Woman As Machine: Representation of Secretaries in Interwar Magazines

Between 1870 and 1930, the number of female typists and stenographers in the United States grew from fewer than ten to more than 750,000.1 In increasingly complex, newly mechanized offices, women found that their chances for upward mobility were far fewer than they had been for the male scriveners who preceded them. Office work became unmistakably feminized. "Woman's place," historian Margery Davies wrote, was as naturally at the typewriter as it was at the kitchen sink.2

Women's workplace presence grew more prominent during the 1920s because of postwar business expansion and changing social attitudes. During the Depression, controversy arose over women working while men were unemployed. The magazine industry flourished in the decades between World War I and World War II, with the average family reading about seventy issues per year in the early 1940s, up from just under twelve issues yearly in 1919.3 Yet how to portray employed women, particularly secretaries, posed a problem for editors and advertisers who had long prescribed proper feminine behavior and for advertisers who used social tableaux to sell their products.4 Idealized femininity was increasingly bound to women's role as consumer.5 As Carolyn Kitch contended, many present-day media stereotypes of women emerged in early twentieth-century magazines.6

As the economy expanded in the 1920s, President Calvin Coolidge told the American Society of Newspaper Editors that "the chief business of the American people is business."7 Women had won the vote in 1920 and were using their postwar social freedom to take more jobs. Co...

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