Publisher's Synopsis
In contemporary Western societies the great majority of office workers are women. But less than a century ago, clerical work was an exclusively male domain. How has this dramatic shift from male to female employment taken place? How are we to understand the origins and development of low-grade, low-paid, dead-end jobs for women in the office?;This book provides an account of the feminization of clerical work. Lowe situates this process within the context of the growth of large-scale organizations in industry and in the public sphere. He shows that the mechanization of rationalization of offices went hand-in-hand with a shift from male to female clerical workers. But the rate at which female employees entered the office, and the specific character of the work they performed, varied from one industry to another and were the outcome of particular strategies, practices and conditions. On the basis of this historical coverage, Lowe addresses a range of more general problems concerning labour markets, the labour process and the complex relations between gender and class.
