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⁶ Carey, The Rise of the Accounting Profession, 15.

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¹¹ Chandler, The Visible Hand, 109–121. In the section entitled Accounting and Statistical Innovation, Chandler presents a vivid picture of the many accounting innovations developed and implemented by the railroads that were adopted by other large corporations. Many of these innovations dealt with the areas of financial and capital accounting. “Innovations in a third type of accounting—cost accounting—came more slowly” (p. 115).

¹² Edwards, James Don, History of Public Accounting in the United States (University, Ala., 1978), 33.Google Scholar

¹³ Porter, Theodore M., Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, N.J., 1995), 91.Google Scholar For public accountants, Porter writes: “The crucial ingredients here are independence and expertise,” 91. In contrast, to bookkeepers or accountants whose responsibility is to their employer (the company), the public accountant's responsibility is to investors, creditors, and the public.

¹⁴ Miranti, Paul J. Jr, Accountancy Comes of Age: The Development of an American Profession, 1886–1940 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990), 30.Google Scholar

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¹⁷ Wilensky, Harold L., “The Professionalization of Everyone?” The American Journal of Sociology 70 (Sept. 1964): 145–146.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ Larson, Magali Sarfatti, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley, Calif., 1977), 14Google Scholar, writes that “in the formative period (of a profession), most of the markets for professional services had to be created.”

¹⁹ Lockwood, Jeremiah, “Early University Education in Accountancy,” The Accounting Review 13 (June 1938): 135.Google Scholar

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²¹ Carey, The Rise of the Accounting Profession, 38.

²² Miranti, Paul J., “Birth of a Profession,” The CPA Journal 66 (April 1996): 14–20, 72.Google Scholar This article written for the one hundredth anniversary of the passage of the first CPA designation in the United States presents an interesting account of the organizations and politics involved in the passage of the first CPA law in New York. The article also traces the evolution of the American Association of Public Accountants into today's American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

²³ Carey, The Rise of the Accounting Profession, 86.

²⁴ Johnson, H. Thomas and Kaplan, Robert S., Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting (Boston, Mass., 1987), 12.Google Scholar

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²⁸ Davies, Margery W., Woman's Place is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers 1870–1930 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1982), 164.Google Scholar

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³¹ Rotella, Elyce J., “The Transformation of the American Office: Changes in Employment and Technology,” The Journal of Economic History 41 (March 1981): 52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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³³ Green, History and Survey of Accountancy, 182.

³⁴ Fine, Lisa M., The Souk of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870–1930 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1990), 10.Google Scholar

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³⁷ The creation of the modern office included the creation of a hierarchical structure of authority. Davies, Woman's Place is at the Typewriter, 166–67. Prior to the 1870s, offices largely were not marked by stratification, but generally depended upon personal relations between employees and employer. Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper, 10. In one of the first major books on office management, Lee Galloway sets forth the purpose of the office manager, “to keep the employees and machines working harmoniously,” Galloway, Lee, Office Management Its Principles and Practice Covering Organization, Arrangement, and Operation with Special Consideration of the Employment, Training, and Payment of Office Workers (New York, 1919), vii.Google Scholar

³⁸ “Women in Business: II,” Fortune 12 (Aug. 1935): 50.

³⁹ Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, “The Beginnings of ‘Big Business’ in American Industry,” Business History Review 33 (Spring 1959): 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁰ The historical close relationship between the bookkeeper and owner is illustrated in the early history of R. H. Macy and Company. Ralph M. Hower writes: “Also to the rear (of the store) were the cashier's desk and an office occupied bv Macy and a bookkeeper.” Hower, Ralph M., History of Macy's of New York 1858–1919 (Cambridge, Mass., 1946), 43.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Chandler, The Visible Hand, 109.

⁴² Yates, JoAnne, Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore, Md., 1989), 2–3.Google Scholar

⁴³ JoAnne Yates, Control Through Communication, 10.

⁴⁴ DeVault, Sons and Daughters of Labor, 13–14.

⁴⁵ Coyle, Grace L., “Women in the Clerical Occupations,” in The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science Volume CXLIII May, 1929 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1929), 184.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work, 144.

⁴⁷ Strom, Sharon Hartman, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900–1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1992), 174.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Lowe, Graham S., Women in the Administrative Revolution: The Feminization of Clerical Work (Toronto, 1987), 135.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Current, Richard N., The Typewriter and the Men Who Made It (Urbana, Ill., 1954), 19.Google Scholar Although C. Latham Sholes usually is given credit for the invention of the typewriter, the two original 1868 patents for a “type writing machine” were issued in the names of Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel W. Soule, and all three men were involved with the machine's early development. However, after the patents were received, Glidden and Soule withdrew from the enterprise, and it was Sholes (occasionally helped by Glidden) who developed the first practical model, the Sholes and Glidden Type Writer. Another important person in the development of the typewriter was James Densmore who largely financed its development and manufactured the first machines. Current, The Typewriter, 12–65.

