Just as there is a whole generation unaware of what a cassette tape is, this same generation won’t remember a time when sexual harassment didn’t exist.
The phrase, that is. It wasn’t invented until 1975, when the term was coined by a new-fangled group of women called feminists to name a behaviour so entrenched in the workplace that, 60 years earlier, someone only half-jokingly suggested placing the office stenographer in a cage for her own protection.
While women may no longer need placing in cages, the male/ female office dynamic has always been tricky.
Jokes, comments, suggestions, invitations, physical contact — come on, where’s your sense of humour?
Don’t be so po-faced, it was only a bit of banter. What’s the matter with you?
Can you stay late? How about a drink? My wife doesn’t understand me.
Of course, offices are often such boring places that the only way to get through the day is to get it on with a co-worker as a form of occupational therapy (this was especially true in the days before social media).
Philosopher Michel Foucault calls this consensual erotic tension in an otherwise dull workplace — the “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” — yet even consensually, office sex can still be a tightrope over a minefield.
But what about when it’s not consensual? American academic Julie Berebitsky, professor of history and women’s studies at the prestigious Sewanee university in Tennessee, has spent the past few years researching the history of unwelcome sexual behaviour in the American office.
The result — ‘Sex and the Office’ — is a goldmine, full of social history nuggets that would make a secretary’s hair curl in horror.
From the first women to take clerical work at the US Treasury office in the 19th century to Bill Clinton chasing various female staff around his desk 150 years later, this is the definitive story of office sex pests and social attitudes towards them — and the women workers they harassed.
When women first started working in offices, they were known as typewriters — as were the machines that they used.
They were drafted in around the time of the American Civil War, which ended in 1865, but by 1870 there were still fewer than 2,000 white American woman office workers.
Twenty years later, they made up a fifth of all clerical workers. The idea of ladies working in offices as assistants to gentlemen bosses began to catch on. The office ideal of the day was that of an efficiently emotionless bureaucracy, with a strict hierarchy for maximum productivity.
Left to their own devices, men could get on with the business of controlling the world without the interruption of messy emotionality — the dominant perception of women was that of emotional incontinence and sexual allure.
And then women started turning up for work. What could possibly go wrong?
Freud heartily disapproved of the presence of emotionally leaky, sexually potent women in the male workplace.
In 1930, he argued that men were successful because they had embraced rationality and sublimated their sexual desires by keeping women out of the office — offices did not need polluting with victims, vixens, vamps and gold diggers.
But perhaps the most dominant idea of all was that men were essentially carnal creatures who could not be expected to rein in their sexual desire, anymore than a dog could resist a steak. This was a simple biological fact, accepted by both genders.
The view of the day, according to Berebitsky, was that “nature had given men an active and ever-present sexual drive, which made sexual overtures in the workplace inevitable”.
Anyway, everyone knew that women only worked in offices to pick up a husband, even if he was already married to someone else. Didn’t they?
“Newspapers regularly portrayed the office girl as a siren who ruined good men and solid marriages,” writes Berebitsky, recounting how in 1893 one enraged wife recalled her husband showering his “pretty blonde stenographer” with “clothing, shoes, bon-bons, bouquets and luxuries”.
Her husband’s bosses fired the stenographer, but kept the man on.
Typewriters, said another furious wife in 1908, were “love pirates”, who consciously exerted “an evil influence” on men.
The typewriters hit back, suggesting that wives “thought it no longer necessary to appear attractive and dainty”, adding: “It’s the wife’s fault if she allows her husband to stray from her.”
In 1909, another wife filed an “alienation of affection” lawsuit against her husband’s former stenographer, whom she viewed as having stolen her husband as though he were a wallet.
(Which, given the economics of the day, he kind of was.)
Meanwhile, back in the typing pool (because women did not have any other office role other than typing and filing), typewriters had to contend with “indignities”, “gross insults”, and “undue familiarity”.
When this happened — which it did, as a matter of course — a female worker had two choices: love it or shove it.
The only option for a respectable young woman was to quit, because even if she were nun-like in her conduct and dress code, the slur would be on her honour, not his.
A study of working women from 1913 included the story of one worker who was fired when she refused to have dinner with her boss, but was subsequently advised by friends never to mention this at job interviews, should she be suspected of “having tried to lead a perfectly good gentleman astray”.
