the making of the kelly girl

The Making of the Kelly Girl: Gender andthe Origins of the Temp Industry in

Postwar America

ERIN HATTON

Abstract This article examines how temp industry leaders exploited notions of“women’s work” in the postwar era to create a new category of “respectable” butmarginal employment. Although they employed substantial numbers of men,postwar industry leaders publicly cast temp work as “women’s work,” constructingthe iconic image of the “Kelly Girl.” In doing so, they entered the postwar culturaldebate about women and work, encouraging housewives to get jobs for self-fulfillment while at the same time maintaining the primacy of the domestic sphere.Through this strategy they began to build a new model of employment that wouldeventually change the meaning of work in America.

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The rise of the temp industry since World War II has changed thenature of employment in the United States. Instead of working attheir employers’ office, millions of Americans report to more thanone workplace, or even more than one industry, each week. Insteadof counting on (or being constrained by) full-time, fixed-scheduleemployment, this rapidly growing population can choose not to callinto the office – or they can be turned away from work for weeksat a time. They are temp workers, and their employers are KellyServices, Manpower Inc., Adecco, Labor Ready and the thousandsof other agencies that have grown from humble postwar origins topenetrate all levels of American business life today, employing morethan two and a half million workers daily. These workers are at theheart of a new model of “flexible” employment relations that repre-sents a radical departure from the traditional standard of a long-term agreement between employer and employee.1

Most observers consider the rise of the temp industry to be anatural response to structural changes in the economy. Forcessuch as globalization and deindustrialization, the argument goes,forced employers to search for ways to cut costs and increaseflexibility. Temp leaders themselves have fostered this view, repeat-edly insisting that the demands of business propelled the expan-sion of their industry. For example, in 1994 Samuel Sacco,executive vice president of the National Association of TemporaryServices, maintained that “the client companies are the primarydrivers. They drive the industry by demanding flexibility in theircompany’s operations.”2 A year earlier, Mitchell Fromstein, presi-

Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 21 No. 1 March 2008ISSN 0952-1909

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dent of Manpower, told Time magazine: “We are not exploitingpeople. We are not setting the fees. The market is. We are matchingpeople with demands. What would our workers be doing withoutus? Unemployment lines? Welfare? Suicide?”3

The picture they have painted, then, is of an industry that devel-oped in response to the needs of the market. A closer look at theevidence, however, shows that the temp industry’s rise was notsimply an inevitable consequence of a changing economy, nor weretemp industry leaders the passive beneficiaries of economic changethey claimed to be. Rather, the industry’s leaders actively sought toproduce the changes they claimed to be responding to. Indeed, theybegan to develop and aggressively market their revolutionary modelof employment in the 1960s, well before economic circumstanceswould seem to have demanded it. In this model, workers wereexpensive commodities who would drain profits with every lunchbreak, sick day, or dip in the workload – in both good times andbad. Business owners, they argued, should not lose money byinvesting in permanent employees, or “dead wood.” Instead, theyshould use temps and “pay only for production.” With this modelof work, industry leaders arguably pushed farther than anyone elsesince World War II in selling workers as commodities. The results,as they say, are history: today the temp industry is one of thefastest growing sectors of the economy and its model of employmentrelations has become a widely emulated ideal, even in those sectorsfarthest removed from “temporary” employment, such as the UnitedStates civil service.4

To trace the origins of this dramatic success, we must go backto the earliest days of the industry after World War II. At thispoint, it was not at all certain that temp work would be acceptedas a legitimate sector of the economy. Early industry leadersfaced opposition on two fronts. First, the popular association oftemp work with the ill-reputed private employment industrymeant resistance from social activists, policymakers, and thepublic at large. Second, the industry’s role in relieving employersof their employee obligations meant opposition from union offi-cials determined to defend the worker protections they had wonat the bargaining table.

To avoid these obstacles, industry leaders pushed into the area ofleast resistance. Although they employed substantial numbers ofmen, industry leaders publicly cast temp work as “women’s work”– suitable for white, middle-class housewives with a little extra timeon their hands – drawing on the long-term marginalization ofwomen workers as “mere seekers of ‘pin money.’ ”5 This strategywas quite successful. The “Kelly Girl” – dress, heels, white gloves,and all – became a popular icon and the temp industry, having

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© 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing LtdJournal of Historical Sociology Vol. 21 No. 1 March 2008

successfully sidestepped these stumbling blocks, grew remarkablythroughout the 1950s and ‘60s.6

In casting temp work as “women’s work,” industry leadersentered the postwar cultural debate about women and work, oftenin surprising ways. For example, while they challenged the myth ofdomesticity by depicting work as the cure for “housewifeitis” (wellbefore Betty Friedan’s “problem with no name”), they also rein-forced gender stereotypes by emphasizing the secondary nature oftemp jobs – and of temporary workers (“extra work for extrawomen”). In this apparent contradiction, temp industry leaderswere not alone, although they were unusually emphatic and out-spoken. In her study of flight attendants, for example, KathleenBarry found that airlines (with the help of the popular media)advertised stewardesses’ glamour and spunk, all the while high-lighting their enduring domesticity. “The archetypal stewardess,”Barry observed, “was enjoying the chance to travel briefly whiletraining for the ultimate female ‘profession’ of homemaking.”7 In asimilar vein, the archetypal temporary worker was already a suc-cessful homemaker, looking for new experiences and a little extramoney to supplement her husband’s income, without disruptingher duties at home.

By defining temporary work as “women’s work” in the yearsafter World War II, industry leaders did more than just open thedoors to a new occupation to join nursing, secretarial work,teaching, domestic service, retail, and other standards of the bur-geoning pink-collar sector. They took the idea of “women’s work”and used it to justify an entirely new category of “respectable”(white, middle-class) but marginal work. With this strategy,industry leaders made permanent a new sector of the economythat would prove resistant to union organizing efforts and effec-tively beyond the reach of a range of worker protections, includ-ing health benefits, unemployment insurance, and future anti-discrimination laws. The stewardesses of Barry’s study went on tobecome successful union organizers demanding greater respect,better wages, and increased job security for women workers.Temps, on the other hand, remained on the margins – from the“Kelly Girls” of the 1950s to the many millions of temporaryworkers today. The implications of this cannot be underesti-mated. By creating a new stratum of second-class “respectable”work, this strategy established a beachhead from which to launchbroader campaigns against the worker obligations that had, afterdecades of bitter conflict, come to be associated with the conceptof “work” in core areas of the American economy. Instead beingessential to the success of a company, workers in this new setupare understood as a costly source of labor market rigidity.8 The

The Making of the Kelly Girl 3


origins of this remarkable shift can be traced – at least in part –to the gendered strategies of early temp industry leaders.

