|
Don't Think from
Womankind (1972)
(Editors Note: Before the women's liberation movement, a clerical job
was one of the few types of work open to women. A CWLU member who worked
as a secretary gives us an inside view of the "pink collar ghetto".)
Three months
ago I got a job as a secretary. The contrast between having a job and
being a secretary is pretty stark. (In my old --job I was pretty much
my own boss. The man I was responsible to exercised some high level
decision making authority, but I handled all the every day work.) In
secretarial work, nothing you do is your own work. Nothing, literally,
has your name on it. And, by extension, you yourself are not supposed
to have any identity apart from the identity which the other persons--your
bosses--have in their work. What’s theirs is yours, and you are
they. The secretary is totally alienated from her labor. Her objective
conditions of labor erase her existence as an ego. The transfer of the
secretary’s loyalty to her boss which union organizers and women’s
liberationists have noticed is a function of this alienation.
A woman
co-worker introduced me to the files: His #1, seven or eight tall cabinets,
half of which contained a library of scholarly articles; His #2, a
similar amount of drawer space; His #3 (actually a Hers), four cabinets;
and mine, one small drawer. For every dozen or so letter copies and
memoranda I get to put away for the gentlemen there is one scrap that
goes into “my” files.
The monthly
budget statement is “my file” and I do a few cursory balancing
operations on it each month. In the old job I managed and balanced 150
accounts which represented the people and reports I dealt with as my
own, real job. I hated those accounts (I hate number work). Over here,
I look forward to that monthly expenditure statement. It’s the
only thing that’s mine.
Day after
day, the secretary types letters to sign with her boss’s name and
send off. Even the most insignificant trivia: “Thank you for sending
me blurf,” “Please send me a reprint of your gezap analysis,” “So nice to see you in Afghanistan, please tell me when you’re
next coming to Chicago”.. .even these “nothing” letters
are composed and presented to her to be typed up. Spiffy. What a groove,
to let your professional colleague in outer Mongolia know how much you
enjoyed his chopped liver--with your secretary’s discreet lc initials
after yours at the bottom of your letter headed formal professional
stationery.
After a
while the secretary may ask if she can’t possibly relieve a little
of the burdens weighing down her boss, whose time is valuable, with
the eager service of composing as well as typing and signing his nothing
letters for him. There are (so far observed) two possible reactions
to this blushing request. (1) “Gee, do you think you could? My
old secretary couldn’t handle that.” (2) “I think I’d
rather not. There are always things I’d like to say that you wouldn't
know and don't need to know to do your job.":
#1 translation:
dumb broad
#2 translation:you’re threatening my masculinity.
Take
#2
To
do what job? The basic contradiction, once we get past the sledge hammer
variety of chauvinism which assumes the dame can’t invent a coherent
sentence, is the contradiction between the secretary’s having no
independent job identity and the boss’s refusing to give up any
more of his work identity to her, lie has to remain superordinate to
her. In words of one syllable, your sole job is to do things for him,
but he won’t let you do more for him than he feels you “should.”
The universe
of things the hireling should do for the man varies from boss to boss.
Each secretary must find the bounds of this universe by trial and error.
She knows she has found the bounds when she gets the bad vibes in response
to her request to do more for him.
After one
or two scenes where the had vibes have come down fairly strong, the
secretary begins to get the message; she does as she is told. No more,
no less. Her behavior pattern changes. She stops looking for more things
to do, more information to understand the boss’s specialty. She
stops asking questions. She assumes that when she is told to do something,
the boss is pressing the remote control garage door open button; all
she has to do is open the door. Here again, conflicts emerge. The boss
is not always programming her with all the essential information needed
to open the door. He withholds data, assuming the secretary will petition
him for advice at every stop of even a routine procedure.
Sometime
last month, one of my bosses told me to get So-and-so long distance.
I dial. I get So-and-So’s office. My counterpart, So—and—so’s
secretary, says So—and—so is not in. I say, okay, goodbye.
I go into boss’s room and announce that So—and—so
has left, so sorry. Boss wrinkles eyebrows in characteristic gesture
somewhere between anguish and anger: “Well, I wanted to know
if there was going to be a meeting tonight. Now we’ll have
to call them back."
Translation:
You dodo, you should have asked. I react silently: I should have
asked
— whom, what question, and at what point during the exchange?
You didn’t say you wanted information, you said you wanted
So—and—so.
I am supposed to read your mind? Why am I getting the dodo vibes?
Other
secretaries understand this episode, the boss’s behavior, attitudes,
and my frustration. But they are puzzled. All one has to do is hold
the call and intercom the boss asking what do we do now. That’s
what they do. I react again, verbally: “What horse manure! How
needlessly complicated; what a waste of time and call money!’ Setting
aside the fundamental absurdity of placing the call for the boss, I
try to enlist them to my point, that the boss ought to say what he wants
in the first place. They smile, they no longer experience the keen feeling
of humiliation which the act of going back and forth between the call
and the boss would evoke in me. Humiliation. That’s really what
it’s all about for the non-person, the secretary. Every day in
tiny tiny pieces, a word, a gesture, an incident. One of my bosses tears
out of his room each time he has something he wants of me and he starts
talking at me from a dozen feet away. While I am in the middle of typing,
in the middle of taking a phone message, in the middle of a conversation
with another of my superiors or one of their students. In the middle
—on the simplest level, this behavior is discourteous. There is
a deeper message being put over, also. The secretary has no time or
task that cannot be violated. She is there to jump for the boss, whatever
and whenever he wants. Nothing she is doing is anywhere near equal importance
to what he wishes to ask of her at that very instant. She has no rights.
The Third
boss, a woman, displays none of these attitudes. Although she has said
nothing to indicate she may hold any explicitly liberationist analysis,
it is as if she perceived the drains on the psyche created by the others.
Three days
ago when I woke up I could not keep my balance. I wasn’t exactly
dizzy, but each movement made me feel like I would fall. The condition
persists. The doctor has put me on Phenobarbital. When I walk it feels
as if my head does not move quite the same distance as my body: either
it moves further or it moves less far. My body is telling me that the
contradiction between this job and my self is total. Where I stand
in relation to the bosses is not real; the real me cannot stand there
but must be suppressed into the not—me, the them—arm,
the them-voice, the them—work. My body has gone schizo in advance
of my mind.
There are
three choices. Quit. Talk back to them. Go mad.
|
