Making Clerks and Re-shaping the White-Collar Workforce in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Clerical work in all western industrial countries has expanded and feminised since the nineteenth century. F?minisation is the shift in workforce composition from male to female. In Australia the proportion of clerical workers who were women rose from one per cent to 70 per cent between 1881 and 1981. There has been a steady stream of North American and British studies from 1974 analysing aspects of the white blouse revolution.2 Recently and belatedly, there have been a number of Australian studies.3 Marxism was the most common framework used to analyse women's position in the 1970s, so historians of the mobilisation of female clerks were inspired by the Marxist theory of the reserve army of labour. Marx argued that a pre-requisite for the development of wealth in a capitalist society was an industrial reserve army of labour, or a disposable surplus of workers which capitalists used to push their labour costs down. He identified three forms of the reserve army of labour: floating reservists usually moved in and out of