The Origins of the Kelly Girl Strategy

The founders of the modern temp industry faced formidable barri-ers in the years after World War II. First, because temp agencieswere widely believed to be an extension of the private employmentindustry, which was notorious for its abuses of workers, they faceda great deal of opposition from social activists, policymakers, andthe public at large. Second, because they sought to relieve employ-ers of costly worker protections – such as worker’s compensation,pensions, and health benefits – they faced opposition from unionofficials. Industry leaders were able to turn these obstacles intoopportunity, however, by developing a gendered strategy thatlaunched the “Kelly Girl” and a whole new way of organizing work.

Padrones & the Private Employment Industry

When the modern temp industry emerged after World War II, itsfounders asserted that theirs was an essentially “new” industry.However, most observers at the time, including government offi-cials, union leaders, and social activists, assumed that temp agen-cies were simply newer versions of the long-established – and highlydisreputable – private employment agencies. The ignominy of thisindustry was exemplified by the public outrage over so-called“padrones” in the early 20th century. Padrones, often immigrantsthemselves, provided recent immigrants with jobs and suppliedcompanies with cheap labor. Accused of luring workers to Americato take bogus jobs, charging exorbitant fees and, in general, ruth-lessly exploiting unknowing immigrants, padrones aroused the ireof social reformers such as Grace Abbott in Chicago, novelists suchas Horatio Alger, government officials, and union leaders.9 In 1915,for example, social reformer Francis Kellor described the padronesystem as the “most vicious anti-American institution.”10

By the 1930s, padrones had largely disappeared, but they hadbeen replaced by employment agents, who were accused ofpadrone-like abuses such as sending workers to “phony” jobs,charging excessive fees, and physically abusing workers.11 Iowa’sCommissioner of Labor declared employment agents to be the most“despicable, double-dyed villains that ever lived.”12 The Ohio Com-missioner of Labor agreed, charging that the purpose of privateemployment agents was “to fleece the jobless.”13 Like padrones,many private employment agents were immigrants themselves;

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unlike padrones, however, they rarely specialized in providing jobsfor their compatriots and, therefore, did not wield the same powerover workers.14

By the 1950s virtually every state had imposed extensive regu-lations on the private employment industry. These laws usuallyrequired employment agents to register, obtain a state license, andpost bond; they capped fees charged to workers; they prohibited feesharing between agents and employers; and they banned the prac-tice of sending “scabs” to replace union workers on strike. Somestates even required employment agents to have lived in an area fora minimum time period, to provide references from “reputablecitizens of the community,” and to ask permission before moving inorder to ensure that they did not collect fees and then leave withoutproviding workers with jobs.15

When modern temp agencies were founded in the late 1940s andearly 1950s, many observers and regulators considered them to beprivate employment agencies.16 In 1955, for example, the SupremeCourt of Nebraska found that Manpower, Inc. was “obviously” anemployment agency and, as a result, was required to comply withstate licensing laws.17 One year later, the Florida Industrial Com-mission argued before the Florida Supreme Court that Manpower,Inc. was just another private employment agency prone to themany “evils” of that industry.18

Manpower and other early temp agencies resisted being classifiedas private employment agents in order to escape such regulations.19

The crux of the matter, they argued, was their claim to employerstatus. Employment agents were simply labor market intermediar-ies, they maintained, linking people in need of work with employersin need of labor. Workers found jobs through employment agents,but were not employed by them. Temp agencies, by contrast, didnot link workers to employers, but were employers in their ownright, contracting out their specialized labor to firms. A betterparallel, they argued, would be with a painting company whoseemployees worked under the direction of the house owner, or anaccounting firm whose employees provided bookkeeping servicesfor its customers.20 Nor did temp agencies charge fees to workerslike employment agents. The “mark-up” – the difference betweenwhat temp agencies charged firms and paid to workers – was not,they claimed, a “fee.”21

In 1956 the Florida Supreme Court agreed with them. Manpower,the Court ruled, was not an intermediary but the employer of itstemporary workers. The agency, the judges wrote, “retains controlover its employees, and can substitute one employee for another inany particular job. It deducts the withholding tax from the employ-ee’s salary, pays the social security tax, carries unemployment and



workmen’s compensation on each employee, and has its employ-ees bonded.”22 Not everyone supported the industry’s position,however: the Nebraska Supreme Court reached the opposite con-clusion. As George Gonos has shown, these cases were only a smallpart of the long and costly legal battle industry leaders fought to beconsidered the official employer of their temps, thus distinguishingthem from their disreputable ancestors, the private employmentindustry.23

Unions in the Postwar Era

The second major obstacle early temp industry leaders faced wasunion power. Although the oft-cited “labor management accord” ofthe postwar era was, as Nelson Lichtenstein has argued, remarkablytenuous and strife-ridden, unions were more powerful than everbefore (or after), representing about 35 percent of the labor force.24

Their strength would be severely undermined by the growth of anindustry that relieved employers of their legal obligations to workers– pensions, health benefits, worker’s compensation, and other hard-won worker protections.25 Not surprisingly, union leaders foughtagainst the incursion of temporary work into their strongholds. Theiropposition was likely hardened by the memory of padrones, who hadprovided strikebreakers to corporations earlier in the century.26

Organized labor’s resistance to the temp industry was centeredon the largely male industrial sector, where unions were mostpowerful.27 For example, in the early 1960s District 727 of theInternational Association of Machinists filed a grievance againstLockheed Aircraft Company, demanding that Lockheed stop usingtemps to erode the union’s bargaining unit. Meanwhile, Local 887of the United Auto Workers filed a similar grievance against NorthAmerican Aviation, Inc., charging that the company was usingtemps to avoid paying the higher wage rates and benefits of per-manent employees. “It’s a black market that is fattening itself onthe aerospace industry,” said Mr. Thomas McNett, district presi-dent. “[This] makes it incumbent on this union to do all in its powerto wipe out the job black market.”28

These grievances were the exception, however. The temp industrywas largely able to avoid union ire by taking measures to placatelabor officials. For example, it was common practice for tempagency executives to sign contracts affirming that temporaryworkers would not cross picket lines or replace strikers.29 Man-power went a step further, promising to get union officials’ consentbefore entering a workplace. As Elmer Winter, president andfounder of Manpower, explained, “We have always maintained goodrelations with the unions. In every plant where a union is involved,

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we clear the use of Manpower with the union. If it objects, we pullout.”30 This promise sounded magnanimous, but it was one Wintercould easily have imagined keeping, since Manpower – like otherpostwar temp agencies – avoided the unionized manufacturingsector altogether, focusing instead on nonunion blue-collar jobsand “women’s work.”

