In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

EMPLOYEES 83
roles, as is the case with "Tiny Nicomedes the Typist" (a cartoon in
Caras y Caretas, November 6), these characters are given the most
negative attributes currently associated with women. Opening his master's
correspondence, Tiny Nicomedes steals a theater ticket. Predictably,
the play that he sees is about the crime and punishment of a thief, and
this plot makes Nicomedes lose all vestiges of his "masculine composure."
He leaves the show and runs straight into his master who, without
a ticket, stands waiting at the theater's entrance.
Germany alone now has 3.5 million nonindustrial employees, of
whom more than 40 percent are women (fewer than 20 percent of
German women work in industry). Concurrently, the typewriter and the
calculator have become widespread in business administration, and there
has been a shift from tailor-made to ready-made clothes. It thus follows
that the positions most frequently occupied by women are those of
secretary and saleswoman (Chronik, 36; von Soden and Schmidt, 25f£.).
Certain status symbols that accompany these jobs lead the public to
greatly overestimate the distance that separates industrial workers and
nonindustrial employees. From this perspective, the situation of clerical
and sales personnel in the United States emerges as a much-admired
example. They are paid monthly (instead of weekly, as factory workers
are); their workday is only eight hours; and, in their spare time, they can
increasingly afford middle-class pursuits, which implies that they can pay
for the services of other employees. Since they are devoted to pleasing,
employees tend to adapt to the tastes of their employers and are strongly
disposed to overlook the often flagrant forms of exploitation to which
they are exposed. Female workers, instead of protesting salaries that lie
15 percent below those of their male counterparts (Chronik, 36), display
that "will-to-happiness" which D. H. Lawrence finds characteristic of
"most modern people"-but which he attributes especially to Kate, the
protagonist of his novel The Plumed Serpent (Lawrence, 8). As a consequence
of this commitment to happiness, secretaries and saleswomen
wind up sending their modest income back to its source. They buy
fashionable clothes or, at least, fashion magazines which help them
dream of a change in their social status. The media, in exchange, furnish
these women with an exuberantly positive self-image: "No one should
think it strange that salesgirls are the most assiduous readers of fashion
magazines and that they strive to find the most effective means to ward
off their greatest enemy: age. They are the industrious worker bees of