Moving forward half a century, into ‘Mad Men‘ territory, and not much had changed.
Women were now called secretaries rather than typewriters, but were still being chased around the desk, and their main goal was still seen as snagging a husband and retiring to the suburbs.
Rona Jaffe published her best- selling novel ‘The Best of Everything’ in 1958 (shown being read by Don Draper in an episode of ‘Mad Men’), about three young white-collar clerks.
For these office heroines, getting groped by the boss was not only inevitable and inescapable, but ultimately harmless. An occupational hazard, so long as you didn’t get knocked up.
And then came Helen Gurley Brown, who in 1962 wrote ‘Sex and the Single Girl’, followed in 1965 by ‘Sex and The Office’, after which Berebitsky named her book (and Candace Bushnell nodded to with ‘Sex and the City‘).
Gurley Brown, who also in 1965 took over an ailing magazine called ‘Cosmopolitan’ and reversed its fortunes by writing about sex, used her own experience in the workplace to craft a “new moral code for the modern working girl”.
She was all about sex.
Offices, she said in 1964, were “sexier than Turkish harems, fraternity house weekends, or the ‘Playboy’ centrefold”.
She proclaimed sex to be one of life’s great pleasures, and urged unmarried women to enjoy it as much as everyone else.
(Remember, this was 30 years before ‘Sex and the City’.)
Reversing a century of advice that urged office women to behave as “total ladies” at all times, keeping constant vigilance against the “office wolf”, Gurley Brown advised women, says Berebitsky, “to use gender and, to varying degrees, sexuality for personal and professional gain”.
The idea of women harnessing their sexuality for their own pleasure and gain gave people the willies.
One review of ‘Sex and the Single Girl’ in a men’s magazine warned that sex was man’s work, and that Gurley Brown’s advice could “earn an unskilled, amateur player her rape or murder”.
Another review suggested that Gurley Brown’s “rapacious, aggressive female” degraded men in a way traditionally reserved for men to degrade women.
Prototype Samantha Joneses had been warned.
Neither did Betty Friedman, godmother of liberal feminism, much approve of Helen Gurley Brown and her sexual raciness.
In 1965, Friedman criticised ‘Cosmopolitan’ magazine as “quite obscene and quite horrible”, and castigated Gurley Brown for not “urging women to live a broader life”.
Early feminists believed that using sex to get ahead, while not as disempowering and humiliating as sexual harassment, was hardly liberating.
In retrospect, Gurley Brown was a missing link between workplace women fiercely guarding their sexuality and transcending it entirely.
However, it is the adverts from this era which show rather more realistically where women were in the workplace pecking order, and within the broader social hierarchy.
An early 1960s office play set marketed at seven to 12-year-olds offered the Junior Executive “a replica of everything on Dad’s desk … name plate, cheque book, petty cash vouchers, credit card”, while his Junior Secretary had a “steno book, hairbrush, cosmetics and perfume”.
In ‘Business Week‘ in 1967, an advert shows a dreamily smiling woman leaning on a filing cabinet, with the caption: “Secretaries love this file. It’s the strong, silent type.”
Another ad feature in ‘Fortune’ in 1969 shows a woman in a series of ditzy, supplicant postures; below her is a filing cabinet.
“This one handles paper, and is fun to watch, talk to, kid with and tease,” says the text under the woman.
Of the filing cabinet, it reads “This one just handles paper.”
Another ad for a steel desk showed a boss, a secretary and a desk. “Sit on it, stand on it, ______” invited the caption.
A brand of typewriter (the machine, not the woman) was marketed as “Faster and more efficient than Miss Feldman (and better looking)”.
In 1975, 10 years after Gurley Brown’s assertion that single women should use what sociologist Catherine Hakim would decades later term their “erotic capital” to get ahead, the feminist journal ‘Quest’ berated ‘Cosmopolitan’ for encouraging women to adopt “a strategy of passive sexual manipulation”, and suggested that women who used sex “for their own advantage” were not helpful in counteracting sexual harassment.
Things were changing, big time.
