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Provided by the Author(S) and University College Dublin Library in Accordance with Publisher Policies Provided by the author(s) and University College Dublin Library in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite the published version when available. Title "Deficient in love-interest": The Sexual Politics of the Office in Canadian Fiction Authors(s) Galletly, Sarah Publication date 2012 Publication information Perspectivas Colombo-Canadienses, 3 : 91-107 Publisher Universidad del Rosario Link to online version https://revistas.urosario.edu.co/index.php/perspectiva/article/view/2167 Item record/more information http://hdl.handle.net/10197/11011 Downloaded 2021-09-26T18:18:12Z The UCD community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters! (@ucd_oa) © Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. “Deficient in love-interest”: the sexual politics of the office in Canadian fiction (1890-1920) Sarah Galletly* University of Strathclyde [email protected] Fecha de recibido: 18 de marzo 2011 Fecha de aprobación: el 28 de febrero 2012. Para citar este artículo: Galletly, S. (2012). “Deficient in love-interest“: the sexual politics of the office in Canadian fiction. Perspectivas Colombo-Canadienses No. 3, pp. 91-107. Abstract working-girl literature of this era support Using the concerns of the period over and endorse the image of the indepen- female workers’ susceptibility to office ro- dent, hard-working, emotionally fulfilled mance and sexual harassment as a starting working woman? Or was women’s clerical point, this article will explore the depiction labour instead seen merely as another step of secretaries and stenographers in Grant in their ‘natural’ evolution from girls to Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897) and mothers? This article will also uncover Bertrand Sinclair’s North of Fifty-Three whether the fictional office was presented (1914). It will examine the pressure to as a site of potential female growth and gain economic independence and personal autonomy, or as a hostile and dangerous autonomy through office work, alongside space where women should escape from as the need to conform to cultural ideologies, soon as possible for the safety of the home. which still argue for women’s destiny to be Key words: sexual politics, officer, Ca- centred on marriage and children. Did the nada, fiction * PhD candidate, University of Strathclyde, Scotland. Perspectivas Colombo-Canadienses • Vol. 3, 2010 (91-110) ISSN: 2011-6888-ISSNe: 2145-4523 91 Sarah Galletly Deficient in love-interest’: Palabras clave: políticas sexuales, ofi- the sexual politics of the cin, Canadá, narrativa. office in canadian fiction (1890-1920) Introduction Women’s work in the public sphere was Resumen frequently criticised at the turn of the Con base en las preocupaciones de la épo- twentieth century for the manner in which ca sobre la susceptibilidad al romance y such work allowed women’s bodies to enter acoso sexual de la trabajadora de oficina, the public sphere, thus leaving them open este artículo propone explorar la represen- to sexual advances from male employers tación de secretarias y taquígrafas en The or co-workers. Laura Hapke outlines the Type-Writer Girl (1897), de Grant Allan, common beliefs of the period about fema- y en North of Fifty-Three (1914), de Ber- le workers: “By rejecting the protection of trand Sinclair. Se mirará la presión para the home they were exposing themselves adquirir la independencia económica y to advances from co-workers and emplo- autonomía personal a través del trabajo yers; though their chastity was deemed en oficina. También, la necesidad de ajus- superior to men’s, their inferior powers tarse a ideologías presentes en la sociedad, of judgement would thus place them at que abogaban un destino predeterminado constant risk”.1 de matrimonio e hijos para la mujer. Se Through an exploration of Grant pregunta si el género de literatura working- Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897) and girl de esos tiempos abogaba la imagen Bertrand Sinclair’s North of Fifty-Three de la mujer independiente, trabajadora y (1914), this article will engage with this de- emocionalmente realizada, o si el trabajo bate and highlight two tropes of Canadian de oficina era interpretado como un paso fiction in this period: the office romance natural hacia una evolución de niñas a and the predatory employer. It aims to de- madres. Este artículo también cuestiona termine the extent to which this potential si la oficina ficcional fue presentada como sexual threat is portrayed in these novels una ubicación de autonomía y potencial or whether, conversely, the fictional office femeninos, o si fue vista como un espacio acts as a site of employer/employee ro- hostil y peligroso del que debería escapar mance that ultimately removes the female lo más pronto posible para mantener la worker from the public sphere and safely seguridad del hogar. reinstalls her at home. By situating these 1 Laura Hapke, Tales of the Working Girl: Wage-Earning Women in American Literature, 1890-1925 (New York: Twayne, Publishers, 1992), 9. 