The making of the Kelly Girl: Gender and the origins of the temp industry in Postwar America

Journal of Historical Sociology

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 1-29

  Hatton, Erin ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 42149163427     PISSN: 09521909     EISSN: 14676443     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6443.2008.00328.x     Document Type: Article

References (144)

1. Erin Hatton, "The Temp Industiy and the Transformation of Work in America" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2007).
2. Samuel Sacco, "Temporary Help/Staffing Services: Still Growing, Still Evolving," Managing Office Technology 39, no. 5 (May 1994): A2.
3. Janice Castro, "Disposable Workers," Time, 29 March 1993, 46.
4. Hatton, "The Temp Industry."
5. Kathleen Barry, Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 3;
6. see also: William Henry Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).
7. For more on the early growth of the industiy, see: Hatton, "The Temp Industiy."
8. Barry, Femininity in Flight, 51.
9. For instance, see: Peter Drucker, "They're Not Employees, They're People," Harvard Business Review (February 2002): 5.
10. Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880-1930 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
11. Leah Vosko, Temporary Work: The Gendered Rise of a Precarious Employment Relationship (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).
12. Vosko, Temporary Work, 56.
13. Peck Reinventing Free Labor, 229;
14. see also: Mack Moore, "The Role of Temporary Help Services in the Clerical Labor Market" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1963);
15. Florida Industrial Commission v. Manpower, Inc. of Miami, 91 So. 2d 197 (Fla. 1956).
16. Henry Guzda, "The U.S. Employment Service at 50: It Too Had to Wait Its Return," Monthly Labor Review (June 1983): 13.
17. Henry Guzda, The U.S. Employment Service at 50: It Too Had to Wait Its Return, Monthly Labor Review (1983): 13. Ibid.
18. Peck, Reinventing Free Labor, 229.
19. George Gonos, "The Contest Over 'Employer' Status in the Post-War United States: The Case of Temporary Help Firms," Law Society Review 31, no. 1 (1997): 81-110;
20. and, Moore "The Role of Temporary Help Services."
21. Moore, "The Role of Temporary Help Services," 187;
22. George Gonos, "A Sociology of the Temporary Employment Relationship" (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1994).
23. State of Nebraska v. Manpower of Omaha, 161 Neb. 387 (1955).
24. Florida Industrial Commission v. Manpower.
25. George Gonos, "The Interaction Between Market Incentives and Government Actions," in Contingent Work: American Employment Relations in Transition, ed. Kathleen Barker and Kathleen Christensen (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 170-91;
26. Gonos, "The Contest";
27. and, Gonos, "A Sociology of the Temporary Employment Relationship."
28. Florida Industrial Commission v. Manpower.
29. Moore, "The Role of Temporary Help Services," 2-3.
30. Florida Industrtal Commission v. Manpower,
31. see also: Gonos, "The Contest."
32. George Gonos, "Fee-Splitting Revisited: Concealing Surplus Value in the Temporary Employment Relationship," Politics & Society 29, no. 4 (2001): 589;
33. see also: Gonos, "The Interaction";
34. Gonos, "The Contest";
35. and, Gonos, "A Sociology of the Temporary Employment Relationship."
36. Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002).
37. Lichtenstein, State of the Union;
38. Gonos, "The Interaction."
39. Peck, Reinventing Free Labor,
40. see also: Moore, "The Role of Temporary Help Services";
41. and, Vosko, Temporary Work.
42. Moore, "The Role of Temporary Help Services."
43. G.W. Nordman, "Temporary Help Services Industry - Wave of the Future?" (Master's thesis, Rollins College, 1967), 32-3;
44. see also: "Labor-for-rent war," Business Week, 5 November 1966, 160.
45. "Manpower, Inc.," Fortune, November 1956, 280;
46. see also: "Now Manpower Inc. Goes In For Steady Jobs," Business Week, 23 August 1976, 41.
47. "How Temporary Employees Pay Off," Steel, 13 February 1961, 66-7.
48. Barry, Femininity in Flight.
49. William Olsten, "Temporary Personnel Services Gain Recognition Abroad," Administrative Management 28 (August 1967): 58.
