420 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE In closing, I would reiterate that, although I did not always agree with Carlson’s inferences or conclusions, they were certainly clear enough to recognize and dispute. His principal thematic arguments, presented in the opening and concluding chapters, provide good overviews of some major themes in current historical research. Coupled with a smooth narrative, the strengths of this book make it useful both for researchers and in courses introducing students to the history of modern technology. Robert Rosenberg Dr. Rosenberg is managing editor of the book edition of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison at Rutgers University. Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modem American Office Work, 1900-1930, By Sharon H. Strom. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Pp. xvii+427; illustrations, notes, index. $42.50. In Beyond the Typewriter Sharon H. Strom presents an astute and far-reaching analysis of the interplay between scientific management and the feminization of clerical work in the early 20th century. Strom draws on scholarship by C. Wright Mills, Harry Braverman, and Margery Davies that reveals the application ofscientific management to the office as well as the factory. But her thesis is that the modern office—with its array of new technologies for processing information—was itself indis pensable to the rise of scientific management, economic integration, and new forms of government organization. “Without new office work systems,” she argues, “the application of scientific management to the workplace would have been impossible” (p. 3). Strom’s further contri bution is to illuminate an office hierarchy founded on both the deployment of office machinery and divisions of gender, class, and race. Strom offers both a structural and cultural portrait of the develop ment of the modern office. The first section of the book explores the economic factors prompting the expansion of clerical work, the profes sional impulses guiding the rationalization of the office, and the material and ideological reasons for the increasing recruitment of female clerical workers. The second section explores the social milieu and work culture of female clericals, making creative use of vocational bureau records and periodical literature. Strom’s study challenges several reigning interpretations. She takes issue with labor economists who, in documenting the degradation of women’s wage labor, have tended to lump together all female workers in an undifferentiated mass. She agrees that the feminization of clerical work attended mechanization of the office. But she convincingly establishes that female office workers were segmented into distinct occupational, skill, and wage categories corresponding to differences of class, race, marital status, educational background, and age. Strom also TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Book Reviews 421 disputes the connections that have been drawn between office machin ery and the displacement of male labor by deskilled female labor. She maintains that new office technologies sometimes created new forms of skilled work. And, contrary to Braverman’s findings, she concludes that women “did not take or de-skill men’s jobs so much as they took jobs created by the revolution in new methods of communicating, cost accounting, and record keeping” (p. 212). Yet Strom also differs with Davies’s contention that the new office machines—typewriters, tabula tors, Comptometers—were not initially associated with either men or women. Rather, she argues that the traditional equation of women operatives with repetitive factory work nurtured the “identification of women with mechanized and routinized clerking” (p. 174). Both em ployers and advertisers played on such conventional images in mecha nizing the office. Nonetheless, Strom is not fully consistent in arguing that the process of office mechanization, along with the power of gendered labor images and the supply of cheap female labor, posed little threat to male jobs. She claims that women office workers entered into “newjobs,” though also noting that office managers replaced higher-paid male and female clerks with exclusively female and lower-paid workers. “Managers,” she explains, “believed young women to be more pliant and more capable machine workers than men of any age” (pp. 212, 241). Among the most original aspects of Strom’s study is her superb investigation of the complex gender dimensions of the scientific man agement movement. She writes that business professionals clung to the...