Treading carefully around unions helped the founders of thetemp industry avoid serious resistance in the years after World WarII. But their most important strategy was much less direct, andultimately much more powerful. Drawing on the long-standingassumption that “women’s work” was marginal and of little interestto postwar unions (who focused on men’s supposedly “breadwin-ning” employment), industry leaders cast temporary work as thedomain of white, middle-class women. In so doing, they created anew kind of women’s work, and an influential new kind of marginalemployment.

The Making of the Kelly Girl

Early temp industry leaders strategically utilized images of gender,race, and class to construct the archetypical temp worker. Bestseen in the “Kelly Girl,” which remains a cultural icon 50-odd yearsafter its making, this strategy established temp work as the sphereof white, middle-class women. Like portrayals of Rosie the Riveterduring World War II, these images showed white, middle-classwomen as both workers and feminine. Unlike Rosie the Riveter,however, they showed women working for glamour, self-fulfillment,and independence, rather than for patriotic service to their country.Yet in both instances, these images portrayed women as explicitlytemporary workers: Rosie was working only until her soldier camehome from the war; Kelly was working only until her kids camehome from school. The same was true of stewardesses, who wereadvertised as “glamour girls” working for fun, adventure, and ulti-mately husbands.31

The ranks of temps, however – unlike stewardesses – includedsignificant numbers of men, despite the “Kelly Girl” image. Why,then, did industry leaders package temp work as “women’s work”?The Kelly Girl strategy achieved several crucial goals for tempindustry leaders. First, constructing temp work as “women’s work”reduced any perceived threat the industry might pose to “bread-winning” male jobs and the unions that represented them. In fact,industry leaders made this claim explicitly: “the temporary serviceindustry poses no threat to labor,” maintained the president ofOlsten Temporary Services, “but instead supplements the laborforce with housewives and mothers – women who might never have



returned to work but for the emergence of this much neededindustry.”32 Second, the Kelly Girl strategy differentiated the tempindustry from padrones and the private employment industry.Industry leaders attached themselves to the respectability of white,middle-class “ladies” to make clear how far removed this was frompadrones and their poor, nonwhite immigrants.33 Finally, by con-structing temp work as “women’s work,” industry leaders dangledthe promise of cutting employers’ costs in an economy where“female substitution” was a time-honored strategy to lower wages.34

The Kelly Girl strategy also allowed the temp industry to takeadvantage of the charged and contradictory gender politics of thepostwar era. Even as white, middle-class women entered the laborforce in greater numbers than ever before in the 1950s, culturalpressure for them to conform to “traditional” ideals was formi-dable.35 Temp industry leaders capitalized on the disjuncturebetween reality and ideology by urging women to work while at thesame time maintaining the primacy of the domestic sphere. House-wives could work in temporary jobs, they maintained, and still keepup with their domestic duties. This addressed the ambivalencesome middle-class women may have felt about the competing rolesof housewife and wage earner, while opening doors for those womenwho had been barred from full-time work because of firms’ exclu-sionary policies.36 At the same time, temp industry leaders wereresponding to – and taking advantage of – many women’s growingconcerns about a variety of labor market issues, including financialindependence, skill acquisition, and self-fulfillment through work.37

The images of gender, race, and class constructed by temp indus-try leaders were complicated and often incongruous. For example,at the same time that they opened up new ways of thinking aboutwhite, middle-class women as viable workers, and about domesticlife as unsatisfying, these images reinforced the belief that womenwere housewives first and workers second. And, perhaps moreimportantly, at the same time that they introduced new categoriesof “respectable” (white, middle-class) work, these images strength-ened – and institutionalized – the divide between “breadwinning”(male) employment and secondary (female) jobs. Indeed, the mostnotable outcome of their efforts was a new kind of work that was atonce “respectable” and marginal.

“I rent women” – John Brandt, executive vice president ofKelly Girl Service, 195838

The most basic element of the Kelly Girl strategy was to take onexplicitly feminine names: Kelly Girl Service, Western Girl Service,Workman Girl Service, American Girl Service, White Collar Girl

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Service, Right Girls, etc. Although Manpower, Inc. was a notableexception to this rule, the company nonetheless led its competitorsin constructing and publicizing images of “feminine” temp workers(Manpower called its version the “White Glove Girls”). In fact,according to James Scheinfeld, Manpower’s vice president ofadvertising, the company launched its massive “White Glove Girl”campaign “to counteract the inherent masculinity of the corporatename.”39

Taking on feminized names did not mean that the agenciesemployed exclusively women, however. Although many of themstarted out employing mostly women, by the early 1960s almostall of them employed significant numbers of men as well. In 1962for example, both Western Girl and Kelly Girl established maleindustrial and technical divisions – called “Western Men” and“Labor Aides,” respectively – and nearly half of Manpower’sworkers were men.40

Because of their origins in employing women workers, feminizednames might be seen not as a conscious strategy but rather anhonest (if out of date) reflection of the companies’ employee base.However, evidence indicates otherwise. In the late 1950s there wasa flurry of name changing from gender-neutral to female-specificcompany titles. Sam Workman established the first modern tempagency in 1929 as “Workman Diversified Enterprise, Inc.,” latersimplified to “Workman Service.” In the late 1950s, however,Workman changed the name to “Workman Girls.” Similarly, in 1957William Kelly changed his company’s name from “Russell KellyOffice Service” to “Kelly Girl Service.” A year later W. Robert Stoverchanged his agency’s name from “Western Employers Service” to“Western Girl Service.”41

Feminizing the industry’s image went far beyond simply adding“girl” to their names. In their massive public relations campaign,temp industry leaders emphasized again and again that theirswas an industry exclusively for women. This theme was capturedperfectly in a 1962 speech by Kelly Girl vice president TerrenceAdderley before the New York Society of Analysts. “We can think of60,000 reasons why our 60,000 female employees want to work ona temporary basis,” Adderley declared, “but we cannot think of onegood reason why a man, other than a student or a man betweenjobs, would want to work as a temporary employee.”42 It is impor-tant to note, however, that the very same year – 1962 – Kelly Girlexecutives were adding industrial and technical divisions designedto employ men.

