| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jerome P. Bjelopera. City of Clerks: Office and Sales Workers in Philadelphia, 1870–1920. (The Working Class in American History.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2005. Pp. ix, 208. Cloth $45.00, paper $22.00.
Jerome P. Bjelopera seeks in this book to examine lower-middle-class clerks and salespeople in the same manner that labor historians have so productively studied blue-collar workers. He aims to construct an analysis that explores not only their work lives but also their educational backgrounds, residential patterns, leisure pursuits, and shared values, providing a sort of "history from the middle out" (p. 7) rather than from the bottom up. Bjelopera largely accomplishes his goal in this well-researched, concise entry in the University of Illinois Press's series on "The Working Class in American History."	1
Focusing on Philadelphia from 1870 to 1920, the book begins by documenting the demographics of the "city of clerks." It was a fast-growing segment of the population, mostly native born, almost entirely white, and becoming increasingly feminized during this time period. The book demonstrates that a significant portion of its members consisted of the sons and daughters of immigrants, and that its overall membership was drawn from a variety of social backgrounds. At one school where clerks were trained for their expanding role in the industrial economy, about forty-five percent of the students had fathers in varying white-collar occupations and thirty percent had fathers in different sectors of the working class (the rest had fathers who were dead or whose occupations were unknown). The book lays out a clear contrast between the status of turn-of-the-century clerks and those who occupied similar positions in the preindustrial era.	. . .

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