Women Office Workers

This chapter traces in broad strokes the connections between technologies and bodies in twentieth-century offices and how women workers were placed by them, leaving for the next chapter how women office workers themselves apprehended these same material conditions. 

The women office workers movement was not by any means antiunion. However, it did feel a need to develop techniques outside of the traditional union drive that would speak to women who, though perhaps not feminists themselves, were living in the context of feminism. To this end, the women office workers movement both drew on the agency feminism had granted women and imported tactics from feminism for... 

Women Office Workers (wow) of New York was founded through consciousness-raising techniques in the summer of 1973 ... 

From its inception, the women office workers movement was critical of the effects of automation and new digital technologies. While desktop computers were not part of the office landscape until the 1980s, many... 

Figure 12. Cartoons from the women office workers movement of the 1970S often commented on the bodily and psychic effects of routin-ized data-processing labor done on early computing terminals. Here, the worker s body is colonized by the machinery of the VDT. FromTepper-man, Sixty Words a Minute. 

Figure 14. Management s disbelief in office hazards was a frequent theme in cartoons from the women office workers movement in the 1970s. In this cartoon from the San Francisco-area group Union wage, workers literally hit management over the head with the reality of health hazards. From Union Wage Newsletter, April/May 1975.

There is still no single disease associated with office work. Instead of finding a shared affliction such as black lung or silicosis, the women office workers movement materialized a nonspecific phenomenon that clashed with juridical, medical, and compensatory institutional demands for proof of linear causality. The women office workers movement was only able to capture the symptomatic expression of workplace conditions by simultaneously leaving the question of their causal root uncertain. Despite this dilemma, the women office workers movement was effictive in rendering perceptible a new kind of occupational health event that workers could, and would, organize around later—sick building syndrome. 

This, however, was not the first time women office workers had heard the call of feminism, or even of labor organizing Feldberg, Union Fever Strom, We re No Kitly Foyles. ... 

The film was used as a vehicle to promote the women office workers movement. Jane Fonda went on a national promotional tour with it. The movie s success went on to spawn a hit single, Dolly Parton s Working 9 to 5, and a short-lived television series in 1982. 

Goldberg, Roberta. Organizing Women Office Workers Dissatisfaction, Consciousness and Action. New York Praeger, 1983. 

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