The Rise of Corporate Feminism - by Allison Elias

About the Book

How did feminism in corporate America come to represent the individual success of the executive woman and not the collective success of the secretary? Allison Elias argues that feminist goals of advancing equal opportunity and promoting meritocracy unintentionally undercut the status and prospects of so-called "pink-collar" workers.

Book Synopsis

From the 1960s through the 1990s, the most common job for women in the United States was clerical work. Even as college-educated women obtained greater opportunities for career advancement, occupational segregation by gender remained entrenched. How did feminism in corporate America come to represent the individual success of the executive woman and not the collective success of the secretary?

Allison Elias argues that feminist goals of advancing equal opportunity and promoting meritocracy unintentionally undercut the status and prospects of so-called "pink-collar" workers. In the 1960s, ideas about sex equality spurred some clerical workers to organize, demanding "raises and respect," while others pushed for professionalization through credentialing. This cross-class alliance pushed a feminist agenda that included unionizing some clerical workers and advancing others who had college degrees into management. But these efforts diverged in the 1980s, when corporations adopted measures to move qualified women into their upper ranks. By the 1990s, corporate support for professional women resulted in an individualistic feminism that focused on the needs of those at the top. Meanwhile, as many white, college-educated women advanced up the corporate ladder, clerical work became a job for lower-socioeconomic-status women of all races.

The Rise of Corporate Feminism considers changes in the workplace surrounding affirmative action, human resource management, automation, and unionization by groups such as 9to5. At the intersection of history, gender, and management studies, this book spotlights the secretaries, clerks, receptionists, typists, and bookkeepers whose career trajectories remained remarkably similar despite sweeping social and legal change.

Review Quotes

[A] valuable new book.-- "Administrative Science Quarterly"

A best summer book of 2023: Business selection--Andrew Hill "Financial Times"

Elias's wide-ranging narrative examines many groups and diverse sources to illuminate overlooked contingencies and offer new insights on gender, work, and rights in recent decades.-- "ILR Review"

The Rise of Corporate Feminism could not be more timely. Elias directly confronts the tension between trying to advance gender equality while devaluing traditional women's work, fast-tracking women college graduates into management jobs while leaving secretaries and other clerical workers behind. She draws on fascinating case studies to explore whether workers' rights and women's rights can finally create more unified pathways for all women to succeed. A marvelous book!

--Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

Elias's book details the labor movement's attempts to raise secretaries' status and how feminism ultimately focused on getting college-educated women out of the secretariat and into the kinds of jobs their fathers held, leaving fewer elite women with dead-end careers. A poignant and telling tale about the results of American feminism's lack of class consciousness.

--Joan Williams, author of Bias Interrupted: Creating Inclusion for Real and For Good

In this well-written book, Elias makes extensive use of important archival holdings and mined oral history transcripts to good effect. She provides a sharp and incisive analysis of how gendered were job assignments, union organizing campaigns, and corporate policies.

--Dennis Deslippe, author of "Rights, not Roses" Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism

Why has movement toward gender equity at work been so slow? Allison Elias asks why "women's jobs" were not merged into career paths leading upward. Why were secretaries with the skills to be managers kept on the sidelines? A riveting and eye-opening update of Rosabeth Moss Kanter's classic Men and Women of the Corporation that should be required reading for every MBA and CEO.

--Frank Dobbin, coauthor of Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn't

As college-educated women moved into management, the pink-collar jobs of their left-behind sisters sank in pay and status. In this revelatory, unflinching book, Elias charts the failures of corporate reform since the 1970s and shows how the past struggles of working women for better jobs and real opportunity offer a way forward.--Dorothy Sue Cobble, author of For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality

Elias has written one of the most engaging and original accounts of women in the workplace that I've ever read.--Isabel Berwick "Financial Times"

In The Rise of Corporate Feminism, Allison Elias provides a complex history of how corporate America bifurcated the feminist movement--creating policies that divided women into the largely white and educated on an upwardly mobile track and the rest segregated into low-paying dead-end clerical jobs. This masterful interdisciplinary study is a must-read for anyone who cares about gender equality at work.--Rosemary Batt, Cornell University

In a provocative and engaging analysis of the quintessentially "female" occupation of secretary, Elias shows how the contemporary women's movement and corporate efforts to respond to anti-discrimination law unintentionally helped reinforce patterns of gender inequality at work. This is a compelling read for anyone interested in studying occupations, organizations, or workplace inequality.--Pamela S. Tolbert, coauthor of Organizations: Structure, Process, and Outcomes

This well-crafted history details an enduring feminist tension between individual meritocracy and working-class solidarity, between corporate ladder climbing and labor-based equality. Allison Elias brilliantly sets these struggles over gender equity within the rise of corporate interests in owning the question. The Rise of Corporate Feminism is a clear-eyed, well-researched, and greatly needed analysis of one of the most central--and neglected--issues in recent American history.--Jefferson Cowie, author of Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

About the Author

Allison Elias is an assistant professor at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia.