Anyone who has ever watched Mad Men knows that the 1950s and 1960s were the
most amount of fun it was ever possible to have in an office.
The booze. The cigarettes. The clothes. Those extraordinary pointy bras, and
above all, the sex.
Compare that with our own offices where there is no booze, no fags and so
little flirting that when the other day a colleague told me he liked my shirt,
he promptly apologised for having put his foot in it.
In the last 60 years or so our attitude to sex at work has moved from denial
to delight to disapproval to disallowing.
The prevailing mood has changed so often that it's been
hard to keep up. So how did we come to be so confused?
Human beings have always been prone to a spot of bad behaviour. But when
women arrived in the office, the opportunities for misbehaving reached a whole
new level.
And the object of desire? The secretary of course.
By the early 20th Century the secretary had become a cultural type. Girls
wanted to grow up to be one. Boys thought they'd marry one.
The ideal candidate was someone who could be an "office wife" - matching the
duties in the office that the wife did at home.
Early manuals of secretarial skills read like guides to a successful
marriage.
"Learn his preferences and obey them even if you do not always agree with his
ideas or methods. Naturally a man likes to have his wants attended to, who
doesn't? Assume that he is always right."
Secretaries can expect more professional atmosphere
today
The job was a complicated one. Secretaries had to manage not only their boss,
but also the boss's wife.
"There was this real tension between the wife who's jealous and the secretary
who thinks that the wife is spending all the boss's money," says Julie
Berebitsky, author of Sex and the Office.
"The office wife has to buy birthday gifts for the wife. Really the question is
who does more for this man, is it the wife in office or the wife at home?"
But it wasn't always men sharking after the secretaries, it could be the other
way round.
One secretary in New York in the mid-1930s was most
eager for her boss to kiss her.
"Sometimes on my job in taking dictation, certain terms I associate with sex
and make me blush," she wrote.
"Words like 'ball bearing' excite me. My boss sort of interests me, I would
enjoy his kisses, but he never comes near me."
Even if Don Draper himself was doing the dictating, I struggle to see how
ball bearings could be in any way exciting. But there you go.
Yet even without the help of the steel balls, affairs
happened. And sometimes they ended very nastily indeed.
Connie Nicholas was a secretary at Eli Lilly in Indiana in the 1940s. She had
a long, tempestuous affair with her boss, which ended when he dumped her in
favour of another, younger secretary.
Nicholas wasn't best pleased. So displeased, in fact, that she shot him three
times, got into his company car - a white Cadillac - and drove off. She then
failed to kill herself and ended up in prison.
Then, as now, companies didn't get their response right. It was decided that
the real problem wasn't the sex but the cars - there were to be no more white
Cadillacs at Eli Lilly. All executives had to trade in their cars or get them
resprayed.
By the 1950s and 1960s, things were beginning to change. The marriage bar -
which stopped women continuing to work after their wedding - was breaking down
and the possibility of a proper career was opening up.
In industries like advertising and publishing, women were starting to advance
beyond the position of secretary. Rona Jaffe describes in her autobiographical
novel, The Best of Everything, what it was like working publishing in New York
in the late 1950s.
Martinis were compulsory at 5pm and there was the perennial dilemma - when
your boss puts his hand on your knee do you smile sweetly and pray for a rise,
or do you knee him in the groin?
Helen Gurley Brown, the late editor of Cosmopolitan, knew the answer to that
question.
Helen Gurley Brown's 1962 book Sex and the Single
Girl broke boundaries
"You see, I don't think it's wrong to use your sex appeal and femininity to
get ahead on a job. In fact, I can't think of a better way to do it," she
said.
She had worked her way up through 17 different secretarial jobs and ended up
as a copywriter on Madison Avenue, the best paid in the business
Her advice to women: "You get to a man by dealing with
him on his professional level, then stay around to charm and sexually zonk
him."
Gurley Brown's first book, Sex and the Single Girl, sold two million copies
in its first three weeks. In 1962, people loved it and hated it, but reading it
now 50 years later it still hasn't quite lost its power to shock.
"Managements who think romances lower the work output are right out of their
skulls," she writes.
"A girl in love with her boss will knock herself out seven days a week and
wish there were more days. Tough on her, but fabulous for business."
But now I think of it, a newspaper editor said the very same thing to me not
so long ago. He loves it when his staff have affairs as they work so much harder
By the 1970s, the women's movement was taking hold. In 1977 a woman's group
ran a competition among secretaries to find the most demeaning personal errand
demanded by their boss.
Finalists included delivering stolen office supplies to his home address,
photographing the boss before, during, and after shaving off his moustache,
cleaning his false teeth and picking up his wife and newborn baby at the
hospital.
But by then women were starting to do equal work, and unequal behaviour was
becoming unacceptable. In a New York court case in 1975, the term "sexual
harassment" was heard for the first time - bottom pinching and lascivious
remarks were on the way out.
Laws were written making sexual harassment illegal, and
companies responded with love contracts - solemn declarations signed by
employees, telling them who they could and couldn't date.
No-one took the blindest bit of notice.
But still, it's a long way from the offices that Gurley Brown worked in,
which she said were, "sexier than Turkish harems, fraternity house weekends or
the Playboy centrefold".
I'm now one of three women on the board of an insurance company and I can
assure you that a less sexually charged environment would be quite hard to find.
But there's still a lingering obsession with top women executives who
sexually exploit young men. There are plenty of examples in fiction. But real
life examples? So far, zilch.
But that's the thing about sex and offices. Unless the jilted underling ends up
putting a bullet in the boss's head - or they use the firm's email - you never
get to hear about it.
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