Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire by Julie Berebitsky (review)

The most significant finding of this history is how little things have changed for women in the office. The way many Americans think about the intersection of sex, gender, and power is, Berebitsky explains, “surprisingly similar” to the way they did 140 years ago (296). To be sure, in a demographic sense, everything has changed. In 1870 there were fewer than two thousand women employed in offices, and today they comprise over half the workforce. Yet Berebitsky argues that women still pose the same sexual challenges to their twenty-first-century colleagues as they did to those in the Gilded Age: Are working women “fair game” for sexual advances? Are they “trustworthy employees or disreputable schemers” (2)? Office jobs may have liberated women from a certain economic dependency, but those jobs seem to have provided the stage on which to amplify female sexualization.

The goal of this book is to historicize our understanding of “unwelcome sexual behaviors in the office, including those that the courts and the public now label sexual harassment,” through the narrative of two intersecting histories (4). In chronologically ordered chapters, Berebitsky narrates stories of “actual women and men in a variety of sexual relations in the office” alongside dominant “cultural narratives” such as those formed and underscored in film, fiction, and public discussion of women in the workplace (20). The majority of Berebitsky’s evidence involving actual men and women comes from newspaper accounts and trial transcripts, since the searching of business archives rarely exposes such critical social history. Through this traversal of the available record, Berebitsky repeatedly finds that “the issues were mostly the same as they had always been,” whether it’s an 1890s stenographer keeping an aggressive boss at bay or Anita Hill combating Clarence Thomas’s soda can suggestions in the 1980s (142). Along the way, Berebitsky records some important legal changes and social curios. For example, she explains the raising of the age of consent in the late nineteenth century as reflective of the growing concern for young working-class women. When the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and other social purity reformers lobbied to make sex with teenage girls a crime, they protected not only a new concept of adolescent innocence but also the possibility of a safer workplace. In reply to anxieties about that very workplace, some groups argued against women participating in such business altogether, like the Anti–Women Stenographers Society, an Ohio women’s group that devoted its efforts to persuading parents to prevent their daughters from entering that profession in the early twentieth century. Meanwhile, contemporaneous to that midwestern activism, the Reverend Geer of Saint Paul’s Church opened an inexpensive lunchroom in downtown Manhattan to save “girls of refinement” from eating lunch at their office, which was an “environment … deleterious to their moral welfare” (45). Berebitsky weaves together such instances, offering a consistent impression of anxiety and advocacy on behalf of, and against the influence of, women in the workplace.

Two heroic figures emerge from this history: Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) and Helen Gurley Brown (1922–2012). Although separated by decades of social difference and cultural etiquette, these two women gained similar advisory influence through speaking frankly in reply to the sexual and interpersonal difficulties of women in the workplace. Both used periodicals as their pulpits and argued for women to pursue their ambitions through determination and focus. While Wilcox counseled women to focus on their work and commit faithfully to the possibility of their self-improvement, Brown “identified the measure of power that could come to women through arousing men’s desires and urged them to use it” (196). For Helen Gurley Brown, there were far fewer problems with sex in the workplace than some bosses and feminists may have you believe. “Managements who think romances lower the work output are right out of their skulls,” Brown observed in 1962. “A...