⁵⁰ Bliven, Bruce Jr, The Wonderful Writing Machine (New York, 1954), 94.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Shurkin, Joel, Engines of the Mind: A History of the Computer (New York, 1984), 94.Google Scholar

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⁵³ Shurkin, Engines of the Mind, 92.

⁵⁴ Eaton, Jeannette and Stevens, Bertha M., Commercial Work and Training for Girls (New York, 1915), 206.Google Scholar

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⁵⁶ In 1915, only five companies (two railroads, a factory, a wholesale house, and a utility) in Cleveland employed tabulating (statistical) machines whereas an estimated forty companies employed bookkeeping machines. Eaton and Stevens, Commercial Work and Training for Girls, 215–216.

⁵⁷ Strom, Beyond the Typewriter, 181–182.

⁵⁸ Yates, JoAnne, “Co-evolution of Information-Processing Technology and Use: Interaction between the Life Insurance and Tabulating Industries,” Business History Review 67 (Spring 1993): 1–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, describes the interrelationship between insurance companies and the tabulating industries in the development of tabulating machines and the modernization of insurance firms' business processes.

⁵⁹ Erickson, The Employment of Women in Offices, 16.

⁶⁰ Rotella, “The Transformation of the American Office,” 54.

⁶¹ “The Loose-Leaf Revolution in Bookkeeping,” The World's Work 13 (Nov. 1906): 8248–8249.

⁶² Sweetland, Charles A., Loose Leaf Book-Keeping and Accounting 4th ed. (Chicago, Ill., 1905), 9.Google Scholar

⁶³ Although there was a significant increase in the total number of bookkeepers in the United States, the introduction of bookkeeping machines and improved bookkeeping procedures resulted in the elimination of several individual bookkeeping positions and affected many individual lives. Kocka, Jurgen, White Collar Workers in America, 1890–1940: A Social-Political History in International Perspective (London, 1980), 127–131Google Scholar [citing Carlton, W. (pseud.) One Way Out, A Middle-Class New Englander Emigrates to America (Boston, Mass., 1911)Google Scholar], relates the impact of office mechanization on one family's life; changes at a woollen company that ultimately result in the loss of a dozen bookkeeping positions due to the introduction of adding machines and the loss of another dozen positions due to a new bookkeeping system.

⁶⁴ Strom, Beyond the Typewriter, 185.

⁶⁵ Mills, C. Wright, White Collar (New York, 1953), 207.Google Scholar

⁶⁶ Not only was there a significant increase in the percentage of women that worked, but there also were significant changes in the industries in which they worked. For example, in 1890, 17.3% of women workers were employed in agriculture, 27.6% in manufacturing, and 41.2% in domestic and personal services; however, by 1930, the percentage of women employed in agriculture, manufacturing, and domestic services had fallen to 8.5%, 17.5%, and 32.3% respectively. In contrast, the percentage of women employed in clerical jobs increased from 3.1% in 1890 to 18.4% in 1930. Anderson, H. Dewey and Davidson, Percy E., Occupational Trends in the United States (Stanford, Calif., 1940), Table 6, 19.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Claudia Goldin points out that questions have been raised about the accuracy of pre-1940 labor force figures, especially figures from Censuses in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Moreover, during this period, accurate labor participation rates for women (especially white married women) were difficult to determine due to the employment of many women in non direct paid work, such as, on family farms, in household production, and as boardinghouse keepers; which were numerous in the cities. Following a re-analysis of the 1890 data, Goldin concluded that white married women participated in the labor force at a rate approximately equal to their rate (12.5%) in 1940. Goldin, Claudia, Understanding the Gender Grip: An Economie History of American Women (New York, 1990), 219–227.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ Edwards, Sixteenth Census of the United States, Table XIV, 91.

⁶⁹ Davies, Woman's Place is at the Typewriter, 59; Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper, xv; Weiner, Lynn Y., From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820–1980 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 19.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ Marshall, Ray and Beth, Paulin, “Employment and Earnings of Women: Historical Perspective,” in Working Women: Past, Present, Future, ed. Koziara, Karen Shallcross, Moskow, Michael H., and Tanner, Lucretia Dewey (Washington, D.C., 1987), 7–8.Google Scholar

⁷¹ Milkman, Ruth, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana, Ill., 1987), 3.Google Scholar

⁷² “Women in Business: I,” Fortune 12 (July 1935): 50.