50. th century, see: David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Become White (New York: Basic Books, 2005);
51. and, Matthew Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Of course, there is a key parallel between the immigrant workers recruited by padrones in the early twentieth century and the white, middle-class women recruited by temp agencies half a century later. As Leah Vosko has observed, the success of both padrones and temp agencies relied on the assumption that these two groups of workers did not provide for their own social reproduction. Just as immigrant workers' costs were assumed to be borne largely by the sending country, middle-class women were assumed to be only secondary wage earners [Temporary Work).
52. Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
53. The labor force participation rate of white, married women grew 44 percent in the 1950s, more than twice that of women in general (19 percent) (Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
54. For more on cultural pressure on women not to work, see: Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1990).
55. For more on the many exceptions to the "June Cleaver" ideal, see: Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994);
56. Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003);
57. Nancy Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935-1975 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990);
58. and, Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
59. Such as those excluding married and/or pregnant women from employment. For more on some women's ambivalence about working in this era, see: May, Homeward Bound
60. Julia Kirk Blackwelder, Now Hiring: The Feminization of Work in the United States, 1900-1995 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1997);
61. and, Chafe, The American Woman.
62. Blackwelder, Now Hiring;
63. and, Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver.
64. Nan Robertson, "Homemakers Take Jobs to Stave Off Boredom," New York Times, 22 January 1958, p. 20.
65. " 'Respectable Sex Symbol' Builds Solid Image," Printer's Ink, 27 July 1962, 36;
66. see also: "Manpower Inc. Promotes 'White Gloves' Theme," Advertising Age, 9 April 1962, 119.
67. Moore, "The Temporary Help Service Industry";
68. and, Norris Willatt, 'The Business Front: Manpower Abroad," Barron's National Business and Financial Weekly 45, no. 1 (1965): 11.
69. Moore, "The Temporary Help Service Industry."
70. (Emphasis in original.) As quoted in Moore, "The Role of Temporary Help Services," 29.
71. "Manpower, Inc.," The Commercial and Financial Chronicle, 7 December 1961, 2501(5).
72. "Respectable Sex Symbol," 38;
73. "Manpower Inc. Promotes 'White Gloves' Theme," 119.
74. New York Times, 4 November 1962, p. F11.
75. Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 June 1960, p. C6.
76. New York Times, 20 September 1962, p. 44.
77. U.S. News & World Report, 20 May 1963, 88.
78. "Respectable Sex Symbol," 36-7.
79. "Office Pin-Up," Chicago Daily Tribune, 16 July 1961, p. B29.
80. Time Magazine, 4 August 1967, 75.
81. Newsweek, 19 July 1965, 4.
82. "Manpower, Inc., Stresses Brawn," New York Times, 20 September 1962, p. 44.
83. Newsweek, 25 May 1964, 119.
84. Although it is unlikely that Manpower executives produced only two such advertisements in the postwar era, the relative scarcity of this image and "the reliables" moniker, rather than their absolute number, is a good measure of the dominance of the Kelly Girl strategy.
85. Elmer Winter, Your Future as a Temporary Office Worker (New York: Richard Rosen Press, Inc., 1968), 36.
86. Robertson, "Homemakers Take Jobs," 20.
87. Elmer Winter, A Woman's Guide to Earning a Good Living (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), 16.
88. "Extra Money for Extra Work for Extra Women," Good Housekeeping 143 (November 1956): 49-50.
89. Manpower, Inc., Manpower, Inc.: The Inside Story of Temporary Help (Milwaukee, WI: Manpower, Inc., 1957), 14.
90. Elmer Winter, "Money and Part-Time Jobs for Women," McCall's 88 (April 1961): 68-9.
91. "Women At Your Beck and Call," Forbes, 15 July 1967, 44.
92. Barry, Femininity in Flight,
93. and, Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003).
94. New York Times, 2 July 1961, p. W4.
