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The Rise of Corporate Feminism: Women in the American Office, 1960–1990. By Allison Elias. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. 312 pp. Paperback, $35.00. ISBN: 978-0-231-18075-7.
The feminist workplace organization for clericals, 9to5, launched its first industry-based subcommittee, Women in Publishing, in 1973. In this much-needed study of clericals in American corporations from 1960 to 1990, Allison Elias details the publishing subcommittee’s decades-long campaign to open doors to managerial and editorial positions while supporting clerical unions and upward mobility for other female staff. Demonstrating remarkable cross-class unity, Women in Publishing fought for internal job postings, clear job titles, and expanded training opportunities to counter the industry’s male-friendly nepotism and dead-end pink-collar ghetto.
Women in Publishing (WIP) only partly achieved its goals. The group won access to new positions and formal hiring procedures for college-educated women. But narrow interpretations of equal employment law coupled with employer hostility to providing the training that would have created upward pathways within a firm constrained working-class women’s opportunities. Elias argues that WIP exemplifies clerical women's trajectory in corporate America: middle-class, college-educated women gained access to the managerial and executive track while working-class, high-school-educated employees remained trapped in a gender-segregated, internally stratified world of executive assistants, support staff, word processors, and data entry clerks. Corporations focused on widening opportunities for women “underutilized” in traditionally male-dominated positions and refused to address women’s overrepresentation in sex-segregated posts (pp. 103–104). Advocates fell short in performing the job analyses and pay equity audits that could have transformed the status and quality of clerical employment....