⁷³ Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper, 42–3.

⁷⁴ Hooks, Janet M., Women's Occupations Through Seven Decades Women's Bureau Bulletin No. 218 (Washington, D.C., 1947), 10.Google ScholarFlexner, Eleanor, Century of Struggle The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 288.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ Wright, Carroll D., The Working Girls of Boston 1889 reprint (Boston, Mass., 1889), 76–77.Google Scholar

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⁷⁸ Although women employed in clerical positions, on the average, earned more than those employed in manufacturing, the gap between clerical wages and manufacturing wages lessened from 1890 to 1930. This decline is discussed in Douglas, Paul H., Real Wages in the United States 1890–1926 (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), 366.Google Scholar Douglas attributes the decline to a greater mechanization of office work, an increased number of high school students with vocational backgrounds, and the increased employment of women which “served to dilute the industry with comparatively low-salaried workers.” Women who worked in clerical jobs normally earned more than women who worked in manufacturing jobs; however, women working in clerical areas earned substantially less than men working in similar clerical jobs. Thus, as women acquired a larger percentage of clerical jobs, the overall average earnings of clerical workers declined. However, Goldin, Claudia “The Historical Evolution of Female Earnings Functions and Occupations,” Explorations in Economic History 21 (Jan. 1984), 13–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar points that the gap between clerical and manufacturing wages not only declined for women it also declined for men, but at a even faster rate. For women, the earnings ratio of clerical to manufacturing jobs declined from 1.75 in 1890 to 1.27 in 1930, while for men the ratio declined from 1.89 to 1.03.

⁷⁹ Strom, Beyond the Typewriter, 205.

⁸⁰ Hutchinson, Emilie Josephine, Women's Wages: A Study of the Wages of Industrial Women and Measures Suggested to Increase Them (New York, 1919), 48Google Scholar; Coyle, “Women in the Clerical Occupations,” 181; Lowe, Women in the Administrative Revolution, 19; Davies, Woman's Place is at the Typewriter, 64–65.

⁸¹ Rotella, “The Transformation of the American Office,” 57; Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper, 44–45; DeVault, Sons and Daughters of Labor, 60.

⁸² During this period, several articles and books were published that dealt with the often bleak conditions that women and children faced in the factories and mercantile establishments. “Perhaps the best known of the journalistic exposes on working women” was by Helen Stuart Campbell who wrote a series of articles on the working conditions of women in department stores and the needle trades for The New York Tribune. Weiner, From Working Girl to Working Mother, 37. These articles were collected and published as Campbell, Helen, Prisoners of Poverty: Women Wage-Workers, Their Trades and Their Lives (Boston, Mass., 1887).Google Scholar In a later book, Campbell, Helen, Women Wage-Earners: Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future (Boston, Mass., 1893), 191Google Scholar, describes the life of the unskilled woman factory worker, “In unskilled labor there is little difference among the workers. All alike are half starved, half clothed, overworked to a frightful degree; the report specifying numbers whose days work runs from fourteen to sixteen hours, and with neither time to learn some better method of earning a living, nor hope enough to spur them on in any new path.” Working conditions in a factory, as experienced by a middle-class reporter, is presented in Richardson, Dorothy, The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl as Told hby Herself (New York, 1906).Google Scholar Florence Kelley, General Secretary of the National Consumers' League, presents a picture of working conditions of women in eighty-two textile mills, fifty-nine rag shops, and five dealers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in a 1919 article: Kelley, Florence, “Wage-Earning Women in War Time: The Textile Industry,” The Journal of Industrial Hygiene 1 (Oct. 1919): 261–283.Google Scholar

⁸³ Lee Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work, 148.

⁸⁴ Kennedy, Susan Estabrook, If All We Did Was to Weep at Home: A Historty of White Working-Class Women in America (Bloomington, Ind., 1979), 107Google Scholar; Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper, xvii.

⁸⁵ In the early 1800s, textile mills in New England began to recruit young rural women as workers. In the beginning, nearly all of the women recruited were native born. Kennedy, If All We Did Was to Weep at Home, 46. Moreover, many “came from the middle ranks of rural farming families.” Dublin, Thomas, ed., Farm to Factory: Women's Letters, 1830–1860 (New York, 1981), 18.Google Scholar Often, the companies recruited these women by “emphasizing the moral and educational advantages of factory work.” Cochran, Thomas C. and Miller, William, The Age of Enterprise (New York, 1961), 19.Google Scholar Or as Benita Eisler writes: “From the outset, the Boston Associates (textile mills) could demonstrate reassuringly to fearful fathers, doubtful divines, and radical reformers that their new factory system matched propriety of upbringing with the exemplary milieu their responsible stewardship provided.” Eisler, Benita, ed., The Lincell Offerings: Writings by New England Mill Women (1340–1845) (Philadelphia, 1977), 22.Google Scholar However, by the time of the Civil War. the recruitment of the “Yankee girl” often had been replaced by the hiring of newly arrived immigrants, often poor. For example, in 1836, only 4% of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company's (Lowell, Massachusetts) workforce were foreign born, but by 1860, 62% of the workforce were immigrants. Kennedy, If All We Did Was to Weep at Home, 47. With this change in the workforce, by 1870 any middle-class status that factory employment had for women was lost. Lynn Weiner writes: “Domestic work and factory labor no longer offered a mantle of rectitude through the extension of middle-class domestic values. These occupations became provinces of the immigrant, black, and poor women…” Weiner, From Working Girl to Working Mother, 17–18.

⁸⁶ Koziara, Karen Shallcross, “Women and Work: The Evolving Policy,” in Working Women: Past, Present, Future, ed. Koziara, Karen Shallcross, Moskow, Michael H., and Tanner, Lucretia Dewey (Washington, D.C., 1987), 375Google Scholar, notes that in the late 1800s, women who found work in factories often had to work “long hours at low pay in substandard conditions.” Smuts, Robert W., Women and Work in America (New York, 1959), 48–49Google Scholar, states: “… a (middle-class) daughter could not be permitted to suffer the drudgery, dirt, noise, and even danger of unskilled factory work. Nor could she be allowed to associate with the uncouth immigrants who worked in factories.” The likelihood of middle-class daughters with high school degrees working in factories can be see in a 1911 study of women employed in seven major industries in Kansas City, Missouri. Of 2,430 women employed in these industries, only 3.5% had a high school degree. Kansas City (Mo.) Board of Public Welfare Bureau of Statistics, Labor, Report on the Wage-Earnings Women of Kansas City and the Annual Report of the Factory Inspection Department for the Year 1912–1913 (Kansas City, Mo., 1913)Google Scholar, Table 16, 26.

⁸⁷ Buchanan, Aimee, The Lady Means Business (New York, 1942), 107.Google Scholar

⁸⁸ In a 1895 study, insurance companies categorized bookkeepers along with copyists, office clerks, librarians, lawyers, and corporation officers in the highest (exposed to the least risk) of six insurance occupational classifications for indemnities purposes. Katharine Pearson Woods, “Accidents in Factories and Elsewhere,” American Statistical Association New Series No. 32 (Dec. 1895): 303–321.

⁸⁹ Tender, Leslie Woodcock, Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900–1930 (New York, 1979), 3.Google Scholar

⁹⁰ In addition to women's recruitment by businesses, the federal government increased its hiring of women. This increase was spurred by (a) an increase in the size of the federal bureaucracy, (b) an expansion of the number of federal agencies that were authorized to hire women, and (c) women earned less which “offered a way to solve the continual and pressing demand for more workers without over extending the budget.” Between 1859 and 1903, the number of workers employed in the executive departments increased from 1,268 to over 25,000, and many of these positions were clerical. Aron, Cindy Sondik, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-Class Workers in Victorian America (New York, 1987), 70–71.Google Scholar

⁹¹ Davies, Woman's Place is at the Typewriter, 55.

⁹² Fine, The Soul of the Skyscraper, xvii.

⁹³ Baker, Elizabeth Faulkner, Technology and Woman's Work (New York, 1964), 215.Google Scholar

⁹⁴ Smuts, Women and Work in America, 49.

⁹⁵ United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Biennial Survey of Education in the United States, 1950–1952 Chapter 1 Statistical Summary of Education 1951–52, comp. Rose Marie Smith (Washington, D.C., 1955), Table 15, 22.

⁹⁶ Blau, Francine D. and Ferber, Marianne A., The Economics of Women, Men, and Work (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1992), 30.Google Scholar

⁹⁷ Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap, 106.

⁹⁸ National Industrial Conference Board, Women Workers and Labor Supply (New York, 1936), 23.Google Scholar

⁹⁹ Sketches and Business Directory of Boston and its Vicinity: For 1860 and 1861 (Boston, Mass., 1860), 323.

¹⁰⁰ The difficulty defining a clerk is addressed in Ruggles, Allen Mead, A Diagnostic Test of Aptitude for Clerical Office Work (New York, 1924), 1.Google Scholar “It is not difficult to distinguish between the work of an office clerk and that of a teacher, a policeman, a machinist, or any of the numerous other occupations listed in a census report of similar publication. And yet, when we attempt to define clerical office work, we are impressed with the uncertainty of its limitations…. An accountant; a statistician, or an executive secretary may be performing almost the same type of work as other employees who are called clerks.”

