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"[O]ur ladies know nothing of the sober certainties which relate to money," wrote Frederick Tudor in 1820, reflecting a widespread belief that persisted well into the twentieth century. In fact, women have played an integral role in American business and economic history from the very beginning as workers, entrepreneurs, record keepers, business and property owners, and investors.
This contribution was largely invisible as an economic factor, however, during most of the past three centuries. Women's production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was often subsumed under that of the household or defined as non-economic housework. In addition, women entrepreneurs mainly oversaw small and short-lived concerns, which did not fit into traditional analyses of business and commerce.
It is comparatively recently that scholars in a variety of disciplines have begun to discover and interpret historical materials documenting women's lives. When Harvard Business School's Baker Library acquired the majority of its manuscript collections in the first half of the twentieth century, collection guides and catalog records did not describe materials by and about women. In 1999, Baker Library initiated a survey of the Business Manuscripts Collection to identify materials that would be useful to the study of the historical role of women in business and the economy.
This three-year survey uncovered not only a significant economic record in countless financial and legal documents, it also brought to light unexpectedly rich resources for social and cultural history in a wealth of personal writings. Included are manuscript sources, such as account books, credit reports, payrolls, time books, employee registers, letters, and diaries, as well as advertising ephemera and photographs. All of the materials identified by the survey are described in an innovative, Web-based guide entitled Women, Enterprise & Society: A Guide to Resources in the Business Manuscript Collections at Baker Library.
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| Materials... range from the eighteenth-century accounts of a woman tavern owner from Rhode Island to the nineteenth-century records of a Boston wool merchant. | |
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| — Laura Linard |
Materials representing the participation of women in the barter economy and in an emerging monetary economy range from the eighteenth-century accounts of a woman tavern owner from Rhode Island to the nineteenth-century records of a Boston wool merchant. The Business Manuscripts Collection is especially rich in records documenting the role of women in the nineteenth-century textile industry, including payrolls and employee registers, as well as labor contracts with women, women's investment records, family records, and information about women's labor activism. There are also materials pertaining to early twentieth-century office practices and the development of human resource and company welfare departments.
Researchers will find legal and investment records documenting women's property ownership and financial management during the last 300 years, from a 1774 document signed by a woman waiving her right of dower to the savvy letters of Ella Lyman Cabot challenging her stockbroker's advice in 1933.
A surprisingly large number of records document eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women's personal lives, such as the diaries of a whaling captain's wife from 1859 to 1860. Advertising ephemera, such as trade and business cards, along with photographic materials help shed light on the growing integration of women in American public life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
When Baker Library initiated this survey project, it was unclear whether any materials relevant to understanding women's role in American industry and the economy would be discovered within the manuscript collections. Three years later, we are very pleased to announce that resources from approximately two hundred collections have been identified and described in this new guide. We invite you to visit the site and encourage you to explore it often. Women, Enterprise & Society is a dynamic resource that will grow and evolve as Baker Library continues to acquire new collections and to identify additional resources for inclusion in the guide.
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Evolution of Office Workers
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The office was an exclusively male domain in the nineteenth century, and "clerk" was the entry position for many young men anxious to rise in business and industry. Late nineteenth-century office mechanization and proliferation of paper work effected a complete gender reversal in the office population. By 1930, the vast majority of office workers were women.
As with other industries, mechanization and female labor brought along devaluation—both monetary and cultural—of skilled labor. Office machines became gender-identified. The postcard reproduced above depicts the 14-ton typewriter the Underwood Company exhibited at the Panama-Pacific Exhibition of 1915. Advertised as "An Exact Reproduction of the Machine You Will Eventually Buy," this machine was "writing daily at the Underwood Exhibit." Sixteen neatly dressed businesswomen, bent over their tasks, seem to be using the giant typewriter (1728x its actual size) as their office.
Exclusively female, twentieth-century office work was no longer a stepping stone to higher echelons in the company. Office work had become an end in itself, and would remain so for most of the twentieth century. Women punched cards, filed, added, typed, and made coffee, and the only stamp they put on the millions of reams of paperwork they produced was a slashed reference found at the bottom of most company letters: ER/cl. By the 1970s, under the influence of the women's movement which decried the dead-end "pink collar ghetto," office workers began to demand pay commensurate with skill, and entry into management level positions.
Reprinted from Women, Enterprise & Society: A Guide to Resources in the Business Manuscript Collections at Baker Library.