Critique de On the make par Josh

This is an interesting little book on the lives of clerks, in 1840s and 1850s New York.

Clerks were junior salespeople working in retailers and wholesale establishments. They showed off items to customers, described their selling points, wrote up bills of purchase and collected payment. They didn't, at least in theory, pickup goods from docks or deliver them to customers (that was the work of porters - a lower status role). They also didn't own their shops - they were employed by someone else.

Clerks were almost exclusively white men. Luskey quotes from an 1857 novel in which a black man applies in writing for a job as a clerk and gets an interview based on his neat handwriting but is rejected when they realize he's black. A member of the firm explains to the man's sister why they can't hire him like this: "We should like to take him; but his colour, miss - his complexion is a fatal objection" hiring him "would create a rumpus amongst the clerks, who would all feel dreadfully insulted by our placing placing a nigger child on equality with them." (p. 69)

In the later part of the period white women start to make inroads in clerking. The popular press had long mocked clerks as unmasculine - a satirical writer 'proclaimed that he had discovered a new species on the commercial scene. It was a possible missing link connecting apes and men, [the clerk was] “as intelligent . . . as the ourang-outang” and “ornamental” as a “poodle.”' (p. 84).

Many writers suggested that it would be more proper for establishments catering to women to employ women as clerks. Led by W.H. Macy this began to happen after the Civil War, but the Clerks attempting to defend their occupation insisted that these women doing clerking work should not be called clerks but Saleswomen. The women themselves insisted on being called "Salesladies" - a demand, which the New York Times editorialized, was "merely another example of the 'vulgarity and absurdity' of the age." As the lower class women who held these jobs were most definitely not proper ladies in the Times' estimation. Though, some upper class ladies hoped that these poor women would be uplifted by the proximity to real ladies as clerks. (p. 232)

Overall an interesting though narrowly focused account - would recommend to people with an interest in this kind of thing.