conferences and contributed to peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Kroik teaches literature and writing at Fordham University and Baruch College, CUNY.

Cultural Production and the Politics of Womens Work in American Literature and Film

Polina Kroik

First published 2019

by Routledge

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2019 Polina Kroik

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ISBN: 978-1-138-32726-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-44934-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Newgen Publishing UK

In the first episode of the television show Mad Men, the protagonist Peggy Olson begins working as a secretary in an advertising agency. The viewers are introduced to the most common stereotypes of mid-century secretarial work. White, middle-class and educated, the female secretary performs menial tasks with a smile and is expected to be emotionally and sexually available to the male employees. By the end of the series Peggy is an executive who competes with men on more-or-less equal terms. Peggys trajectory is meant to represent the decline of a particular patriarchal and economic order, making way for a new age.

While mid-century office culture was significant in its historical specificity, the figure of the secretary dates back to the first decades of the twentieth century when Fordist economic expansion and technological innovation created the need for large numbers of cheap, educated workers. Rather than hire black or immigrant men as many factories did, the office opened its doors to white educated women. The consequent emergence of the figure of the secretary is intertwined with a complex array of social, economic, and cultural changes and had far-reaching effects on gender and sexual norms. As the Victorian taboos against womens presence in the distinctly masculine office fell away, new images, mores, and practices formed in their place. Though working- or business- girls became as essential to the modern office as the new technologies of communication that they operated, these women were rewarded with only limited economic mobility and personal freedom. For over 50 years female clerical workers remained a contingent and highly exploited workforce with few protections. Moreover, the female secretary became one of the models of the modern girl, female worker, and cultural producer. Single and sexually available, the girl was welcome in the workplace as long as she served the needs of male employees and did not compete with them for managerial and professional positions. This gendered hierarchy not only limited womens ability to participate in cultural production but also helped redefine authorship in the era of modernism and beyond.

My reading of the rise of the figure of the secretary and its importance builds on nuanced accounts of Fordism, many of which are influenced by Antonio Gramscis early insights about Fords use of social technologies to create reliable workers and rational consumers for his mass-produced cars. Thus while Richard Sennett and Mike Davis characterize Fordism as an era of essentially masculine, blue-collar work on the regimented factory floor, I follow David Harvey, Stuart Ewen, and William Leach in highlighting the importance of communication- and social technologies to the success of Fordist expansion. Like advertising, corporate welfare, represented by Henry Fords Five-Dollar Day, was important to the creation of an amenable workforce and a wide consumer base. While maintaining the communication networks, the secretary was also an important part of the corporate welfare mechanism. Through her affective labor, the secretary discouraged worker turnover while helping disseminate Fordisms consumerist ideology. As my reading of Sinclair Lewiss 1917 novel The Job suggests, the secretary already began to play all these roles in that early moment.

An integral part of this constellation of economic and cultural strategies, secretarial work also reinforced the construction of white-collar work, with its attendant gender norms, as racially white. As David Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch argue, scientific labor management in the early twentieth century often relied on the sociology of race in its workplace practices. Ford himself habitually spoke of workers race and ethnicity when making decisions about their placement in his factorys hierarchy. By 1930, when most secretarial work was performed by women, only .5 percent of working black women held such jobs (Jones 166). Most white-collar offices remained closed to black women at least until World War II. As I discuss in , black women with a high school education typically sought training in a handful of professions such as teaching, nursing, librarianship, and social work. These majority-female occupations typically promised a stable income in an institutional structure that sometimes protected black women against racial discrimination. Yet even though these types of work were categorized as professions, the work they offered was strenuous, lower status, and lower paid relative to male-dominated professions in the same fields. Nella Larsen, who had a successful career as a nurse and a librarian when she began writing in the 1920s, found such professional work incommensurable with her position as an author. In her novels and correspondence, questions of racial identity frequently intersect with the problem of economic survival.