Some time ago I watched the 1980s movies “Working Girl” and “9 to 5” on Amazon Prime. The first movie I had had on my list for 25 years, as it came highly recommended by a friend. The second one came up when reading about Dolly Parton who wrote the title song and starred in the movie. I started with “9 to 5”.
The movie left me slightly irritated. Was it the clothes of the working women? Dressed to the nines, although their job was that of a not very high-ranking back-office administrator or secretary? Very much like in the title photo of the article, full business outfit, high heel shoes, perfectly made up. Was it the tone in the workplace, full of patronizing and chauvinist behaviour towards the women? The movie is quite ok, it uses some over the top slapstick to get its message across, which is funny sometimes. One wonders how it was seen by audiences back then in 1980.
As “Working Girl” was hailed as an emancipatory movie, I decided to watch it next. This one came as a shock. The way women are portrayed in that movie is just offensive for any woman working today. In 1988 it was seen as a fresh and interesting comedy, where one woman is in heavy rivalry with another, whilst the men look amused on, support the fighting women from the side-line and bed the main characters.
Not yet everything is good in the workplace today and there is a glass ceiling for women, no matter what. It seems, though, that blatantly chauvinist behaviour became less.
I do remember 20 years ago during a meeting, when I was the only woman in the room, that a MD asked the rhetorical question: Why has the oppression of women existed for 5000 years? He gave the answer himself: Because it has proven its worth. I do not exactly remember how people in the room reacted, if anyone told him off, but most of the men were embarrassed. I also do not remember saying anything in return, being a pretty lowly employee back then, but I have not forgotten the scene which means it left a mark.
When I tell the story today, younger women tend to be disgusted, older ones just raise their brows. What people think when they are all alone is their private matter, but a bias against women in the workplace stays. Especially as women climb to the highest position in companies (sometimes) and through that invade the truly interesting territories traditionally claimed by men.
The whole discussion about women in the workplace is strange. Women always worked. Peasant women were the most obvious and most integrated in a family, but there were also servants, homeworkers (seamstresses, weavers, sometimes teachers etc), actresses, and of course prostitutes. There were always a few women, born wealthy or powerful or widowed or supported by someone of influence, who became known for professional success. Different characters, women like Malwida von Meysenbug, Beatrice Potter, Florence Nightingale, Gertrude Bell, Rosa Luxemburg, Marie Curie, to stay in the 19th and early 20th centuries only. They were the exceptions.
In general, a women’s place was with her husband and children and she was 100% dependent on him. The incredible reality is that it stayed like this in the Western World till the 1970s. The situation was not better for women in most countries, just different. Almost all societies did find ways of keeping women at home. Being rich meant not that life was better – one only needs to think of the Chinese practice of binding women’s feet, which left them permanently disabled and unable to move normally. Such a woman needed to be kept, as she could not support herself and became a symbol of wealth. Although this example is extreme, all societies found their ways to delegate women to the second row.
In Europe and the USA, the women’s fight for rights initiated after they were needed to support the household income throughout society on a regular basis. This happened during the 19th century, when people migrated from the countryside to cities and the industrial revolution took place. Women’s roles changed.
After years of exploitation at the new workplace, women became more interested in fairer payment and some other rights, like the right to vote. It became an epic back and forth in the 19th and 20th century. During war time women were needed to take their men’s places in the steel mills and all the other industries. What had been “a job a woman cannot do” became possible. After the war the women were pushed back home, rights taken back as well and only a few more than before stayed on working. The 1920s and 1930s, with their libertine ways and economic crisis, where the first perk times of women trying out work as a possibility to lead a self-determined life (at least before marriage). The working woman was pictured in movies and heard about in the radio.
After the Second World War, society was all up for sending women home again, but this time it was different. By then women could go to schools and universities and were even elected to parliament. Still, husbands could end their wife’s employment contract and he could take all her money and keep the children in case of divorce. That was the European situation. It only changed in the 1970s. In the USA, men could solely dispose of the marital property till the 1980s. Birth control possibilities were hard fought for and slowly enabled women to decide whether they wanted a family with children, and if at all. The pill gave women more freedom to decide about their lifes than most laws.