92 Perspectivas Colombo-Canadienses • Vol. 3, 2010 (91-110) ISSN: 2011-6888-ISSNe: 2145-4523 "Deficient in love-interest" novels within the larger context of contem- jobs as secretaries and stenographers rather porary debates about the conflict between than blue-collar jobs as factory workers or women’s domestic and professional roles, seamstresses. This was likely due to the fact this article will examine the pressures to that female clerical wages were relatively gain economic independence and personal high by female worker standards in this autonomy through office work, alongside period. Indeed, Lowe claims that by 1911, the need to conform to cultural ideologies 85 % of all stenography and typing jobs which still argued for women’s destiny to be were occupied by women.4 However, it is centred on marriage and children. also important to remember that these wo- Many historians and sociologists have men only earned 53 % of the average male focused on the apparent "feminisation" of clerical salary in 1901; tellingly, female the clerical sector at the turn of the twen- clerical workers were still only earning 58 tieth century. However, as Graham Lowe % of male salaries by 1971.5 makes clear in his study of the Canadian One of the reasons female clerical wor- administrative revolution, “Strictly spea- kers earned significantly lower wages than king, stenography and typing jobs were their male counterparts was because wo- not feminised; almost from their inception men were deliberately ghettoised into the they were defined as women’s work”.2 lowest ranking jobs, which fulfilled the The clerical sector was one of the fas- most repetitive and mechanical tasks. Ro- test growing female professions at the turn les such as type-writer and stenographer of century, expanding from 4,710 female were centred on the ability to continually clerical workers to 12,660, between 1891 copy and take dictation efficiently, without and 1901, and from 33,723 to 90,577, bet- necessarily understanding or engaging ween 1911 and 1921.3 Although this was with the intellectual content of the work. a period of mass immigration to Canada, Female clerical workers rarely had op- which led to a boom in population size, portunities to be promoted. Due to the the sheer increase in numbers over this assumption that most women would only period emphasises not only that more work for a few years before leaving their women were entering the workforce, but jobs to settle down and start a family, it was that they were actively seeking white-collar not deemed worthwhile to train women to 2 Graham S. Lowe, Women in the Administrative Revolution: The feminization of Clerical Work (Oxford: Polity Press, 1987), 74. 3 Ibid., 49. 4 Ibid., 53. 5 Ibid, 146. Perspectivas Colombo-Canadienses • Vol. 3, 2010 (91-110) ISSN: 2011-6888-ISSNe: 2145-4523 93 Sarah Galletly carry out the more senior and better paid agent Jack Barrow, intending to give up her supervisory and managerial office roles. stenography job and spend her days “[...] These suited employers could count on a mak[ing] the home nest cozy”.8 Here, Hazel continual, cheap turnover of female em- would appear to be internalising cultural ployees who would require limited training expectations about women’s ‘proper’ place and pay to carry out the least desirable being at home. In her study of American office roles before leaving to marry. As office culture at the turn of the twentieth Meta Zimmeck explains, “[...] providing century, Sharon Hartman Strom claims: work suitable for surplus women was not “[...] working in an office usually meant the same thing as opening the door to all cleaner, safer, steadier work, and a middle- forms of work to all women —that is to say, class environment appropriate for native- equal opportunity”.6 born status”.9 This would seem to suggest This practice of limited advancement that despite the limited opportunities for is illustrated in Bertrand Sinclair’s North advancement and low wages, secretarial of Fifty-Three (1914); the narrator informs work nevertheless provided a safe working us that the heroine Hazel Weir’s work “[...] environment and gave the worker a certain consisted largely of dictation from the ship- status not available to them in blue-collar ping manager, letters relating to outgoing occupations. consignments of implements. She was ra- One of the reasons why the figure of pid and efficient, and, having reached the the female secretary became so prominent zenith of salary paid for such work, she at the turn of the century was due to the expected to continue in the same routine general consensus that women’s bodies until she left Harrington & Bush for good”.7 were ideally suited to typewriting. As John However, it is important to note that Harrison argues in his 1888 typewriting Hazel herself feels no sense of injustice manual, the typewriter “[...] is especially in her lack of upward job mobility.
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