Industry leaders were relentless in their campaign to paint afeminine portrait of temporary work. Starting in the mid-1950s,thousands of pictures of “Kelly Girls,” “White Glove Girls,” Western



Girl’s “Cowgirls,” “American Girls,” and more dotted the pages ofpopular magazines and newspapers, including Newsweek, Busi-ness Week, U.S. News & World Report, Good Housekeeping, Fortune,the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune. In fact, in 1960Manpower, Inc. purchased an entire printing company in its home-town of Milwaukee solely to handle its advertising literature andinternal documents. The company used it quite heavily indeed,distributing over 7 million pieces of promotional literature everyyear.43 For example, in 1961 alone Manpower leaders spent onemillion dollars to ensure that images of their “White Glove Girls”appeared in the Sunday papers of every major metropolitan area inthe country. They also created a range of promotional materialsthat encouraged women to become “White Glove Girls,” includingposters (“Be a girl in the white gloves”) and a “Girl in the WhiteGloves Handbook” (distributed to all female employees). And theymailed countless advertisements directly to business owners withtaglines such as, “This pair of white gloves will be important to yourbusiness” or “Office help going on vacation? Call for the girl in thewhite gloves.”44 These images quickly gained powerful cultural cur-rency, even spawning women’s “career” fashions and fabric prints.As reported by the New York Times in 1962, Kelly Girl “has becomeso widespread that it has joined with 17 leading department storesthroughout the country and Henry Rosenfeld, Inc., manufacturer ofpopular-price misses’ dresses, to design and market special KellyGirl fashions.”45

The image these campaigns presented was of a white, middle-class, and patently “feminine” workforce. A full-length picture of a“Kelly Girl” in 1960, for example, showed a stylish young whitewoman wearing white gloves, high heels, and jewelry, along with ahat and purse adorned with the Kelly Girl logo.46 Manpower’s“White Glove Girl” was similar in a 1962 New York Times adver-tisement depicting a well coifed Sandra Dee-type model wearing adress, high heels, and, of course, white gloves.47 Early in thiscampaign, Manpower’s advertisements were a “feminine” hot pink,contrasting sharply with magazines’ black-and-white color scheme.Typically, they pictured the head, shoulders, and – most promi-nently – the white gloves of Judy Newton, the same Sandra Dee-likemodel who became the public face Manpower in the 1960s. “For thevery best in temporary office help,” the captions read, “call Man-power for ‘The Girl in the White Gloves.’ ”48

The carefully crafted femininity of such images turned the “WhiteGlove Girls” and “Kelly Girls” into popular sex symbols. In 1962the advertising magazine Printer’s Ink named Manpower modelJudy Newton a “respectable sex symbol.”49 A year earlier, real-lifeKelly Girl Jean Kent won the title of “Pin-Up Girl” in the Chicago

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Source: Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 June 1960, p. C6



Source: Personnel Journal, November 1965, back cover

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Tribune.50 Company leaders explicitly promoted the sex appeal oftheir women workers. In a highly publicized public service projectcalled “the Kelly Beautification Program,” for example, the tempagency sent “Kelly Girls” to plant flowers in New York City’s publicparks. However, as an article in Time Magazine quipped, “someclients might feel piqued that the ‘temporaries’ do not always looklike the pert young things Kelly has been sending to plant gladioliand publicity in city parks.”51

Temp industry leaders advertised male temp work as well, butminimally – such ads represented less than three percent of theirpromotional effort. Interestingly, they did not generally portrayimages of men; rather, they showed pictures of tools and, in somecases, even women. A 1965 ad for Kelly Girl’s industrial division“Labor Aides,” for example, pictured a large loading hook: “If youhave boxcars to unload, bales to lift, stock to move, or anything elsethat needs unskilled or semi-skilled help, Labor-Aides temporaryworkers will save you money.”52 Company executives produced anumber of variations on this theme, with depictions of sledgehammers, loading dollies, and a variety of other industrial tools.

The leaders of Manpower also publicized male temp work, butinstead of depicting masculine tools they showed images of “WhiteGlove Girls” faced with “unladylike” jobs. One such advertisementpictured a white, middle-class woman wearing a dress, high heels,and the white gloves that had become the company’s iconic symbol.She held one gloved hand on her hip, the other to her chest, andexclaimed: “Me unload lumber? Heavens no! I’m Manpower’s ‘Girlin the White Gloves’ and my job is helping you temporarily withoffice work.” But Manpower did have men to handle “unladylike”jobs, the text below assured business owners, including unloadingand loading, stacking and sorting lumber, and cleaning – “youname it.”53

It is important to note what temp industry leaders were notportraying – men and nonwhites. Doing so would highlight theirencroachment into areas claimed by powerful industrial unions, andcould muddle their careful campaign to distinguish themselves fromprivate employment agents. In thousands of ads in the postwar era,there was only one exception: in 1964, Manpower ran an advertise-ment in Newsweek that portrayed a white, working-class manholding a pair of work gloves. “Need temporary help? Call for ‘thereliables’ from Manpower!”54 This image appeared only twice, and“the reliables,” sans image, were mentioned only one other time inthe countless advertisements, magazine advertisements, newspaperarticles, and books produced by Manpower executives.55

In addition to portraying the archetypal temp worker as “femi-nine,” temp industry leaders also were careful to show her as



“respectable,” that is, white, middle-class, and highly skilled. Thiswas most clearly evidenced in the image of the white gloves preva-lent in (and largely unique to) temp industry advertisements at thistime. Needless to say, the “class” and “femininity” conveyed by thewhite gloves was no accident. Elmer Winter, co-founder and presi-dent of Manpower, described the company’s strategy this way: “Wechose white gloves as a symbol . . . because they seem to repre-sent everything that is feminine, neat, and proper. They symbolizequality and efficiency.”56

Temp industry leaders further emphasized the class distinction oftheir female workforce with frequent reminders that these womendid not have to work. These were not poor, unskilled, and un-educated women. Rather, they were “proper” white, middle-class

Source: Newsweek, 19 July 1965, p. 4

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housewives, dabbling in temp work in their spare time to help payfor a few luxuries. In 1958, for example, the executive vice presidentof Kelly Girl described what he called the “typical Kelly Girl” in thisway: “She doesn’t want full-time work, but she’s bored with strictlykeeping house. Or maybe she just wants to take a job until shepays for a davenport or a new fur coat.”57 Elmer Winter of Man-power agreed, right down to the fur coat. In describing the perks ofworking for women, Winter asked: “As for real luxury items, whynot? That space over the fireplace has been crying for a goodpainting. Why not invest in one? How about that winter vacation, orthat fur coat you’ve always felt you didn’t have any right to ask for,which will not only keep you warm but do something to yourmorale?”58

The suggestion that these women did not need to work wascaptured perfectly by the title of a 1956 article in Good Housekeep-ing: “Extra Money for Extra Work for Extra Women.” The article,essentially an advertisement for Manpower (it even concluded withthe company’s contact information), opened with this question: “Doyou occasionally have a few free hours you’d like to put to work toearn some extra spending money?” After describing Manpower’ssize and services, as well as the benefits of temping, the anonymousauthor advised, “if you have extra time you would like to turn intoextra money, you may want to investigate the services of a tempo-rary help business.”59

Describing their work – and their workers – as “extra” was acommon theme in the industry’s marketing campaigns. Tempswere secondary workers who would not undermine the authority of