To make it short: the standard of life had been improved to such a degree, that women looked for a broader sense in life. As long as you need to feed a family and live on a shoestring, you don’t fight for more rights. Self-improvement is pretty low on the agenda. The century old idea that a man has made it when his wife does not need to support the family, but can “do nothing” was coming to a closure. Women, at least quite a few of them, did not wish to be kept any more. Betty Friedan gave a lot of background research to this topic in her book “The Feminine Mystique”.
It is interesting to read biographies about Jacqueline Kennedy and Lee Radziwill in that context. The sisters were groomed in the 1930s and 1940s to marry rich men and be supportive to them, like women were for centuries. But still, they were highly educated and had a mindset for work. After they had gotten their share of rich men, they started to work quite earnestly, although they did not need it financially. They entered the workplace in roles far below their public profile. The money they earned would have never allowed them the glamorous lives they had led, but it gave them much more: “Jackie’s discovery in these years was that reading by herself in a corner, sailing on a yacht, and buying couture clothes in Paris were all a great deal less sustaining than going into the office and drinking coffee out of a Styrofoam cup.” (quote from William Kuhn’s book “Reading Jackie”).
The whole business of women’s emancipation through work and becoming independent is epic and the few sentences here stay very much on the surface. Living today, one easily forgets how lucky we are, and how different the situation was for our mothers.
The movies I was irritated about were from the 1980s. Back then women entered the workplace for the first-time not being on a complete disadvantage. This must have made many men uncomfortable. With that background, the tone of the two movies is more understandable.
Women started to dress like Alexis Carrington from “Dynasty” to give the impression of being always in charge and to develop a certain distance to their male counterparts. “Power Dressing”, as in the title photo of the article, was not for nothing an important fashion mark of the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher was British Prime Minister and showed everybody that a nicely dressed woman can be at the same time an Iron Lady. Those women who came to the top back then, without family connections, had a stony way behind them. Looking at today’s “working-from-home“ dress code, that made jogging pants more or less a normal work dress, the 1980s seem very over the top. On the other hand, having come so far away from the elegant dress code of before and knowing fashion, we might soon be all back in our suits from 15 years ago (not everybody will fit in again).
The right to work and to be taken seriously in the workplace was for women a victory of the last decades of the last century. To work and have a career was a very desirable aim in life.
The way young people, male and female, think today about work, that it should not be the centre of life, but allow for a “work-life-balance” shows that our society became very rich and money often is not the problem any more for people. The next generation also wants to work, but wants the work to have a more sustainable meaning.
The topic of woman at work would allow for a long discourse. For the moment one can summarize that we women are in a better place than ever before in history to lead a self-determined life through earning our own money and we can even dress in almost every fashion we want. A lot of women are able to combine a career and family life. Never before in history was that the case for women.
All rights to the books and films belong to:
9 to 5, produced by Collin Higgins, a film by Twentieth Century Fox, 1980
Working Girl, a Mike Nichols Film, produced by Twentieth Century Fox, 1988
Carnegy, Vicky: Fashions of a Decade, the 1980s, 1990, series editors: Valerie Cummings and Elane Feldmann, published by B.T. Batsford Ltd, 4 Fitzharding Street, London, W1H 0AH, manufactured by Bookbuilders Ltd, printed in Hongkong, ISBN: 0713464364
Friedan, Betty: The Feminine Mystique, 1963, published by Pengiun Classics in 2010, printed in England, ISBN: 978-0-141-19205-5
Kashner, Sam / Schoenberger, Nancy: The Tragic and Glamorous Lives of Jackie and Lee: The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters, 2018, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN: 978-0-06-236498-2
Kuhn, William: Reading Jackie, Her Autobiography In Books, 2010, published by Nan A. Talese, First Edition, ISBN: 978-0-385530996