Gender and the Politics of Office Work: The Netherlands 1860-1940 (review)

Gender and the Politics of Office Work: the Netherlands 1860-1940. By Francisca de Haan (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 1998) 243 pp. $47.50.

In c. 1860, a debate began in the Netherlands concerning the need and appropriateness for women (especially middle-class women) to take clerical jobs. While some people, especially those in the emerging women's movement, strongly supported the idea of female access to office work, other women and many men opposed it. The "struggle for the office" continued to World War II, as evidenced especially in three public discussions that took place between 1860 and 1940 (12).

This book focuses on these debates and on how much the fight against female office workers was tied up with defending the existing gender system. Office work for women in the Netherlands was associated with emancipation and independence; supporting it meant questioning, if not undermining, the fundamental social organization of Dutch society. Since office work provided some of the best opportunities for (middle-class) women in the labor market throughout the pe-riod, it attracted the attention of opponents of women's equality.

Four of the five chapters are based on primary sources, especially many contemporary (Dutch) books, articles, and reports on the role of women and on work, supplemented by an extensive list of international secondary works that includes both historical and sociological analyses. Although primarily historical, this book also uses sociological approaches. For instance, Chapter five is based on a mailed survey, conducted by the author in 1988/89, of women who worked as office clerks between 1910 and 1940. This survey, with a notable response rate of 69 percent, provides a valuable insight into the role and position of women in the office at the time, showing not just that they were treated unequally but also demonstrating that office work gave many women satisfaction and sometimes independence.

The preceding chapters chronicle the history of Dutch attitudes toward female office workers and the changing meaning given to office work by the women's labor movement. Particularly important is the second chapter, which analyzes national clerical unions' attitudes toward office women, and explains how concepts such as unemployment and clerk came to have a gendered meaning. The four main clerical unions--organized under the Dutch system of pillarization ("the social and political segmentation according to political persuasion and religious affiliation") and, hence, divided along clearly identifiable lines of liberalism, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and socialism--were remarkably undivided when it came to their views on women in general and office women in particular (40). None of the unions fought on behalf of female clerks. If these women were mentioned at all, it was usually in the context of concern for men's wages or employment. Despite presenting themselves neutrally as representing "office workers," the unions tended to act on behalf of men because they viewed them as breadwinners; they regarded women as only temporary workers. As the author points out, the pillarization paradigm's association with issues of class and religion in Dutch historical and sociological analyses has obscured the role of gender as "an organizing principle of work, (union) politics and identities," almost to the point of negating it (70).

De Haan sheds light on this struggle for the office, which is important background for understanding the Dutch welfare state after 1945. Her book also provides historians and sociologists with an interesting comparative perspective on the United States, much of it implicit. For instance, although office workers (men and women) in the Netherlands, unlike those in the United States, were unionized clerical work in both countries eventually devolved to women and was treated as inferior employment.

Joyce M. Mastboom
Cleveland State University

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