¹⁰¹ During the late 1800s and early 1900s, the use of the term “accountant” sometimes was restricted to individuals who reviewed or audited financial records of other individuals, private companies, or public corporations. In other cases, the term accountant might refer to individuals who were responsible for overseeing the work of “bookkeepers” or who were responsible for the preparation of the financial statements. The uniqueness of accountants in the 1800s is illustrated the 1880 Williams' Cincinnati Directory Embracing A Full Alphabetical Record of the Names of the Inhabitants of Cincinnati, A Business Directory, Municipal Record, Etc. June, 1880 (Cincinnati, Oh., 1880), 1150–1156. In contrast to over 700 listings for attorneys or law firms, the Cincinnati Directory lists only 4 accountants or accounting firms, the same number as for astrologists [sic].

¹⁰² This twelve percent share of the workforce was the high point of the employment of women for several years and was created by a unique situation (World War I). During the War, due to the shortage of men, several accounting firms temporarily hired women as accountants. When the war ended, some of the firms retained women as workers; however, they hired men for all new accounting positions. By 1930, women constituted less than nine percent of the accountants/auditors. United States Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Population Volume V (Washington, D.C., 1933), Table 3, 49.Google Scholar An interesting account of the influence of World War I upon the employment of women in the Federal Government can be found in Nienburg, Bertha M., Women in the Government Service Bulletin of the Women's Bureau, No. 8 (Washington, D.C., 1920).Google Scholar

¹⁰³ United States Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920: Volume IV Pirpulation 1920 Occupations (Washington, D.C., 1923), Table 4, 43.Google Scholar

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¹⁰⁵ Carey, The Rise of the Accounting Profession, 15.

¹⁰⁶ Edwards, Sixteenth Census of the United States, Table XIX, 98.

¹⁰⁷ “About Wages,” The Revolution 45 (20 Oct. 1870): 146.

¹⁰⁸ Glassberg, Eudice, “Work, Wages, and the Cost of Living, Ethnic Differences and the Poverty Line, Philadelphia, 1880,” Pennsylvania History 46 (Jan. 1979): 17–58.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁹ Wright, The Working Girls of Boston, 5.

¹¹⁰ Wright, Working Girls of Boston, 76–82, 109.

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¹¹² United States Census Office, Report on Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890. Part II (Washington, D.C., 1897), Table 116, 530–627.Google Scholar

¹¹³ A vivid description of the working conditions, hours worked, and wages of women working in the slaughtering and meat-packing houses of Chicago is presented in Abbott, Edith and Breckinridge, Sophonisba, “Women in Industry: The Chicago Stockyard,” The Journal of Political Economy 19 (Oct. 1905): 609–654.Google Scholar In 1905, slightly over 11% of the workforce in meat-preparation houses were women, usually recent immigrants. Abbott and Breckinridge reported that in a typical Chicago stockyard plant women earned from $2.96 a week working as a meat packer to $6.18 as a feeder.

¹¹⁴ Office of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of Illinois, “Working Women in Chicago,” in Seventh Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of Illinois 1892 (Springfield, Ill., 1893), XIII–XV.Google Scholar

¹¹⁵ Average wages of full time bookkeepers and stenographers were determined from workers' wages presented in Tables I and III of the publication: Office of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of Illinois, “Working Women in Chicago,” in Seventh Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of Illinois 1892 (Springfield, Ill., 1893), IV–354.Google Scholar

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¹¹⁷ DeVault, Sons and Daughters of Labor, 56.

¹¹⁸ In 1890, the average annual earnings of men and women workers in the United States were $498.71 and $267.97 respectively. United States Census Office, Twelfth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1900 Manufactures Part 1 Volume VII (Washington, D.C., 1902), Table XXXIX, cxv.Google Scholar

¹¹⁹ Bosworth, Louise Marion, The Living Wage of Women Workers: A Study of Incomes and Expenditures of 450 Women in the City of Boston (New York, 1976), 2, 8–9Google Scholar; Table 1, 16.

¹²⁰ Bosworth, The Living Wage of Women Workers, 11–12.

¹²¹ United States Bureau of the Census, Statistics of Women at Work (Washington, D.C., 1907)Google Scholar, Table XXIII, 34; Table XXV, 38; Table 17, 162.

¹²² Maher, Amy G., Bookkeepers, Stenographers and Office Clerks in Ohio 1914 to 1929 Bulletin of the Women's Bureau, No. 95 (Washington, D.C., 1932)Google Scholar, Table 6, 13.

