| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

City of Clerks: Office and Sales Workers in Philadelphia, 1870–1920. By Jerome P. Bjelopera. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. x, 208 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-252-02977-1. Paper, $22.00, ISBN 0-252-07227-8.)
When industrial Philadelphia was the fabled "workshop of the world," not all the working people there were employed by the city's diverse range of factories, dyehouses, and textile mills. This book tells the story of the thousands of men and women who processed the paper work generated by the manufacturing and sales enterprises that thrived in Philadelphia between 1870 and 1920. Focusing on white-collar positions not considered professional or proprietary, Jerome P. Bjelopera's first book is an excellent survey of a wide range of workers usually overlooked by historians, including clerks, bookkeepers, stenographers, typists, secretaries, messengers, cashiers, and department store sales staff.	1
The period immediately following the American Civil War saw a "clerical revolution" characterized by a new white-collar work force that had expanded tenfold by 1920. This development marked a shift in business culture away from proprietary, exclusively male clerical apprenticeships toward more standardized, technologically based, and gender-mixed settings. Bjelopera analyzes this white-collar world as it developed into the twentieth century, highlighting the role of business schools in job training and placement, the experience of the workday, the absence of collective resistance on the job, and the ways gender structured almost all aspects of the new business environment.	. . .

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