Source: Personnel Journal, Sept. 1964, p. 438–9



male breadwinners, nor would they trespass into union territory.Manpower’s 1957 self-published history Manpower, Inc. boastedthat “the opportunities afforded by Manpower for a woman whoneed not earn all of her living expenses are excellent. It is ideal fora married woman with responsibilities that do not permit herabsence from the home every day of the week.”60 Similarly, in the1961 article “Money and Part-Time Jobs for Women,” Elmer Winterof Manpower heralded the “thousands and thousands of womenwho have no illusions about embarking on a grandiose career;women who, when they say they want to work, mean just that. . . . They consider [work] as something nice, something extra. It isnot the primary motivation.”61

The secondary status of female temps was described succinctlyby Norman Jackson, vice president of Kelly Services:

“It’s true that temporary workers don’t get pensions or six-week vacations . . . butthey get a decent wage, not just the bare minimum. . . . You also have to takecognizance of the people who want these jobs. By and large, they are married womenon the young side, who want the extra money to supplement their husbands’incomes, or they’re older women whose children have married and gone away.”62

Over and over again, industry leaders described temps as marginalworkers. They were secondary earners who wanted to remain so,content to work for a little extra money without ambition for a“grandiose career.” This was similar to employers’ portrayals ofother kinds of women workers, such as stewardesses and “Avonladies,” who were said to work for glamour, excitement, and inex-pensive cosmetic products, rather than pursuing a fulfilling careeror supporting their families.63

Industry leaders sometimes went so far as to suggest that tempwork was not “work” at all but more like a pastime. In 1961, forexample, a Kelly Girl advertisement in the New York Times blared,“HOW TO MAKE Lots of Money WITHOUT WORKING.” Although inthe text Kelly officials conceded that the only way to do so was towin the sweepstakes, marry a millionaire, or inherit a fortune, theyoffered temping as “the next best thing.”64

The portrayal of temp workers and their wages as “extra” stood instark contrast to the reality of the vast majority women who soughttemporary jobs out of real economic need. Indeed, this was true ofpostwar women workers more generally, who had only limitedability to support themselves or their families without the help oftheir parents or husbands. Women at this time had limited accessto mortgages, credit cards, or other kinds of borrowing becausetheir earnings were assumed to be temporary or part of a man’s“family income”; employers could pay men higher wages for exactlythe same job; and key stepping stones to the middle class – the GI

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Bill and union membership – were largely closed off to them.65 Thispicture of economic need rather than hunger for glamour and furcoats was borne out in a study of female temporary workers in theearly 1960s. Researcher Mack Moore found that 73 percent cited“to earn money” as the most important reason for working, whileless than 15 percent of temps said they worked for “relief from theboredom of housework.” These women were not working to pay forfur coats, as suggested by temp industry executives; rather theytemped to pay household bills and to save for their children’seducation. “To have extra miscellaneous items from time to time”was listed half as many times as the need to meet daily livingexpenses.66

Perhaps somewhat inconsistent with the description of temps as“extra women,” industry leaders also emphasized temps’ “skills,”“know-how,” and “special training.” These were not immigrantslooking for a break through a private employment agency; theywere “specially certified” workers, and they carried their companycertificate to prove it. A 1960 Kelly Girl ad in the Chicago DailyTribune, for example, described “the exacting Kelly Girl testingprocedure that assures you the right girl for the right job.”67 A 1963advertisement in U.S. News & World Report asked business owners:“Rushed at year end? Insist on the girl with the guarantee! Sheknows all about inventories. Figures and figuring are old hat to her.You know she’s qualified by the 100% guarantee she hands you inwriting.”68 The ad included a miniature copy of the “Kelly GirlGuarantee,” a warranty for satisfactory service.

Manpower, too, highlighted its women workers’ “special training,”“savvy,” and “accuracy and productivity.” Their advertisementscommonly showed a “White Glove Girl” holding a “Certificate ofTraining” with her white gloves, for example, and they insisted that“Special training equips the ‘Girl in the White Gloves’ to do a betterjob in your office!”69 Another ad boasted that Manpower’s “WhiteGlove Girls” were trained “in the special skills of temporary officework by a training course that took Manpower a year’s study toprepare. Four manuals, 25 chapters, so advanced that leadingfirms and schools are asking to use them.”70

Industry leaders’ emphasis on their women workers’ skills dif-fered markedly from the few ads featuring male workers, whoseskill levels were either unspecified or identified as “unskilled orsemi-skilled.” The 1964 Manpower advertisement for “the reli-ables,” for example, simply described male temps by their job titles:“Unloaders, warehousemen, shipping help, clean-up crew, laborersand machine operators are all a part of Manpower’s service. Ourmen are called ‘The Reliables’ – and they’re just that! They show upon time – come to you fully bonded and insured – work hard as long



as you need them.”71 The unskilled nature of the jobs seemed tospeak for itself, and the primary “skill” these workers were said tobring was punctuality. Industry leaders’ emphasis on male workers’lack of skill and replaceability, particularly in comparison withtheir glowing descriptions of female workers’ particular “know-how,” is not surprising, however, given their need to avoid unionopposition. Advertising skilled male workers and occupationswould have encroached on union territory and likely provokedantagonism from labor leaders.

In general, then, temp industry leaders responded to the majorobstacles presented by the disreputable history of the privateemployment industry and the power of unions by painting a veryspecific portrait of the archetypical temp worker. She was a woman,and quite “feminine” at that. She was white and middle-class – for

Source: U.S. News and World Report, 16 Dec. 1963, p. 104

18 Erin Hatton


Source: Newsweek, 18 May 1964, p. 11



she did not need to work – and she was highly skilled. This imagewas no coincidence, nor was it merely a reflection of the industry’sprimary workforce. It successfully deployed notions of genderand respectability to avoid potentially ruinous opposition and, ulti-mately, it institutionalized a new sector of “respectable” butmarginal work.

Ladies, beyond the door opportunity awaits you. All you needdo is take that first step. Come in, please. – Elmer Winter,president of Manpower, Inc., 196172

Even as industry leaders were pursuing their own agenda with theKelly Girl strategy, they also responded to many women’s interestsin gaining independence, equality, and even self-fulfillment throughemployment. As a result, postwar temp industry officials unexpect-edly took part in the long-term cultural debate about women andwork. At the time, more women than ever before were workingoutside the home, particularly married women with young chil-dren.73 In response, the domestic ideal grew even stronger, as theengines of cultural production sought to contain the “threat” ofwomen working by describing it as a problem that needed to beresolved.74

Although other employers in the expanding pink-collar sectorwere encouraging housewives to seek work outside the home, fewused the language of “self-fulfillment” to do so. Hospitals, forinstance, urged nurses who had left the workforce to return out ofan “obligation” to ease the severe nursing shortage.75 Temp agen-cies, by contrast – well before Betty Friedan used the language ofself-actualization to encourage middle-class housewives to pursuecareers outside the home – encouraged married women to work forself-fulfillment, gender equality, and financial independence. Forexample, in an early brochure Kelly Girl leaders waxed poetic: “Inevery woman’s heart there’s a yearning . . . to meet new people. . . to go to new places . . . to earn her own money . . . to do newthings.” As described in Fortune magazine, the brochure pictured a“smartly clad young woman entering a lavender automobile, tryingon a new hat, and chatting over cocktails in an elegant restaurantthat looks like the Four Seasons.”76 Temp work, Kelly Girl officialsseemed to be saying, offered (white, middle-class) women self-fulfillment (the “yearning” for something more), independence (their“own” money), and even glamour and excitement (new people,places, and things).

Manpower executives advertised these grand opportunitiesas well. A 1965 ad depicted a fashionable woman, floppy wide-

20 Erin Hatton


brimmed hat over one eye, a gloved finger at her lips. “Ssshhhh!”she seemed to be saying, as though telling a secret. The text belowran:

“SHE LEADS A DOUBLE LIFE . . . AND LOVES IT! She’s a temporary office workerwhen she chooses . . . and a homemaker all the time. She’s a Manpower White GloveGirl, and she loves her double life, because it gives her a refreshing change, becauseshe earns good money, because it makes her happy. She works when she wantsto . . . and meets new people all the time . . . enjoys life more. Could you lead adouble life? . . . You could if you call Manpower for an appointment, or stop in for aninterview. Do it today . . . have a double life to enjoy!”77

Although Manpower leaders gave lip service to cultural ambiva-lence about women working (a “worker when she chooses . . . anda homemaker all the time”), their emphasis was not uncertaintybut, rather, the sovereignty, fulfillment, and glamour that wagework offered. Moreover, the sexual intrigue of the “double life”in this advertisement should not be overlooked. Temp industryleaders seemed to be luring women workers into a dangerous place– the world of work, and perhaps more – only to return them homeagain, safe and sound, where domesticity reigned supreme.

The many benefits of wage work for women was the central themeof Manpower president Elmer Winter’s 1961 book, A Woman’sGuide to Earning a Good Living. Working outside the home, Wintermaintained, would give women a new sense of independence. Atwork, he explained, “you are no longer merely the daughter, thewife, the mother, but an independent being, greeted by the elevatoroperator, your fellow workers, the boss and the waitresses in thecompany cafeteria.” Working not only gave women independenceand respect outside the home, Winter claimed, but inside the homeas well. “At the supper table,” Winter wrote, “it’s a pleasant relief tobe able to tell stories of something that happened somewhere elseto you instead of sitting quietly while your husband talks about hisoffice day.” In addition to an equal footing at the dinner table,Winter argued that working would give women more equality in allaspects of domestic life. “If both wife and husband arrive home inthe evening tired from their jobs, the likelihood is that they willshare the domestic chores. . . . The stigma of housework’s beingonly for the sissies or the henpecked went out with the iceman.Both partners work; both take pride in their home. It’s a partner-ship all the way through.”78

In contrast to the exciting world of work, Winter described the lifeof a housewife as “depressing” and a “drudgery.” “It takes a mostunusual woman not to get fed up with the day-in, day-out round ofdomesticity, despite all the mechanical aids,” he wrote. “Even thelatest model in deep freezes or washer-dryers is not the most



stimulating of company as a steady diet. Almost every woman of myacquaintance has confessed to me that there are many times in herdomestic rounds when she suffers from ‘housewifeitis.’ ” Workingfor wages, Winter promised, would give women the cure for this“disease.” “Why is it,” he asked, “that every woman with a job sheenjoys gives forth such an aura of inner fulfillment? So often amongour friends, my wife and I have seen the ‘befores’ and ‘afters’:before, neurotic, complaining, restless; after, serene and with arenewed sense of living.”79

Other industry leaders sold work as the route to self-fulfillmentas well. In their 1963 book Work Smartly, Kelly Girl executivesWilliam Russell Kelly and brother Richard Kelly wrote: “Manywomen have the feeling that household work after a time losesimportance both to their families and to themselves. These motherscan no longer get emotional satisfaction from housework. . . . Manywomen seek temporary jobs as a means of self-expression.”80

Temp industry executives were selling self-fulfillment to womenmuch as a door-to-door salesman would have sold them a new ovencleaner. But they were not alone. As the middle class expanded inthe postwar era, automobiles, modern appliances, and even tran-quilizers like Miltown were being sold to the middle class – andmiddle-class women in particular – as an essential part of a newlifestyle based on convenience and psychological fulfillment.81

Nor were Elmer Winter and other industry leaders alone in theirdescription of “women’s problem” and its solution, even in thisculturally conservative era that championed women’s domesticity.As Joanne Meyerowitz has shown, plenty of popular magazinearticles in the postwar era portrayed “domesticity as exhaustingand isolating.”82 In truth, Elmer Winter and other temp industryexecutives were taking part in an ongoing dialogue among elitewhite feminists dating back to Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the1890s, one that would soon be reignited by Betty Friedan and the“second wave” feminists later in the decade.

Yet Elmer Winter and other industry executives were not exactlyfeminists. Winter, for example, was a lawyer and businessman;and although he was not divorced from politics (he would laterbecome quite active in the affairs of Israel), he did not espousefeminism. Even while supporting (some) women’s desires for inde-pendence, equality, and fulfillment through wage work, Winterand other temp industry leaders emphasized the primacy ofwomen’s service to their husbands and families. For instance, atthe same time as he quoted Simone de Beauvoir and VirginiaWoolf, Winter asserted, “I think it is downright wrong for anymarried woman to allow her own personal ambition (whatever hermotivations) to upset the equilibrium of those to whose welfare

22 Erin Hatton


she should be dedicated.”83 The Kelly brothers agreed: “A wisewoman is always a wife and mother first.”84

In encouraging women to seek self-fulfillment in work withoutdethroning domesticity, then, temp industry leaders went only sofar as their own interests led them and no farther. It is likely thatthis rhetoric – like that of the airlines, which encouraged women towork for glamour while at the same time imposing strict age limitsand marriage bars – both exacerbated and capitalized on culturalambivalence about women working in the postwar era. As anumber of historians have shown, many women themselves hadinternalized this strong ambivalence.85 Manpower itself found that65 percent of nonworking middle-class women “expressed an activeinterest in going back to work but circumstances or attitudes,primarily that a woman belongs in the home, prevented them” fromdoing so.86 Other women felt that work was simply incompatiblewith family obligations. This was a common theme in Elaine TylerMay’s study of postwar American women and their families. Onewoman in May’s study described her choice between work andfamily in this way: “I gave up a promising career as advertisingmanager in a department store for children. I could have continuedit with a leave of absence and had my first child, but I felt I shouldbe a full-time mother.” Another explained, “I’m not the ‘career girl’type. I like being home and having a family.” A third said simply:“Marriage is my career.”87 Although these views may not have beentypical (or even completely honest), they demonstrate the power ofthe domestic ideal at the time.

Temp industry leaders capitalized on the cultural tensionbetween the reality of women working and the domestic ideal,offering temp work as the perfect “compromise” for mothers whowanted to work. For instance, in a 1960 article in Chatelaine, apopular women’s magazine in Canada, an executive from OfficeOverload, the only major Canadian temp agency at the time, gavethe following response to a woman who argued against full-timework for mothers:

“It’s easy to see that she bit off more than she could chew. The modern compromisefor the married woman is part-time temporary work: working hours tailored to suither particular responsibilities, the bonus interest of varied offices and industries towork in, and that extra kick, a few more dollars in the family purse! What more coulda woman want? Wilbur can have the measles without the whole fragile structure ofthe mother’s working life toppling around her. . . . This compromise satisfies someforty-thousand women across Canada who work on such a basis for the company Irepresent.”88

Like the Office Overload executive above, many industry leaderssought to assuage some women’s (and their husbands’) concerns



about combining wage work and domesticity with the promise offlexibility. In a 1965 advertisement with the headline, “ME WORK?I’d Love To But . . . ,” for example, Manpower leaders assuredhousewives that their family duties would not suffer because tempwork gave them flexibility: “Try the ‘temporary office-work’ way ofworking. No ‘buts’ about it. You’ll enjoy it, and you’ll still have timeto be a good wife and mother. You set your own work schedule whenyou’re a Manpower White Glove Girl. Work near home wheneverpossible. Get paid highest rates. And, as a White Glove Girl, you’rerecognized as the very best in temporary office help.”89 Likewise,Western Girl leaders promised women “dream jobs” with all theflexibility they could desire: “Hitch your wagon to Western Girlwhere those ‘dream’ jobs are waiting now! Dream of working thehours you choose . . . dream of working as long or as little as youwish . . . dream of selecting firms, assignments and fields you pref-er . . . at HIGH temporary rates! Who has more of the ‘Dream’temporary jobs? WESTERN GIRL.”90

For some women such promises of flexibility may have suffi-ciently assuaged their concerns (or those of their husbands) aboutworking outside the home. In reality, however, temporary work didnot offer much flexibility. In his study of the temp industry, MackMoore found that women applying for temporary jobs needed to beavailable to work full days every day of the week. Those who couldwork only partial days or certain days of the week, he discovered,were essentially eliminated from the agency’s labor pool. “A verycommon advertising appeal used by [temp agencies],” Moore noted,“is ‘work at your own convenience.’ A more appropriate appealmight be: ‘Work at our convenience, refuse work at your conve-nience.’ ”91 Temping, in short, did not necessarily offer any moreflexibility than regular jobs.

Despite the lack of any real flexibility in temporary employment,however, industry leaders’ Kelly Girl strategy was quite successful.By the end of the postwar era, the temp industry had becomeaccepted by businesses and workers as a legitimate sector of theeconomy. Industry leaders were thus well positioned to movebeyond the narrow confines of the “Kelly Girl.” In the late 1960s and‘70s, they turned their attention away from selling temp work tohousewives and focused, instead, on marketing their model of workto business owners. Instead of promoting self-fulfillment andglamour, they promised productivity and cost-savings. In doing sothey redefined workers as an expense rather than an asset.92 Theirefforts paid off: fully 90 percent of employers regularly use tempindustry services today.93 The origins of their success, however,cannot be fully attributed to downturns in the economy or employ-ers’ demands for greater flexibility but, at least in part, to the Kelly

24 Erin Hatton


Girl strategy that created a new category of “respectable” but mar-ginal work in the years after World War II.

Notes1 Erin Hatton, “The Temp Industry and the Transformation of Work in

America” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2007).2 Samuel Sacco, “Temporary Help/Staffing Services: Still Growing, Still

Evolving,” Managing Office Technology 39, no. 5 (May 1994): A2.3 Janice Castro, “Disposable Workers,” Time, 29 March 1993, 46.4 Hatton, “The Temp Industry.”5 Kathleen Barry, Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants

(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 3; see also: WilliamHenry Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, andPolitical Roles, 1920–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).

6 For more on the early growth of the industry, see: Hatton, “The TempIndustry.”

7 Barry, Femininity in Flight, 51.8 For instance, see: Peter Drucker, “They’re Not Employees, They’re

People,” Harvard Business Review (February 2002): 5.9 Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant

Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, UK: Cam-bridge University Press, 2000); Leah Vosko, Temporary Work: The GenderedRise of a Precarious Employment Relationship (Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 2000).

10 Vosko, Temporary Work, 56.11 Peck Reinventing Free Labor, 229; see also: Mack Moore, “The Role of

Temporary Help Services in the Clerical Labor Market” (Ph.D. diss., Uni-versity of Wisconsin, Madison, 1963); Florida Industrial Commission v.Manpower, Inc. of Miami, 91 So. 2d 197 (Fla. 1956).

12 Henry Guzda, “The U.S. Employment Service at 50: It Too Had to WaitIts Return,” Monthly Labor Review (June 1983): 13.

13 Ibid.14 Peck, Reinventing Free Labor, 229.15 George Gonos, “The Contest Over ‘Employer’ Status in the Post-War

United States: The Case of Temporary Help Firms,” Law Society Review 31,no. 1 (1997): 81–110; and, Moore “The Role of Temporary Help Services.”

16 Moore, “The Role of Temporary Help Services,” 187; George Gonos,“A Sociology of the Temporary Employment Relationship” (Ph.D. diss.,Rutgers University, 1994).

17 State of Nebraska v. Manpower of Omaha, 161 Neb. 387 (1955).18 Florida Industrial Commission v. Manpower.19 George Gonos, “The Interaction Between Market Incentives and

Government Actions,” in Contingent Work: American Employment Relationsin Transition, ed. Kathleen Barker and Kathleen Christensen (Ithaca andLondon: Cornell University Press, 1998), 170–91; Gonos, “The Contest”;and, Gonos, “A Sociology of the Temporary Employment Relationship.”

20 Florida Industrial Commission v. Manpower.21 Moore, “The Role of Temporary Help Services,” 2–3.22 Florida Industrial Commission v. Manpower; see also: Gonos, “The

Contest.”23 George Gonos, “Fee-Splitting Revisited: Concealing Surplus Value in

the Temporary Employment Relationship,” Politics & Society 29, no. 4



(2001): 589; see also: Gonos, “The Interaction”; Gonos, “The Contest”; and,Gonos, “A Sociology of the Temporary Employment Relationship.”