95. Sarah Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (New York: Free Press, 2003);
96. and, Chafe, The American Woman.
97. Moore, "The Role of Temporary Help Services," 96-8.
98. Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 June 1960, p. C6.
99. U.S. News & World Report, 16 December 1963, 104.
100. Newsweek, 18 May 1964, p. 11.
101. This advertisement was part of a S1,500,000 campaign that promoted the "special training" of Manpower's "White Glove Girls." Advertisements such as this one appeared in more than 12,000,000 direct mailings to business owners, as well as in local newspapers and popular magazines [Advertising Age 35 (16 March 1964): 2).
102. Personnel Journal (December 1964):
103. inside front cover. These highly publicized manuals included: "An Introduction to Manpower & Temporary Office Work";
104. "Adapting Quickly to New Office Routine & Advanced Telephone Technique";
105. "Tips & Shortcuts in Typing, Dictation, Filing & Office Procedure";
106. and "The White Glove Girls Book of Beauty, Wardrobe & Personal Grooming" (Manpower Brochure, Personnel Journal (July-August 1964): 37).
107. The latter, for example, much like the guides for flight attendants described in Barry's Femininity in Flight, offered many "beauty tips" for temporary workers that would be considered highly inappropriate by today's standards.
108. For an exhaustive list, see: Elmer Winter, How to be an Effective Secretary (New York: Pocket Books, 1965), 46-58.
109. (Emphasis in original.) Personnel Journal 43 (1964): 439.
110. Winter, A Woman's Guide.
111. Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap.
112. Barry, Femininity In Flight;
113. Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982);
114. Blackwelder, Now Hiring;
115. Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap;
116. and, Susan Rimby Leighow, Nurses' Questions/Women's Questions: The Impact of the Demographic Revolution and Feminism on United States Working Women, 1946-1986 (New York: Peter Lang, 1996).
117. Susan Rimby Leighow, "An 'Obligation to Participate': Married Nurses' Labor Force Participation in the 1950s," in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 37-56.
118. "Renting Workers to Industry," Fortune, September 1960, 254.
119. (Emphasis in original.) Chicago Tribune, 19 August 1965, p. A12.
120. Winter, A Woman's Guide. For the quotes: "you are no longer merely the daughter," see p. 22;
121. "at the supper table," see p. 19-20;
122. and, "if both wife and husband arrive home," see p. 90-1.
123. Winter, A Woman's Guide. For the quotes: "it takes a most unusual woman," see p. 19-20;
124. and, "why is it that every women with a job," see p. 12-3.
125. William Russell Kelly and Richard Kelly, Work Smartly (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1963), 10.
126. David Herzberg, Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming 2008).
127. Joanne Meyerowitz, "Beyond the Feminine Mystique," in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender In Postwar America, 1945-1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 242.
128. Winter, A Woman's Guide, 58-9.
129. Kelly and Kelly, Work Smartly, 79.
130. May, Homeward Bound;
131. see also: Blackwelder, Now Hiring;
132. Chafe, The American Woman;
133. and, Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
134. In response to these early 1960s survey findings, Manpower leaders launched a "full-scale recruiting program" - with advertisements in newspapers, radio, television, and even on the sides of buses - to convince housewives that the "two careers can be combined successfully" ("Coupon Ads Lure Women Back to Jobs," Editor & Publisher, 15 October 1966, 20).
135. May, Homeward Bound For the quotes: "I gave up," see p.86;
136. "I'm not the 'career girl' type," see p. 29;
137. and, "marriage is my career," see p. 31.
138. W. Keith, "Married Women, You're Fools to Take a Job," Chatelaine, January 1960, 148,
139. quoted in Vosko, Temporary Work, 103-4.
140. Chicago Tribune, 2 September 1965, p. B3.
141. New York Times, 12 May 1965, p. 86.
142. (Emphasis in original.) Moore, "The Role of Temporary Help Services," 158-9.
143. Hatton, "The Temp Industry."
144. Timothy Brogan, Scaling New Heights: ASA's Annual Analysis of the Staffing Industry (Alexandria, VA: American Staffing Association, 2001).