Beyond the Typewriter or Working Girls

Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930

Author: Sharon H Hartman Strom

By World War I, managers wanted young women with some high school education for new "light manufacturing" jobs in the office. Women could be paid significantly less than men with equivalent educations and the "marriage bar"--the practice of not hiring or retaining married women--ensured that most of them would leave the workplace before the issue of higher salaries arose. Encouraged by free training gained in high schools and by working conditions better than those available in factories, young working-class women sought out office jobs. Facing sexual discrimination in most of the professions and higher-level office jobs, middle-class women often found themselves "falling into" clerical positions. Sharon Hartman Strom details office working conditions and practices, drawing upon archival and anecdotal data. She analyzes women office-workers' ambitions and explores how the influences of scientific management, personnel management, and secondary vocational education affected office workplaces and hierarchies. Strom illustrates how businessmen manipulated concepts of scientific management to maintain male dominance and professional status and to confine women to supportive positions. She finds that women's responses to the reorganized workplace were varied; although they were able to advance professionally in only limited ways, they used their jobs as a means of pursuing friendships, education, and independence.

Interesting textbook: Ulcer Free or Self Harm Behavior and Eating Disorders

Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema

Author: Yvonne Tasker

Working Girls investigates the thematic concerns of contemporary Hollywood cinema, and its ambivalent articulation of women as both active, and defined by sexual performance, asking whether new Hollywood cinema has responded to feminism and contemporary sexual identities. Whether analyzing the rise of films centered around female friendships, or the entrance of pop stars such as Whitney Houston and Madonna into film, Working Girls is an authoritative investigation of the presence of women both as film makers and actors in contemporary mainstream cinema.

Booknews

Tasker (film and cultural studies, U. of Sunderland) investigates contemporary cinema's complex relationship with gender and sexual identities in the wake of feminism, and explores four versions of the working woman common in Hollywood films--spunky heroines of action movies, female police and FBI agents, the singer as movie star, and sharp-shooting cowgirls of the new Westerns. She also discusses the increasing prominence of women as producers and directors. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Table of Contents:

	List of figures
	List of contributors
	Shuffle
	Preface: curvatures in space-time-truth	1
Pt. 1	Embodied knowledge and virtual space
1	Embodied knowledge and virtual space: gender, nature and history	15
2	The digital unconscious	30
3	Physical, psychological and virtual realities	45
Pt. 2	Nature and virtue
4	Nature = x: notes on Spinozist ethics	63
5	Embodying virtue: a buddhist perspective on virtual reality	76
6	Redesigning the present	88
Pt. 3	Embodying truth
7	Hubble telescope: the artist in the eye of the storm	105
8	A more convivial perspective system for artists	109
9	Ancient oaks: a one-act play	122
10	Culture, technology and subjectivity: an 'ethical' analysis	132
Pt. 4	When becoming meets becoming
11	The dream garden: notes on a virtual idyll	149
12	The 'return-beat': 'curved perceptions' in music and dance	157
13	'Peak practices': the production and regulation of ecstatic bodies	168
Pt. 5	Between saying and showing
14	[Sait]	181
15	+ and [actual symbol not reproducible]	196
16	PDF: the digital hostess	206
17	Messages from Sir Arthur and the Rev. Bill	213
	Index