Making Clerks and Re-shaping the White-Collar Workforce in the Twentieth Century

Clerical work in all western industrial countries has expanded and feminised since the nineteenth century. Feminisation is the shift in workforce composition from male to female. In Australia the proportion of clerical workers who were women rose from one per cent to 70 per cent between 1881 and 1981. There has been a steady stream of North American and British studies from 1974 analysing aspects of the white blouse revolution. Recently and belatedly, there have been a number of Australian studies.