Never Done

Erin Hill

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813574882
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts & Business

Histories of women in Hollywood usually recount the contributions of female directors, screenwriters, designers, actresses, and other creative personnel whose names loom large in the credits. Yet, from its inception, the American film industry relied on the labor of thousands more women, workers whose vital contributions often went unrecognized.    Never Done introduces generations of women who worked behind the scenes in the film industry—from the employees’ wives who hand-colored the Edison Company’s films frame-by-frame, to the female immigrants who toiled in MGM’s backrooms to produce beautifully beaded and embroidered costumes. Challenging the dismissive characterization of these women as merely menial workers, media historian Erin Hill shows how their labor was essential to the industry and required considerable technical and interpersonal skills. Sketching a history of how Hollywood came to define certain occupations as lower-paid “women’s work, ” or “feminized labor, ” Hill also reveals how enterprising women eventually gained a foothold in more prestigious divisions like casting and publicity.      Poring through rare archives and integrating the firsthand accounts of women employed in the film industry, the book gives a voice to women whose work was indispensable yet largely invisible. As it traces this long history of women in Hollywood, Never Done reveals the persistence of sexist assumptions that, even today, leave women in the media industry underpraised and underpaid.  For more information: http://erinhill.squarespace.com  

1

Paper Trail

Efficiency, Clerical Labor, and Women in the Early Film Industry

Women have only been allowed to encroach on areas that have limited power. We can type up our own lists and make a deal at the same time.

—Jane Jenkins, casting director, 1991

The cultural logic that determined which film production jobs would be assigned to women developed before the advent of moving pictures, during nineteenth-century experiments with the scientific management of production and debates over whether and how to employ the groups of middle-class women that had emerged as a potential new workforce in urban centers. The answer, it turned out, was to sit them down at typewriters as part of a larger strategy to subsidize and control the massive growth of many American businesses after the Civil War. Once it took hold, the notion of women as natural clerical workers became nearly impossible to eradicate. The pattern of clerical feminization that arose across American industries in the nineteenth century would go on to shape and sanction film industry production practices in the twentieth.

Women’s relatively high level of participation in the heterosocial workspaces of early film production began to shift in the late 1910s and early 1920s, with the “efficient” reorganization of studios and attendant sex segregation and feminization practices under which work was separated, classified, and relocated (as such) to accommodate the studios’ aims. According to this logic, the largest feminized labor sector—that of clerical work—emerged as a key component of efficient mass production, facilitating expanded management and cost accounting, reducing labor costs, and absorbing mass film production’s lowest-status, most repetitive, least desirable forms of labor on the basis that they were women’s work. As it had elsewhere, efficiency shift ed the film industry from less formal, more holistic early work systems in which women moved fluidly between different work sectors (presenting a kind of unintended or latent feminism), to a highly structured, rigid organizational model in which management was geographically and conceptually separated from production. Under this logic, women were increasingly identified with neither creative/managerial specialties nor production jobs, but rather with the clerical sector that connected the two (manifesting an overt feminization more in line with the cultural and professional norms of other industries).

Building on Janet Staiger’s seminal work on studio organization, this chapter sketches the geography of the early film industry both before and after the onset of full-blown efficiency by following the paper trail—quite literally, the increase in paper processes at studios as they incorporated scientific management principles—that eventually rationalized the use of large, feminized labor sectors.¹ Once introduced, sex segregation’s gendered geography became embedded in studio culture, both geographically—written into maps and displayed in promotional materials—and ideologically—in the production workflow and hierarchy of studio labor.

Clerical Labor as Women’s Work in the Gilded Age (1850s–1900s): The Pre-mechanized Office and Early Efficiency Practices

Clerical work was so associated with women by the first decades of the twentieth century that female secretarial archetypes such as the long-suffering Girl Friday were already well-established staples of films and novels.² Yet in the work of Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Herman Melville, and other nineteenth-century novelists, the male clerk is a ubiquitous figure while female clerks are almost nonexistent, reflecting the masculinized state of the office through the middle of that century.³ For centuries, male clerks and secretaries had served as record keepers and letter writers for governments and nobility in Europe and the United States. By the 1800s, small businesses such as banks and insurance companies regularly employed male clerks, bookkeepers, messengers, and copyists or scriveners to create and maintain office paperwork. In these pre-mechanized offices, the boundary between clerical and managerial workers was blurry, and, as Margery Davies explains, a single clerk might master “the entire scope of an office’s operations,” learning from an employer as an apprentice studies under a master craftsman.⁴ An employer dictated his clerk’s working conditions as well as his mobility through the business world and, by extension, the class system.

In the wake of the Civil War, businesses expanded from small, competitive firms to larger, more vertically and horizontally integrated corporations with monopolies on major industries such as steel, oil, and meatpacking. To coordinate among geographically dispersed branches of their businesses, growing companies employed new forms of paperwork to track costs, dictate workflow, formalize previously idiosyncratic practices, and enforce more rigid departmentalization and hierarchy. Order was imposed on the chaos of large-scale production through the adoption of the principles of “scientific management of production,” first developed by mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor. Scientific managers studied different workers in order to synthesize their “best practices”—those techniques that evolved over time as most effective—and standardized the steps of their work processes, reorganizing the workplace to minimize waste and maximize profitability. “Efficiency,” the term commonly used to signify these collective practices, swept like a fever through countless areas of American life, from steel mills to government offices to private homes. As Sharon Hartman Strom observes, efficiency practices offered a solution to the problems of industrialization, bridging the gaps “between progressive reformers and railroad tycoons, efficiency experts and production managers, consumers and corporations,” who put their faith in a common language of balance sheets and systematization.⁵