¹²³ Maher, Bookkeepers, Stenographers and Office Clerks, Tables 7–9, 15–16.

¹²⁴ United States Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States Colonial Times to 1970 Part 1 (Washington, D.C., 1975), 172.Google Scholar

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¹²⁶ Although across the United States women held the majority of bookkeeping positions, there were exceptions. One exception was the City of New York. In a 1918 study-made for the Civil Service Reform Association of New York, Fannie Witherspoon and Anna Martin Crocker found that only 7 of 175 (4%) bookkeepers employed by the cits were women. In contrast, 199 of 438 clerks were women (45.4%), 231 of 311 typewriters (typists) were women (74.3%), and 628 of 1,145 stenographers were women (54.8%). Witherspoon, Fannie M. and Crocker, Anna Martin, Opportunities for Women in the Municipal Civil Service of the City of New York (New York, 1918), 47.Google Scholar

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¹²⁸ Although the majority of bookkeepers in Massachusetts were women, the majority of upper wage positions were held by men. A 1926 study of 5,195 bookkeepers/accountants (1,889 men; 3,306 women) in Massachusetts reported that 34.9% of the men earned $40 or more a week, whereas, only 2.8% of the women did. However, of four office categories (clerical, stenographic, office machines operators, bookkeeping), women bookkeepers reported the highest average earnings. “Salaries of Office Employees in Massachusetts,” Monthly Labor Review 24 (Jan. 1927): 141–143.

¹²⁹ United States Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920: Volume IV Population 1920 Occupations (Washington, D.C., 1923)Google Scholar, Table 15, 72–127.

¹³⁰ Aronovici, Carol, Women in Industry in Minnesota in 1918 Field Investigation Carried on by Women in Industry Committee Council of National Defence [sic] and Bureau of Women and Children (St. Paul, Minn., 1920), 7.Google Scholar

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¹³³ Beney, M. Ada, Wages, Hours, and Employment in the United States 1914–1936 (New York, 1936), Table 3, 48.Google Scholar

¹³⁴ A 1922 study of 34,655 women employed in 31 industries in New Jersey reported that the median weekly earnings for all women were $14.95. Women in New Jersey Industries: A Study of Wages and Hours Bulletin of the Women's Bureau, No. 37 (Washington, D.C., 1924), Table 3, 13.

¹³⁵ In general, women office workers earned more than women employed in other occupations. A 1923 study (25,598 factory, 2,389 store, and 2,586 office workers) of women's wages in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) by the Ohio Industrial Relations and Industrial Commission reports that while only 16.6% of office workers had weekly earnings of less than $15.00 a week, 40.8% of store workers and 50.9% of factory workers earned less than $15.00. Rich, Frances Ivins, Wage-Earning Giris in Cincinnati (Cincinnati, Oh., 1927), 15.Google Scholar

¹³⁶ “Situations Wanted/Help Wanted,” The New York Times 69 (16 Feb. 1920): 25, 26. “Situations Wanted/Help Wanted,” The New York Times 69 (15 March 1920): 29, 30. “Situations Wanted/Help Wanted,” The New York Times 69 (15 April 1920): 28, 29.

¹³⁷ “Women in Accountancy,” The Certified Public Accountant 15 (April 1935): 244.

¹³⁸ National Industrial Conference Board, Inc., Clerical Salaries in the United States 1926 (New York, 1926), 7.Google Scholar

¹³⁹ Hager, Alice Rogers, “Occupations and Earnings of Women in Industry,” in The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science Volume CXLIII May, 1929 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1929), Table III, 71.Google Scholar

¹⁴⁰ Elliott, Margaret and Manson, Grace E., Earnings of Women in Business and the Professions Michigan Business Studies Volume 3 No. 1 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1930), 4–5Google Scholar; Table 10, 22.

¹⁴¹ Byrne, Harriet A., Women Who Work in Offices Bulletin of the Women's Bureau, No. 132 (Washington, D.C., 1935), 10.Google Scholar

¹⁴² In 1926, of 287 (105 factory, 109 store, and 73 office) randomly selected “working girls” in Cincinnati, 40% of the women who worked in offices had some college education while 5% of the store workers had some college education; however, none of the women factory workers had attended college. Rich, Frances Ivins, Wage-Earning Girls in Cincinnati (Cincinnati, Oh., 1927), 6; Table XXII, 56.Google Scholar

¹⁴³ Byrne, Women Who Work in Offices, 6, 18.

¹⁴⁴ Rotella, “Tne Transformation of the American Office,” 52.

¹⁴⁵ C. Wright Mills, White Collar, 206.

¹⁴⁶ Davies, Woman's Place is at the Typewriter, 56.

¹⁴⁷ Hooks, Women's Occupations Through Seven Decades, 75.

¹⁴⁸ Davies, Woman's Place is at the Typewriter, 55.

¹⁴⁹ Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper, xvii.

¹⁵⁰ Baker, Technology and Woman's Work, 215.

¹⁵¹ From 1870 to 1930, men were substantially less likely to graduate from high school than women. Typically, each year, less than 45% of all high school graduates and often less than 40% of public high school graduates were men. For example, for the school year 1894–95, Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1894–95 Volume 1 (Washington, D.C., 1896), Table 2, 38; Table 12, 49 reports that of 42,393 public high school graduates, 15,158 (35.8%) were men and of the total 54,353 high school graduates, 21,210 (39%) were men.

¹⁵² DeVault, Sons and Daughters of Labor, 17.

¹⁵³ Adams, Elizabeth Kemper, Women Professional Workers: A Study Made for the Women's Educational and Industrial Union (New York, 1921), 225.Google ScholarAmott, Teresa and Matthaei, Julie, Race, Gender, and Work A Multicultural Economic History of Wotnen in the United States (Boston, Mass., 1991), 127.Google Scholar

¹⁵⁴ Herman Melville in his short novel, Bartleby The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, vividly describes the duties of a law-copyist (scrivener). Melville writes: “It is, of course, an indispensable part of a scrivener's business to verify the accuracy of his copy, word by word. Where there are two or more scriveners in an office, they assist each other in this examination, one reading from the copy, the other holding the original. It is a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair. I can readily imagine that to some sanguine temperaments it would be altogether intolerable.” Melville, Herman, “Bartleby The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” in Shorter Novels of Herman Melville Black and Gold Edition (n.p., 1942), 118.Google Scholar

¹⁵⁵ Dex, Shirley, The Sexual Division of Work Conceptual Revolutions in the Social Sciences (New York, 1985), 192.Google Scholar

¹⁵⁶ Eaton and Stevens, Commercial Work and Training for Girls, 214.

¹⁵⁷ In his seminal work on human capital theory, Becker, Gary S., Human Capital A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (New York, 1964), 7–33Google Scholar, distinguishes between two basic types of training and skills, general and specific. Firm-general skills increase employee's productivity for many employers and are inter changeable among several employers. These skills often are learned outside of the firm. Firm-specific skills increase the future productivity of workers of the firms providing it. Building upon Becker's human capital theory, Elyce J. Rotella emphasizes that mechanization reduced the job-specific skill components of most office jobs. Instead, clerical work often required firm-general skills (typing, stenography, machine adding) that were learned outside of the firm (often in high schools or commercial schools). As women were willing to work for lower wages and many women possessed the required firm-general skills, companies favored the hiring of women. Moreover, “the availability of an abundant supply of cheap female labor provided an incentive to adopt the mechanized and routinized production techniques that used workers with firm-general skills.” Rotella, Elyce J., “The Transformation of the American Office: Changes in Employment and Technology,” The Journal of Economic History 41 (March 1981): 57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁵⁸ Weiss, Janice Harriet, Educating for Clerical Work: A History of Commercial Education in the United States Since 1850 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1978), 256–257.Google Scholar

¹⁵⁹ Baker, Technology and Woman's Work, 215.

¹⁶⁰ Coyle, “Women in the Clerical Occupations,” 183.

¹⁶¹ Strom, Beyond the Typewriter, 192.

¹⁶² Another factor that contributed to the large number of single bookkeepers was the middle-class background of many of them. For example, Lynn Y. Weiner writes: “From 1900 to 1940, middle-income white wives typically did not work outside the home.” Weiner, From Working Girl to Working Mother, 83. Even if a woman worked in an office that allowed her to continue work after marriage, there often was social pressure on her to leave her job. Aron, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service, 41.

¹⁶³ History of the Federal Civil Service: 17S9 to the Present (Washington, D.C., 1941), 27. Under the 1864 statute, women could be employed in one of four clerical classes, at a salary not to exceed $600, which was approximately half of what a male clerk earned.

¹⁶⁴ Nienburg, Women in the Government Service, 27–28, 32.

¹⁶⁵ Liszt, Charlotte G., “Opportunities for Women Accountants in the Federal Civil Service,” The Woman C.P.A. (Oct. 1942): 64.Google Scholar

¹⁶⁶ Employment Opportunities for Women In Professional Accounting, Women's Bureau Bulletin No. 258 (Washington, D.C., 1955), 9.

