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“Vital Industry” and Women's Ventures: Conceptualizing Gender in Twentieth Century Business History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Kathy Peiss
Kathy Peiss
Affiliation:
KATHY PEISS is currently Graduate Program Director and professor of history at theUniversity of Massachusetts at Amherst.
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In 1935 Fortune magazine published a series of articles on “Women in Business” whose true subject was the absence of women in business. Published anonymously but written by Archibald MacLeish, the articles distinguished between the relatively few women in “general business” or “business proper” and the greater number “engaged in the business exploitation of femininity.” MacLeish asserted that this was “not merely an arbitrary” distinction, for businesses dominated by men were “vital industries.” Vital is a significant adjective from a man known to choose his words carefully, with its connotations of fundamental, indispensable, robust, animate, and, not least, virile. Unlike men's efforts in business, said MacLeish, “feminine success in the exploitation of women proves nothing but the fact that women are by nature feminine.” That is, women's ventures in cosmetology, fashion and styling, department store buying, advertising to women, and the women's press resulted from a state of being, not a will to action. As MacLeish put it, “Elizabeth Arden is not a potential Henry Ford. She is Elizabeth Arden. It is a career in itself but it is not a career in industry.”

Type
Special Section: Gender and Business
Information
Business History Review , Volume 72 , Issue 2: Gender and Business , Summer 1998 , pp. 219 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1998

References

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19 “Ruth Waldo—Business Biography and some personal description,” in box 4, Sidney Bernstein Papers. Chain recruitment and job networks are apparent in the personnel records at the J. Walter Thompson Company Archives; see also Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings. We might theorize for women something akin to the ethnic “takeovers” of specific occupations or occupational segments; see Waldinger, Roger, Still the Promised City? African-Americans and New Immigrants in Post-Industrial New York (Cambridge, Mass., 1996)Google Scholar.

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