In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

4 After Hours: How the Clerical Workforce Entertained Itself When the workday ended, clerks, bookkeepers, stenographers, secretaries , and salespeople found a multitude of ways to amuse themselves in the City of Brotherly Love. The leisure experiences of clerical employees were in many ways as important to their history as their work was. Prior to the 1890s the men who dominated Philadelphia’s offices and stores devoted most of their free time to same-sex activities, such as fraternalism. But new forms of entertainment began to emerge with the new century. A broadly based commodification of leisure began to transform the ways that urban Americans played. New business ventures emerged to entertain people. The turn of the century was the heyday of the amusement park and vaudeville theaters.Various types of motion-picture venues arose in this period as well. All these entertainment outlets formed major components of the budding commercialized leisure economy (or entertainment economy) that catered largely to white-collar workers. This chapter illustrates the participation of clerical workers in this leisure economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and builds on the work of scholars such as Kathy Peiss and David Nasaw.1 Doing so ties lower-level white-collar workers, a social group of rising significance in the industrial order, to the development of modern leisure patterns. Nasaw has pointed out that white-collar workers at the turn of the century “were the critical element in the construction of the new commercialized ‘night life.’” Significantly, “their work was increasingly regimented,concentrated,and tedious,creating a need for recreation.”2 Particularly after 1890 office and sales employees participated in a complex world of entertainment influenced by a variety of important factors. Youth played a big role in the clerical workforce’s recreation. The office workforce 80 city of clerks was young, and the new world of commercialized play was geared toward young people.Youthful,white Philadelphians flocked to sites such as Willow Grove Park (an amusement park) or B. F. Keith’s Eleventh and Chestnut Theater (a vaudeville house). Sport also appealed to youth and vigor. Gender combined with youth to shape key aspects of the clerical workforce ’s leisure pursuits.This somewhat replicated their workplace experiences in two important respects. First, while the office and selling floor feminized, the new leisure economy provided unprecedented mixed-gender venues for clerks and salespeople at play. The rise of commercial entertainment helped undermine theVictorian notion of separate spheres regarding gender.3 Male and female office workers began to spend more of their spare time with members of the opposite sex. Like New York’s Coney Island, Philadelphia’s Willow Grove Park and the amusements at Atlantic City catered to a whitecollar crowd including both men and women. But there was more to these leisure activities than just an intermingling of the sexes. Second, much as women and men faced different gender-based expectations at work, clerks played according to gender-based mores. This especially applied to athletics . Indeed, a great deal of office and sales workers’ leisure seems to have depended on their sex. Even as their urban environment was providing them new ways to play at the turn of the century, clerks and salespeople were enjoying increasing time off from work. Their employers offered them regular vacations, and they often had their evenings and their weekends free. Unlike typical bluecollar workers, they possessed the time to participate in the new entertainment economy. In addition, the clerical workforce enjoyed a fair amount of spending money.At the low end of the white-collar pay scale,the earnings of saleswomen might have been paltry when compared to the wages of skilled male workers, but many lived with their families and paid no rent. Some of their pay could be devoted to other things, and inexpensive leisure outlets abounded. Vaudeville houses, for example, charged between ten and thirty cents a ticket.4 With respect to leisure activities, clerical workers acted as both consumers and producers. At one extreme, clerks and salespeople participated in highly commodified, public activities that required little creative effort and organization on their part. Vaudeville impresarios, movie-house operators, motion-picture stars, professional athletes, and amusement-park owners and employees were all part of the human apparatus that concocted these amusements.In the most commercialized forms of leisure,clerks participated only as spectators who purchased admission to spectacles that drew droves of other urbanites. Still, as...

Share