SWIMMING IN THE STENO POOL

Given its subtitle, A Retro Guide to Making It in the Office, and its cheeky vintage-art cover, one might be forgiven for assuming that is just another one of the heaps of lightweight hipster nostalgia books that began to flood the market in the early 2000s, when reviving/celebrating/satirizing midcentury culture and design became all the rage. That is, if one didn’t happen to know that Lynn Peril is one of the sharpest, wittiest feminist cultural historians around. As the author of the sadly defunct zine Mystery Date, the books Pink Think and College Girls, and the “Museum of Femorabilia” column in Bust magazine, she specializes in examining the ways in which women’s identities were portrayed and constructed through pop culture—advertising, advice books, etc.—throughout the twentieth century. She continues this effort in Steno Pool, exploring the history of that much maligned, celebrated, and even fetishized figure, the secretary: a topic near to her heart because, it turns out, she is one.

I picked up this book mainly because I loved Peril’s previous two and it seemed like good retro fun. I was not surprised to be so interested and entertained, but I was a bit taken aback by how much it resonated with me. A history of secretaries is by proxy a partial history of women in the modern white-collar workforce (since it was one of the few jobs outside the home that was socially acceptable for women—at least, single women; there is an entire chapter on the additional obstacles, including outright firing, faced by working married women—and remains female-dominated today), and as an office worker myself, I connected with it quite personally. The story is both empowering (working girls, yay!) and depressing (sexism, boo!); even if you think you know it—typing and dictation, groping and harassment, the glass ceiling and making coffee—seeing it all laid out with Peril’s stringent analysis is informative. So much of the material she quotes might seem hilariously antiquated and irrelevant if she didn’t do such a good job of demonstrating how systematically it reflected complex social norms that still resonate today. I’ll resist launching a rant, but much of the book inspires a healthy sense of outrage, though it’s leavened by amusing factoids and Peril’s wry humor. This is a natural follow-up to College Girls and a good companion to one of my other favorite twentieth-century histories, Betsy Israel’s Bachelor Girls. Not to mention a great reminder of how fortunate I am to have a job that values me and doesn’t limit or discriminate against me, which is useful to think about when I’m dragging myself reluctantly out of bed on a Monday morning.