Working women tell their story

By Manuela Saragosa
BBC World Service business reporter

Women entered the office 140 years ago

In 1913, a special committee of the British government had to consider the following written minutes of evidence on post office employees:

"I do think it would be rather awkward to have men and women working together shoulder to shoulder in the same department.

"If we think of employing women we always think "is there a room where we can put them all by themselves?"

Fifty odd years before that statement was written, British women had been teachers, housekeepers and seamstresses - occupations that kept them safely in the domestic sphere.

So what brought them into the office for the first time? And how did men feel about it?

There was a lot of anxiety about sex in the office, basically Antonia Byatt, London Metropolitan University

An exhibition at The Women's Library at London Metropolitan University, charting 140 years of British women in the workplace, provides some answers.

Women at work

The exhibition shows that women first began to join the workforce in large numbers in about 1860.

According to Antonia Byatt, director of the Women's Library, it was about this time that big employers such as the Post Office began actively to recruit female workers.

"It's the late 19th century and offices are beginning to burgeon - the industrial revolution is well on its way - and they need more people to work in banks, post offices, and telecommunications," she told the BBC's World Business Report.

Hiring women was seen as a revolutionary step, and the transition to a mixed gender workforce did not always run smoothly.

To begin with, acceptance of women in the workplace was grudging, and they were expected to retreat back into the domestic sphere as soon as they got married.

The exhibition includes a letter from a female employee to her boss which begins "I beg to inform you that I wish to get married," and goes on to ask whether her husband can take over her job after their wedding.

Typing skills

When women first began to join the workforce, most employers were determined to keep them away from tough physical labour.

Early women workers were segregated

Women were encouraged to take up clerical and administrative roles instead, and these quickly came to be seen as female occupations.

A manual for a Remington typewriter, dating from 1888, is among the exhibits at the Women's Library.

It states that using the typewriter involves no more work than playing the piano, explicitly promoting it as a woman's tool.

"Comparing typewriting with playing the piano makes it seem not really that outrageous to go out and do it, a bit like sitting in your drawing room at home," says Antonia Byatt.

Of course, the entry of large numbers of women into the workplace threw up some practical challenges, especially as the moral climate of the day dictated that male and female workers had to be segregated.

Tension

"The attitude was, if we have to have women, let's not see them or rub shoulders with them. There was a lot of anxiety about sex in the office, basically," says Ms Byatt.

As the exhibition makes clear, this fundamental anxiety continued to cause convulsions even long after strict gender segregation in the workplace had been abandoned.

Female dress codes: 'Mimicking' male power

In the late 1960s, when open-plan offices were introduced, working women became the subject of a fresh bout of soul-searching.

This time, the dominant fear was that men working shoulder to shoulder with women might be tempted to take advantage of their hapless female colleagues.

The exhibition includes a magazine article from the period with the headline: "Would you let your daughter work in an open-plan office?"

Other articles from the era reveal that many men were worried that female colleagues wearing miniskirts - then the height of fashion - would distract them from their work.

Fortunately, furniture manufacturers came to the rescue with so-called modesty boards - side panels fitted to the side of the office desk.

Respectable

Ms Byatt says many visitors to the library are surprised that a debate which took place as recently as the 1960s was so Victorian in tone.

"Young women nowadays are absolutely dumbfounded that some of this happened not particularly long ago," she says.

Of course, much of the discussion about women in the workplace has focused on what they should wear to the office. The exhibition shows - perhaps unsurprisingly - that conservative fashions have tended to dominate.

A copy of the Lloyds bank staff magazine dating from 1920 recommends that female employees wear Victorian styles of dress, completely out of step with the fashions of the day.

And even the 1980s trend for female 'power dressing' - a style associated with female corporate success - is revealed to be deeply traditional at heart.

Ms Byatt picks up a contemporary issue of Vogue magazine featuring a picture of a woman with bouffant hair wearing a shoulder-padded suit.

"She's got a very high-necked white blouse which is very similar to the Victorian blouse that women office workers were meant to wear," she says.

"And then of course the suit resembles the very plain dark clothes that men wore to work - it's mimicking male power, really."