NEW JOBS FOR WOMEN
Towards the end of the century, new job opportunities arose in new sectors of employment. These were mainly in the service sector, incorporating whitecollar (or blouse) occupations in insurance companies, in book-keeping and government service, the post office, telegraph and telephone exchanges, in retail sales and, most publicly, in department stores.
There were also some professions opening up for the middle-class woman, notably teaching and nursing. From the outset, most new jobs in services were taken by women — they became ‘feminised'. In France, 40 per cent of workers in banking, insurance and retail were women by 1911. In Germany, the percentage of female employees in the white-collar sector rose from 21 to 30 per cent between 1882 and 1907, and by 1914 up to 80 per cent of retail employees were female, as were 22 per cent of office workers.127 In Britain, similarly, the percentage of civil service employees who were female rose from 13 per cent in 1881 to 27 per cent in 1911. They also constituted over half of telegraph workers and a quarter of commercial clerks. Nursing and teaching were feminised on a far greater scale. In Britain, almost all of the more than 80,000 nurses and midwives were female in 1911, as were almost three- quarters of teachers.128 The vast majority of these employees were young — 68 per cent of British telegraph employees were under 25. This kind of work became especially attractive to young women of the middle classes for whom there had been few respectable opportunities on offer. But the expansion of the tertiary sector did not challenge the traditional gender hierarchy embedded in the labour market. In fact, although there existed the potential to do away with sex-typing, the sexual division of labour was just as pervasive in the offices and stores as in the factories, and for many of the same reasons. Women's supposed ‘natural' skills, male ‘craft' traditions, and the struggle for control of new workplaces and processes, all contributed to a segregated labour force. Men became managers and supervisors, women were recruited to clerking; women became typists and switchboard operators — work that was regarded as light, clean and ideally suited to those nimble fingers. In retail sales, women dominated the sale of light consumer goods on the shopfloor, whilst the managerial positions and jobs as buyers and in travelling sales — jobs with career prospects — were reserved for men. And whilst apprenticeships operated for men in this sector, few women benefited from this form of structured training programme because they were expected to leave when they married. There were some office occupations that did not open up to women until after the First World War, most notably banking and stockbroking, the most prestigious and highly paid white-collar work. In Britain, women's share of employment in the banking sector was pitiful, there being just 476 female bank officials and clerks in 1911, a mere 1.2 per cent, compared with the 20,337 employed in the less prestigious post office.129 In Spain women were barred from competing for civil service posts until 1918. The idea of a female employment career was for the future.How can this sex segregation be explained? In her study of the German postal service, Ursula Nienhaus shows how a sex-specific employment policy which resulted in rigid sex segregation was based upon the traditional notion of male employees as breadwinners and women as mothers and housewives. The expansion of telephone communications, albeit based on male-dominated military technology, saw women flood into the postal service, especially as telephonists. Yet, the old ideas about fit work for women were employed: women were suited to telephony, not only because it required a good speaking voice and nimble fingers (albeit that these fingers regularly received electric shocks) but also because women were cheap and flexible labour.130 In Britain it was said that women were ideal telegraph operators because:
In the first place, they have in an eminent degree the quickness of eye and ear, and the delicacy of touch, which are essential qualifications of a good operator.
In the second place, they take more kindly than men or boys do to sedentary employment, and are more patient during long confinement to one place. In the third place, the wages, which will draw male operators from but an inferior class of the community, will draw female operators from a superior class... They are also less disposed than men to combine for the purpose of extorting higher wages, and this is by no means an unimportant matter.131Male civil servants, it was noted, expected their salary to increase year on year, whether or not their performance had improved. Women, on the other hand, ‘will solve these difficulties for the Department by retiring for the purpose of getting married as soon as they get the chance.' Male employees were protected at the expense of women, receiving insurance and pension benefits as ‘breadwinners', whilst the female workers were never accorded full civil servant status and thus were denied those same benefits. The German female postal workers were treated little better than their factory cousins; they were a reserve army of labour, an army called upon during the First World War when the number of female employees increased more than threefold, but then dispensed with when the postal service rationalised its operations in the postwar years. In the large retail establishments and department stores, similar perceptions of the working woman determined the shop assistant's status and conditions, albeit youth and good looks replacing dexterity as the desirable attributes.
The expansion of the service sector did not, at least in the pre-war years, challenge entrenched industrial notions of skill. In fact women experienced a form of deskilling in these occupations. Whereas the specialist retailers and small offices employed men and women who learned a trade and developed a specific set of skills, the department stores, large offices and typing pools relied upon a larger number of employees who were trained for a specific job rather than a career.
At the same time, jobs in these sectors too became segregated according to gender: men remained associated with heavy goods whereas the sale of cloth, ladies' fashions, lingerie, cosmetics and confectionery became girls' work. The female sales assistant was associated with the goods she sold, she was part of the presentation, her physical attractiveness used to stimulate the purchaser's desire. And, behind the scenes, department stores relied upon hundreds of women in the offices dealing with the mail-order business, and seamstresses whose status and pay was more akin to that of their sweatshop predecessors.132 The Parisian flagship department store, the Bon Marche, was typical in this respect. Its 2500 sales assistants worked long hours for low pay. They were housed in nearby supervised dormitories and ate their meals in communal dining halls where a watch was kept on the girls' social behaviour. Far from being a beacon of modernity, the department store operated along paternalistic lines. Gender hierarchies not only remained but were accentuated in some new employment situations. Moreover, this workforce was mostly new with no history of workplace culture or agitation. Shopworkers and clerks were regarded as docile, far less likely to strike for higher wages than their factory counterparts. Thus their position in the labour market was tenuous and in any case they were not expected to stay. The notorious marriage bar, which permitted a business to terminate a woman's employment, operated everywhere except in France and thus it was impossible for women to combine a white-collar career with family life.Yet it is undeniable that white-collar work was often more attractive to women workers for very good reasons. A job as a shop assistant was often preferable to domestic service or factory work. Retail was often perceived by women themselves as skilled work. The skills of personal service and technical accomplishments such as in the grocery, florist or drapery trades, were transferable and better rewarded than domestic service.
And even a job as a shop assistant in one of the new department stores such as Woolworth's where the pay was better, the work cleaner, the status higher, and women could dress more attractively, was often preferable to factory work. ‘A lot of them at work in the brewery did that,' commented a former bottler in a Scottish factory. We must have thought we were toffs for leaving the brewery and going to work in Woolworth's.'133 Office work similarly had a higher status than many other occupations and, as Simonton argues, ‘For women workers anxious about respectability, strict discipline and sexually segregated employment were positive features.'134 It would be wrong to portray white-collar work as glorified domestic service, notwithstanding the fact that by the turn of the century its workforce was drawn from a similar social group and the similarities in terms of working conditions and employment prospects. At this time, white-collar work was usually a positive choice for women of the working and middle classes.