Alice Kessler-Harris - In Pursuit of Equity - Worklife and the Prism of Gender - Gender at Work

by Alice Kessler-Harris

Alice Kessler-Harris' new book In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America, continues her original scholarship into the ways women have been denied an equal place with men in the workplace. This excerpt, looking at how one company studied worker productivity issues, reveals gender attitudes toward work in the late 1920s.

Welfare policies blended with the new sensitivity to human relations in the workplace unwittingly generated by more frequent applications of efficiency techniques. On the shop floor, industrial psychologists explored the impact of lighting, rest periods, and sociability on the rates of production and attempted to relieve monotony that reduced output. The largest and perhaps best-known effort to sort out these effects comes from a lengthy series of experiments in human relations conducted at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in the late 1920s. Researchers there noticed the influence of workers' mental attitudes or "reveries," on their levels of production and set out to explore the issue further. Their data, largely the voices of men and women workers, inadvertently reveal how the ideology of work is gendered in particular ways. They suggest how deeply rooted among ordinary white men and women was the conception that women's rights inhered in their family lives rather than in the workplace, how functional this notion was, and how difficult it would be to dismantle.

The Hawthorne works, located in Chicago, manufactured telephone, wiring, and switching equipment for its parent, employing thousands of workers to do a range of relatively routine jobs that required manual dexterity and speed. Dissatisfied with the output of workers and influenced by the human relations movement in industry, personnel managers there began a series of experiments with workers to see what factors influenced productivity rates. The original company experimenters, Donald Chapman, Clarence Stoll, Homer Harbirger, and, later, William J. Dickson, were soon joined by Elton Mayo, Felix J. Roethlisberger, and a team of researchers from the Harvard Business School. Over a six-year period, this group consulted on ways to extend the original exploration, a study of the effect of lighting, to research into the attitudes of workers. Their search began with first one and then another small test room and led finally to an extensive interview program conducted by plant supervisors. I turn to these conversations now to see what they can tell us about gendered attitudes toward work in the late 1920s.

The Relay Assembly Test Room, where the longest-lasting Hawthorne Experiment took place. From the Western Electric Company, Hawthorne Studies Collection, Courtesy of the Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

The first and longest-lasting experiment, the Relay Assembly Test Room (RATR), set up by management in April 1927, consisted of five young women (ages eighteen to twenty-eight) whose repetitive but demanding jobs involved putting together telephone signal switches that would eventually relay calls from one cable to another. Of the five women originally selected, two were replaced about nine months after the experiment started. With the exception of a few months in the fall of 1932, when one worker briefly left, the new team of five "girls" remained together until February 1933, when the company was forced by the depression to abandon all experimentation. This group more or less cooperated with management as their working conditions altered, their output steadily rose, and the economic depression around them deepened.69 Other small groups of workers participated in shorter experiments. One of these, the Bank Wiring Test Room, established in November 1931, consisted of nine men and no women. It lasted barely six months, disbanded after the workers horrified management by regulating their own pace of work and thus restricting their output.

	Their data, largely the voices of men and women workers, inadvertently reveal how the ideology of work is gendered in particular ways.
	— Alice Kessler-Harris

In apparently sharp contrast to the behavior of men, the women, after a short period of adjustment, increased their production dramatically. Management praised the women for cooperating, and their room quickly became a model test. The apparent difference dissolves on examination, however. As Richard Gillespie has pointed out, in both cases men and women were doing what seemed to be in their fundamental self-interest. The women, paid at a relatively high rate according to their group output, understood that increasing their production could only increase their total wages. They had been promised protection against the typical cuts in rates of pay if the quantity of production increased. The men had not only been made no such promise, but they continued to be paid by the piece at the same rate as workers in the larger section to which they belonged. Fearful that the rate for the job would be cut for all workers if they produced too much, and deriving little immediate benefit from putting out more work, they whiled away hours if it suited them. Asked by an interviewer if he was aware that others would be laid off if he produced too much, one worker replied, "That only stands to reason doesn't it?…Suppose the fellows in the test room could increase their output to seven thousand. I think some of them can. That would mean less work for others."70 The structure of the wage provided males with incentives to restrain production; a more collective structure for women, and one that did not threaten their sister workers, encouraged them to enhance theirs. In the end the men whose exercise of power violated managerial conceptions of work, lost their favored places. The women kept theirs.

The researchers, who failed to see women's control over their work, described the men as obstinately resistant to change, while they believed the women were simply immune to it, even "to the experimental changes."71 They attributed the women's continuously high production to many factors, of which the high level of wages was one. Roethlisberger and Dickson's book Management and the Worker, which provides the original and most comprehensive account of the experiments' results, describes the "girls" in this and other test rooms in great detail, recording menstrual periods and in-depth information about their home lives, but pays no particular attention to their wages, though it is clear from the recorded comments of the "girls" that the dramatically higher wages they earned significantly increased both their production and their eagerness to cooperate with the research process.72 In the end, Roethlisberger and Dickson credited the high levels of production to "a network of personal relations . . . which not only satisfied the wishes of its members but also worked in harmony with the aims of management."73 In support of the women's cooperative stance, they cited such factors as their social activities, afternoon tea, and frequent rest periods, overlooking the mechanisms that women used to goad each other to work harder and to spell each other when tired.74 The informal organization of the men, who were described by interviewers as having "a set of practices and beliefs . . . which at many points worked against the economic purposes of the company," clearly threatened management in a way that the women did not.75 Did researchers choose to see men and women workers differently?

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Excerpted with permission from In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America, © 2001 by Alice Kessler-Harris. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

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Alice Kessler-Harris is the author of Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States; Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, Australia, and the United States, 1880-1920; and U.S. History as Women's History.