¹⁶⁷ Wagner, John W., “Defining Objectivity in Accounting,” The Accounting Review 40 (July 1965): 600.Google Scholar

¹⁶⁸ Oppenheimer, Valerie Kincade, “The Sex-Labeling of Jobs,” Industrial Relations 7 (May 1968): 227.Google Scholar

¹⁶⁹ In regard to the changing office place and the perception of women in it, Maurine Weiner Greenwald writes, “Mechanization and specialization resulted in a tri-level stratification of the office labor force: men trained to deal with matters involving judgment, experience, and responsibility; semi-skilled female machine operatives; and unskilled women assigned routine tasks.” Greenwald, Maurine Weiner, Women, War, and Work: The Impact of World War I on Women Workers in the United States (Westport, Conn., 1980), 9–10.Google Scholar

¹⁷⁰ “Women Accountants,” The Accountant Volume 47 (New Series) No. 1971 (Sept. 14, 1912): 341.

¹⁷¹ Perks, R. W., Accounting and Society (London, 1993), 11.Google Scholar

¹⁷² Paul J. Miranti, Accountancy Comes of Age, 29, points out that most American public accounting associations “wished to emulate” the success of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales “who earlier had succeeded in obtaining a prominent place in society for their special expertise.” However, the Institute of Chartered Accountants had failed to act on suggestions that women be admitted to the Institute in both 1895 and 1909. It was only after the passage of The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919, that opened professional bodies to women, that women were accepted as members of the Institute of Chartered Accountants. Howitt, Harold, The History of The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales 1870–1965 and of Its Founder Accountancy Bodies 1870–1880 (London, 1966)Google Scholar; repr., The History of The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales 1870–1965 (New York, 1984), 54, 6.5–66.

¹⁷³ DeVault, Sons and Daughters of Labor, 22.

¹⁷⁴ In addition to the perception that women were not suited to become managers, a similar perception was widely held that women could not understand management practices, and therefore, they should not write about such practices. An illustration of this perception is the case of Lillian Gilbreth, one of the major contributors to the early development of management thought. When the granting of her Ph.D. at the University of California was delayed due to a residence requirement, Lillian and Frank (her husband) Gilbreth sought a company to publish the thesis (“The Psychology of Management“), “only to be told by several of them (publishing companies) that thev could not undertake publication of a book on such a subject by a woman author.” However, the journal, Industrial Engineering, agreed to publish the thesis as a series of articles (May 1912-May 1913), under the name of F. M. Gilbreth. The following year, a small publishing house agreed to publish the thesis as a book; “provided it bore the name of L. M. Gilbreth… and that no publicity be given the fact that the author was a woman.” Yost, Edna, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth: Partners for Life (New Brunswick, N.J., 1949), 213.Google Scholar

¹⁷⁵ Daniel A. Wren describes the duties of the social (welfare) secretary: “The social secretary listened to and handled grievances, ran the sick room of the workshop, provided for recreation and education, arranged transfers for dissatisfied workers, administered the dining facilities, prepared nutritious menus, and looked after the moral behauor of unmar ried female factory employees.” Wren, Daniel A., The Evolution of Management Thought (New York, 1994), 158.Google Scholar

¹⁷⁶ Tolman, William H., Social Engineering: A Record of Things Done by American Industrialists Employing Upwards of One and One-Half Million of People (New York, 1909), 51.Google Scholar

¹⁷⁷ Goldin, Understanding tlie Gender Gap, 112–13.

¹⁷⁸ For several decades, women would continue to find public accounting a difficult profession to enter. In 1945, Jennie Palen, one of the first women to be hired by a major accounting firm, wrote: “Vocational advisers are in agreement that it (public accounting) has been the most difficult of all the professions for women to break into.” Palen, Jennie M., “The Position of the Woman Accountant in the Postwar Era,” The Journal of Accountancy 78 (July 1945): 27.Google Scholar

¹⁷⁹ For example, in 1924, the State of New York required five years of accounting experience of which two vears had to be in the employment of a certified public accoun tant. In New Jersey, three years of public accounting experience were required. “C.P.A. Requirements in New York and New Jersey,” The Pace Student 9 (Nov. 1924): 187–188.

¹⁸⁰ Editorial—Women in Accountancy,” The Journal of Accountancy 36 (Dec. 1923): 443–445.

¹⁸¹ “Editorial—Women in Accountancy,” 444.

¹⁸² Trail, Nettie A., “Women in Accountancy,” The Certified Public Accountant 4 (March 1925): 140.Google Scholar

¹⁸³ Fischer, Anne B., “Where Women are Succeeding,” Fortune 116 (3 Aug. 1987): 86.Google Scholar