How new technology transformed the American workforce

In the 1870s, a tiny fraction of the United States population worked in offices, mostly men. Fifty years later, a third of the labor force was made of office workers, half of them women. The transformed workplace featured open-plan designs and rapidly evolving technology. But, even by the 1930s, it was still overwhelmingly white.

A world transformed

The office of Detroit-based manufacturing company Leland & Faulconer is occupied entirely by men: managers, engineers, accountants, and perhaps an errand boy or apprentice. The layout of the room (pictured above) seems more like a hotel lounge than a workspace, equipped with armchairs and handcrafted wooden desks packed with drawers and compartments. Despite its 19th-century look, this office is about to reshape 20th century America. High-precision manufacturers of sewing machines and bicycles, Leland & Faulconer has just started producing the single-cylinder engines of the first Cadillac horseless carriages. As the automobile transforms the American landscape, the American workplace is also about to change beyond recognition.

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New tech, old prejudices

A huge increase in paperwork in the 1890s led to the invention of vertical filing cabinets, seen in this 1905 image of a Washington, D.C., office. The boom in paperwork was generated by various machines developed in the 1880s, which became standard office fixtures in the early 20th century. In the foreground of this photo is a Dictaphone (an early version was patented in 1886) and a Burroughs adding machine (patented in 1888). Gone are the old rolltop desks—and the exclusively male presence. The clerks and shorthand takers here are now nearly all women. Emphasizing the subordinate role of the new influx of female workers, their male supervisors sit at separated tables. The workers in this image, and all the images in this article, appear to be white. A study of office labor conditions in Philadelphia by historian Jerome P. Bjelopera found that virtually no Black workers were employed by white-owned firms in the city in 1912, a situation that was reflected nationwide.

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Like clockwork

Clerks seated at ranks of identical desks dominate this 1915 photograph of a Washington, D.C. office. A male supervisor stands on the left overseeing the work. The workstation arrangement reflects a new office culture that, from 1910, surveilled its workers following the principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Hailed by employers and denounced by union leaders, Taylor’s methods aimed to make offices and factories run like machines. By timing workers with stopwatches, bosses could take measures to save time and increase efficiencies. Nikil Saval’s 2014 book Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace quotes the 1915 diary entry of a worker that says, simply, “Stopwatched today.” The next day, the worker records how his work group was split up, and each member was assigned strict work quotas.

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Women in the workplace

By 1921, when this picture was made, more than 92 percent of typists in the United States were women. E. Remington and Sons, originally a firm of New York gunsmiths, produced the first commercial typewriters in the 1870s. The business case for the typewriter was as appealing as it was exploitative: A good typist easily outpaced clerks writing by hand, and because women were forced to accept lower wages than their male contemporaries, the new low- paying profession of typist was female-dominated. Displacing male clerks, typists transformed both the soundscapes and gender makeup of offices, whose female-staffed typing pools resounded with the interminable clack-clack of typewriters. Although such work offered women an alternative to factory or domestic jobs, it was dull and monotonous. Typist Una Golden is the protagonist in Sinclair Lewis’s 1917 novel The Job, set in the early 1900s: “Lists and letters and items, over and over; sitting at her typewriter till her shoulder-blades ached and she had to shut her eyes to the blur of the keys ... Then the blessed hour of release, the stretching of cramped legs, and the blind creeping to the Subway, the crush in the train, and home.”

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