Scientific managers used new systems of paperwork and computation, appropriating knowledge and decisional authority from previously self-governed workers like machinists and handing it over to managers in planning departments who were physically separate from production.⁶ Historian Lisa Fine explains, “Clerical workers do not produce the good demanded” in a manufacturing context, “but they produce an intermediate good that economists call clerical output.”⁷ Efficiency elevated clerical labor in importance as clerical output became a bridge between the “brain” of management planning and the “hands” of production, linking different departments and employees through marching orders without which they could no longer function.⁸

All of this paperwork (and the additional bodies needed to process it) posed its own threat to cost effectiveness, so scientific managers also studied clerical workers’ best practices and then rationalized, standardized, and separated their work processes, redistributing their decisional responsibilities to managers and delegating many other responsibilities to subordinates, each specializing in a narrower share of the work process. New clerical designations included timekeepers, payroll clerks, accountants, billing clerks, ledger clerks, cost clerks, key punch machinists, requisition clerks, shipping and receiving clerks, stenographers, typists, Dictaphone transcribers, and switchboard operators.⁹

Efficient work systems also employed an array of newly invented organizational and labor-saving technologies, from filing cabinets and index cards to stencils, mimeographs, and Dictaphones. The typewriter came into use in the 1870s and, together with stenographs, mechanized the writing process and eliminated the need for a copyist’s handwriting skills. The profession of steno-typist—the entry point for most women in turn-of-the-twentieth-century offices—was not unskilled; it required training in shorthand and typing. Nonetheless, stenography and typing technologies broke down the process of copying documents into multiple, mechanized steps that might be completed more quickly and with less variation between operators. The operator became a conduit through which information passed—unaltered—from sender to receiver, rather than the active, human participant the copyist had been in message creation.

Efficiency’s benefits to management were manifold: unskilled or semiskilled laborers demanded lower wages than skilled workers, had less expectation of promotion beyond the clerical sphere, and were easy to train and thus easy to replace if they quit or were fired. As a result of this change in circumstances, extant male workers left clerical fields in large numbers from the 1880s to 1910s, while young men embarking on careers in business looked elsewhere for the pay, training, and advancement potential they had once enjoyed as clerks. Men who did remain typically did so in positions of higher skill and status, such as manager, accountant, or supervising clerk. Meanwhile, a shift from agrarian to urban life brought young, single women—previously engaged in their families’ small businesses, farms, or homes—to cities.

The Feminization of the Office

According to nineteenth-century Victorian ideals, women’s “natural” sphere was the home, and the only acceptable types of employment for a woman were roles related to the domestic sphere, say, as servants or teachers. However, amid industrialization and urbanization, more working-class women needed work than could be employed in domestic service jobs, and the ranks of literate, educated, middle-class women outgrew available positions in culturally acceptable women’s fields such as teaching and nursing.¹⁰

Debates about women’s fitness for office work were rooted in culturally held assumptions about the essential characteristics of each gender. Many feared that women’s mass entrance into the workplace would threaten the balance of perceived innate skills and qualities that clearly delineated the genders, whereby women occupied the private sphere as the moral, religious, emotional, aesthetic, intuitive complements to rational, logical, ambitious, strong, practical men in the public sphere.¹¹ Counterarguments held that women would improve workplace morals through many of the same essential qualities of their gender. From these debates later emerged the progressive, feminist ideal of the New Woman, a figure who both sought and symbolized new social freedoms for women. Hilary Hallett explains that the concept of the New Woman came to represent changes associated with women’s rapidly increasing participation in work outside the home between 1890 and 1920 as, “for the first time the majority of women, usually those who were white and native-born, experienced work as an endeavor that sent them outside the confines of factories or other women’s homes” to offices and department stores.¹²

Employers in need of cheap, disposable labor submitted arguments in favor of women’s particular suitability for clerical work. Said one, women had the quickness of eye and “delicacy of touch which are essential qualifications of a good operator,” took more kindly to sedentary jobs than men, and were “more patient during long confinement to one place.”¹³ The association of immigrant and working-class women with “light” manufacturing work (textiles and such) was deployed as evidence that women might work in a “precisely similar” capacity in the rationalized office.¹⁴ Soon after its invention, the typewriter began to be marketed specifically to women. Salesmen used female operators to demonstrate the new technology on the basis of women’s skill at playing pianos and operating sewing machines. Women were held to be nimbler and neater than their male counterparts, whose “broad tipped fingers,” an 1880 catalog explained, “do not fit him for a graceful operator.”¹⁵ Catalogs and advertisements dubbing female operators “type-writers,” further conflated women’s bodies with the machines.¹⁶

Women were paid less—as little as half as much—for the same work, a practice rationalized through the cultural assumption that a woman would leave the office once married for her preferred sphere (the home) and that a man should receive a “family wage”—enough to support his family on his salary alone. Many firms also instituted a “marriage bar,” which forced women to retire once they wed, and female workers were typically ineligible for promotion.¹⁷ All of these practices eliminated the threat women posed to male coworkers as well as employers, ensuring that the information they managed would pass harm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Paper Trail: Efficiency, Clerical Labor, and Women in the Early Film Industry
• 2. Studio Tours: Feminized Labor in the Studio System
• 3. The Girl Friday and How She Grew: Female Clerical Workers and the System
• 4 “His Acolyte on the Altar of Cinema”: The Studio Secretary’s Creative Service
• 5. Studio Girls: Women’s Professions in Media Production
• Epilogue: The Legacy of Women’s Work in Contemporary Hollywood
• Appendix: Work Roles Divided by Gender as Represented in Studio Tours Films
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author