A 1970 edition of ‘Business Week’ warned its male readers that “a top man who needs a private secretary may run smack into the women’s liberation movement … with its egalitarian psychology”.
Women were starting to make some noise. The first “speak out” about the newly coined term ‘sexual harassment’ happened in Ithaca, New York in May 1975.
One of ‘Ms’ magazine’s founding editors, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, in her book ‘Getting Yours: How To Make The System Work For Working Women’, included a chapter entitled ‘The Sexual Dimension: Even Virgins Get Screwed By The System’, which stated unambiguously that “some bosses extort sex in return for giving a promotion”.
In 1977, Pogrebin wrote in ‘Ladies Home Journal’: “You can try humour, charm, resistance and threats. But when your voice is ignored and the old-boy network closes ranks against you, personal solutions count for nothing.”
Office-worker groups sprang up in the early 1970s, with slogans such as “Raises, Not Roses”.
Some early feminists likened the role of secretary to prostitute, with one article’s title making clear its dissatisfaction with existing systems of class, race, economy and gender — “The Secretary: Capitalism’s House Nigger”.
Abolishing ‘office wife’ duties such as making the boss’s coffee and running personal errands for him was part of a bigger push for more equality and professionalism.
As far back as 1959, the National Secretaries Association wrote that the secretary “is neither a maid servant nor a piece of furniture”.
Another early 1970s group WOW — Women Office Workers — highlighted employers’ preferences for young attractive women with a series of campaigns; they complained about sexist jokes made in mainstream media, and dodgy adverts.
But it was an individual named Carmita Wood, an admin assistant at Cornell University, who was instrumental in turning the previously private problem of unwanted sexual attention at work into a social issue that united women and got things changed.
In 1975, stressed to bits from her boss’s ongoing unwanted sexual advances, Wood quit her job. She applied for unemployment benefit but was turned down, as she was deemed to have quit for “personal reasons”.
Three feminist academics at the University stuck up for her. “Within a few weeks, they had put a name to the infinite variety of humiliating, unwanted and coercive sexual behaviours that working women had historically experienced,” writes Berebitsky.
“Once sexual harassment had a name, women as a group could speak out against it.”
This meant that, for the first time in the history of men chasing women around the office, the responsibility moved from the recipient to the perpetrator.
‘Time Magazine‘, in its first-ever article on sexual harassment in 1979, titled, ‘Many Office Romeos Are Really Juliets’, slightly missed the point:
“As more women rise to supervisory positions, it will become harder to tell who is chasing whom around the desk.”
(We had to wait another few decades before the emergence of Jennifer Aniston‘s sexual harasser character in ‘Horrible Bosses’).
What had changed was that sexual trespass now had a name, and could be dealt with without the woman always having to quit her post, with no guarantee that the same thing would not happen all over again in her next job.
But naming the behaviour, even legislating against it, didn’t make it go away.
The groping boss remained prevalent, portrayed in films such as 1980′s ‘Nine to Five’, produced by Jane Fonda and based directly on the experiences of her friend Karen Nussbaum.
This groping boss continued all the way to the White House in the 1990s.
Despite such fundamental changes at work, the ‘Wall Street Journal‘ ran a piece in 1981 noting employers’ concerns that a woman was “partly responsible” for her own harassment due to her “provocative dress or demeanour”.
And women who had successfully scaled the corporate ladder were still vulnerable to insinuation that they had slept their way to the top.
These days, we have something called ‘sexual enticement’, which is when a woman harnesses her sexual power in the workplace in order to further herself professionally.
This is not quite the same as sexual harassment, but assumes that “men still filter their logic through their libido”.
Both enticement and harassment, argues Berebitsky, are essentially an abuse of power, although enticing someone does sound rather less unpleasant than harassing them.
However, human nature remains at its core unchanged, even if we have better laws now to moderate its worst excesses.
In 1997, a jury in North Carolina awarded a woman $1m when her husband ran off with his secretary. Alienation of affection, secretary as homewrecker — the same old story.
The main difference these days is that women are just as likely as their male counterparts to have affairs at work, rather than remain passive victims of bad behaviour.
Other than that, men and women remain eternally men and women.
- Suzanne Harrington
Originally published in
Article source: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/sexism-in-the-city-has-anything-changed-3112222.html
