Review of: Angel Kowlek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women In the Corporate Office, 1870-1930, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1994.

Angel Kwolek-Folland’s Engendering Business is an important exploration of the changing nature of gender relations in the United States between 1870 and 1930. It builds upon, contributes to and goes beyond the rich secondary literature in business history (Chandler, Wiebe), labor history (Braverman, Baron), material culture (Ames & Martinez, Upton & Vlauch) studies and women’s studies (Aron, Davies, DeVault, Rotundo, Scott). Part of a new series on gender relations in the American experience published by Johns Hopkins University Press, Kwolek-Folland’s book takes the transformation of the corporate office as the analytical focus. In industries of banking and insurance, the corporate office represented the bureaucracy par excellence: the industry’s office work did not merely support the business operation but occupied the center of the production. Bookkeepers, secretaries, stenographers, cashiers, file clerks, telephone operators, office machine operators, payroll clerks, receptionists, stock clerks, typists, sale clerks and managers ‘produced’ the intangible goods of the service industries. In the sixty years under discussion, the corporate office had become a site where middle-class men and women mingled, but did so through careful negotiations over time, space and job descriptions. By the 1930s clerks had become an icon of womanhood, while managers and salesmen represented the “central male figures of the new gender relations of the business world” (p. 70).

At first, the study seems to be an historical narrative, analyzing the growth of the financial industry’s office as a site of production. Kwolek-Folland closely examines the historical records of U.S. life insurance companies such as Metropolitan Life and other important corporate offices. Upon closer examination, however, the author has organized her book not in chronological order but in a topical manner to tell her almost anthropological story of gender. Instead of chronicling the history of office work from the small family run organization to the corporations, Kwolek-Folland shows how gender constituted the very fabric of the corporate office.

The increased numbers of young women — both ethnically white and African-American — found new employment opportunities in the emerging corporate bureaucracies. As many other scholars have shown before her, these structural changes altered working relations on the office floor in profound manners. Equally important, gender rhetoric smoothed the entry of women into office work and also created new male-defined job categories such as managers, executives and salesmen. Thus, the dynamics of gender did not merely involve women, but also was the business of men.

If the ideal office worker (as someone who could be subservient and selfless) operated as a middle-class male ideal in the precorporate office so long as men could hope for promotion, that ideal would become at once more appropriate for middle-class women and more threatening to men when possibilities for promotion became less a viable option by the early twentieth century.

More profoundly, perhaps, the author argues that gender had an impact far beyond the socialization of men and women and the structure of their work. For example, she shows how corporate America literally incorporated the idea of the family and womanhood in order to domesticate as well as mask the underlying hard-nosed competitiveness of their businesses and the subordination of their workers. The corporations, emphasis on feminine ideals of service and corporate domesticity was both metaphorical and material since “blood ties were present at every level of corporate experience, from executives to the clerical staff”. In particular, the corporate domesticity and kinship were created, expressed and integrated by corporate sponsored leisure activities such as soccer games, wedding showers, outings, and gift giving. Corporate domesticity went beyond the employment of gendered language, however. It took on concrete material forms in the architectural shape of the skyscraper. Within its concrete walls, office spaces echoed nineteenth- century female-coded parlors shaped as a new public domain.

Kwolek-Folland’s very important conclusion is that gendered language and practices shaped the corporate production process by suggesting that corporate work was based on the “natural hierarchies of gender rather than economic imperatives or class status”. It masked class tensions through the rich and elaborate employment of gender images and practices. “Corporate domesticity, with its symbolic images of womanhood and manhood, masked the hierarchical realities and paternalism of corporate organization” (p. 186).

The book marks an important synthesis of previous and emerging scholarship, not the least because its research lives up to and elaborates on the years of theorizing in gender studies. Through painstaking historical scholarship, it demonstrates that the employment of gender is more than a code word for women’s studies to include men, shows the changing varieties of male and female gender scripts in relation to each other, and employs gender a useful category for historical analysis (Scott). If that is not enough, it is through its critical use of footnotes that we learn the true import of the book. In many places, Kwolek-Folland provides alternative interpretations and elaborations of current scholarship. For example, she shows how the ideas of Scientific Management had been practiced within corporations decades before it became articulated as a system of belief in the 1910s; in another place, she takes issue with Chandler and Wiebe’s neglect of the theories of salesmanship in the development of professional management theory; and in a chapter on spatial arrangements of corporate offices, she has different readings of architectural historiography in her interpretation of the commercial buildings such as hotels, apartment buildings and the skyscrapers that insurance companies built for themselves. Insurance buildings built after 1870 did not move away from domestic imagery, but rather negotiated the increasingly fragile boundaries between domestic and commercial spaces by creating public spaces that incorporated the intimacy of the home into its design.

Anyone interested in the rise of the corporations, the history of gender relations and cultural history should include this significant book on the reading list.

Cited Works:

Ames, Kenneth L.; Martinez, Katharine (eds.), The Material Culture of Gender/Gender of Material Culture, New York, W.W. Norton, 1994.

Aron, Cindy S., Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-Class Workers in Victorian America, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1987.

Baron, Ava (ed.) , Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990.

Braverman, Harry, Labor and monopoly capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1974.

Chandler Jr., Alfred D., The Visible Hand: the Managerial Revolution in American Business, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1977.

Davies, Margery W., Woman’s Place is at the Typewriter, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1982.

DeVault, Ileen, Sons and Daughters of Labor: Class and Clerical Work in Turn-of-the-Century Pittsburgh, 1990.

Rotundo, E. Anthony, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era, New York, Basic Books, 1993.

Scott, Joan W., “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”, Journal of American History, 1053-1075, 1986.

Upton, Dell and John Michael Vlach (eds.) Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1986.

Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877-1920, New York, Hill & Wang, 1976.