An "Unpaid-for Education": A Feminist Labor Organizer in Boston Publishing

Abstract

Following the tradition of the nineteenth-century British women travelers who abandoned Victorian England to seek lives of adventure in distant foreign lands, I entered the business world to escape family expectations and to mix it up with alien cultures. I went to work to earn a living and to demonstrate that I was capable of handling myself in the male world of public action. I did not know any businessmen and had no idea what business was about. My culture and my family had prepared me only for the unpaid professions of wife and mother. My formal education had not taken into account the role of paid employee as essential to a woman's life. My upbringing had conveyed to me no awareness that a life in the public sphere would be important to my spirit. No woman in my family before me had ever been her own sole means of support. Publishing's world of ideas offered a sphere of influence where I believed I could negotiate on the strength of my brain. I considered being female irrelevant to success in the world of action. If you need a good idea, surely it does not matter where or from whom you get it. I hurried off to work aged eighteen, idealistic and naive, a true child of the 1960s. Youth and keenness and energy and brains were the tools I carried to help reshape a society in the throes of foreign and domestic war. I could barely type 29 words a minute. When I entered it two decades ago, four years after the Civil Rights Act was passed on the heels of the people's historic Washington March for Freedom and Jobs, Boston general-book publishing existed in something recognizable today only as the setting for a PBS-TV Masterpiece Theater series. New young women were hired as typists, whether or not they had, as I did, professional experience. Publishers' personnel policies forbade women to go bare legged or to wear open-toed shoes in summer, because, as one memorandum writer put it, females' bare, wiggling toes caused male colleagues to lose their powers of concentration. Women were not to wear pants to the office because pants outlined their rear ends. Women employees were to use back stairwells, leaving front stairs for men employees. One black woman was jovially referred to around her office as little, brown girl, pun intended. Men's names were listed in an in-house directory in upper case, women's in lower case. In one company the men's rooms featured linen hand towels, the women's paper. Where I worked, air-conditioning was unknown except to one or two men in executive offices. On ninety-degree days, when erasable type disappeared off manuscript pages and printed on the pads of our sweaty palms, we telephoned downstairs to announce the outside and inside temperatures, tactfully inviting managers' suggestion that we be dismissed for