24 Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor(Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002).

25 Lichtenstein, State of the Union; Gonos, “The Interaction.”26 Peck, Reinventing Free Labor; see also: Moore, “The Role of Temporary

Help Services”; and, Vosko, Temporary Work.27 Moore, “The Role of Temporary Help Services.”28 G.W. Nordman, “Temporary Help Services Industry – Wave of the

Future?” (Master’s thesis, Rollins College, 1967), 32–3; see also: “Labor-for-rent war,” Business Week, 5 November 1966, 160.

29 “Manpower, Inc.,” Fortune, November 1956, 280; see also: “Now Man-power Inc. Goes In For Steady Jobs,” Business Week, 23 August 1976, 41.

30 “How Temporary Employees Pay Off,” Steel, 13 February 1961, 66–7.31 Barry, Femininity in Flight.32 William Olsten, “Temporary Personnel Services Gain Recognition

Abroad,” Administrative Management 28 (August 1967): 58.33 The Greek, Italian, and Mexican immigrants that padrones recruited

at the turn of the twentieth century were largely considered nonwhite,though they would not be today. For more on the construction of whitenessamong the various waves of immigrants in the early 20th century, see:David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s ImmigrantsBecome White (New York: Basic Books, 2005); and, Matthew Jacobson,Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy ofRace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Of course, there is akey parallel between the immigrant workers recruited by padrones in theearly twentieth century and the white, middle-class women recruited bytemp agencies half a century later. As Leah Vosko has observed, thesuccess of both padrones and temp agencies relied on the assumption thatthese two groups of workers did not provide for their own social reproduc-tion. Just as immigrant workers’ costs were assumed to be borne largely bythe sending country, middle-class women were assumed to be only sec-ondary wage earners (Temporary Work).

34 Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation bySex during World War II (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

35 The labor force participation rate of white, married women grew 44percent in the 1950s, more than twice that of women in general (19percent) (Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An EconomicHistory of American Women (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press,1990). For more on cultural pressure on women not to work, see: ElaineTyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (NewYork: Basic Books, 1990). For more on the many exceptions to the “JuneCleaver” ideal, see: Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women andGender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple UniversityPress, 1994); Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Work-place Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2003); Nancy Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement:Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935–1975 (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1990); and, Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums:The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York:Oxford University Press, 1987).

36 Such as those excluding married and/or pregnant women fromemployment. For more on some women’s ambivalence about working in

26 Erin Hatton


this era, see: May, Homeward Bound; Julia Kirk Blackwelder, Now Hiring:The Feminization of Work in the United States, 1900–1995 (College Station,TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1997); and, Chafe, The American Woman.

37 Blackwelder, Now Hiring; and, Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver.38 Nan Robertson, “Homemakers Take Jobs to Stave Off Boredom,” New

York Times, 22 January 1958, p. 20.39 “ ‘Respectable Sex Symbol’ Builds Solid Image,” Printer’s Ink, 27 July

1962, 36; see also: “Manpower Inc. Promotes ‘White Gloves’ Theme,” Adver-tising Age, 9 April 1962, 119.

40 Moore, “The Temporary Help Service Industry”; and, Norris Willatt,“The Business Front: Manpower Abroad,” Barron’s National Business andFinancial Weekly 45, no. 1 (1965): 11.

41 Moore, “The Temporary Help Service Industry.”42 (Emphasis in original.) As quoted in Moore, “The Role of Temporary

Help Services,” 29.43 “Manpower, Inc.,” The Commercial and Financial Chronicle, 7 Decem-

ber 1961, 2501(5).44 “Respectable Sex Symbol,” 38; “Manpower Inc. Promotes ‘White

Gloves’ Theme,” 119.45 New York Times, 4 November 1962, p. F11.46 Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 June 1960, p. C6.47 New York Times, 20 September 1962, p. 44.48 U.S. News & World Report, 20 May 1963, 88.49 “Respectable Sex Symbol,” 36–7.50 “Office Pin-Up,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 16 July 1961, p. B29.51 Time Magazine, 4 August 1967, 75.52 Newsweek, 19 July 1965, 4.53 “Manpower, Inc., Stresses Brawn,” New York Times, 20 September

1962, p. 44.54 Newsweek, 25 May 1964, 119.55 Although it is unlikely that Manpower executives produced only two

such advertisements in the postwar era, the relative scarcity of this imageand “the reliables” moniker, rather than their absolute number, is a goodmeasure of the dominance of the Kelly Girl strategy.

56 Elmer Winter, Your Future as a Temporary Office Worker (New York:Richard Rosen Press, Inc., 1968), 36.

57 Robertson, “Homemakers Take Jobs,” 20.58 Elmer Winter, A Woman’s Guide to Earning a Good Living (New York:

Simon and Schuster, 1961), 16.59 “Extra Money for Extra Work for Extra Women,” Good Housekeeping

143 (November 1956): 49–50.60 Manpower, Inc., Manpower, Inc.: The Inside Story of Temporary Help

(Milwaukee, WI: Manpower, Inc., 1957), 14.61 Elmer Winter, “Money and Part-Time Jobs for Women,” McCall’s 88

(April 1961): 68–9.62 “Women At Your Beck and Call,” Forbes, 15 July 1967, 44.63 Barry, Femininity in Flight; and, Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’

Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York:Vintage Books, 2003).

64 New York Times, 2 July 1961, p. W4.65 Sarah Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century’s

End (New York: Free Press, 2003); and, Chafe, The American Woman.66 Moore, “The Role of Temporary Help Services,” 96–8.



67 Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 June 1960, p. C6.68 U.S. News & World Report, 16 December 1963, 104.69 Newsweek, 18 May 1964, p. 11. This advertisement was part of a

$1,500,000 campaign that promoted the “special training” of Manpower’s“White Glove Girls.” Advertisements such as this one appeared in morethan 12,000,000 direct mailings to business owners, as well as in localnewspapers and popular magazines (Advertising Age 35 (16 March 1964):2).

70 Personnel Journal (December 1964): inside front cover. These highlypublicized manuals included: “An Introduction to Manpower & TemporaryOffice Work”; “Adapting Quickly to New Office Routine & Advanced Tele-phone Technique”; “Tips & Shortcuts in Typing, Dictation, Filing & OfficeProcedure”; and “The White Glove Girls Book of Beauty, Wardrobe &Personal Grooming” (Manpower Brochure, Personnel Journal (July-August1964): 37). The latter, for example, much like the guides for flight atten-dants described in Barry’s Femininity in Flight, offered many “beauty tips”for temporary workers that would be considered highly inappropriate bytoday’s standards. For an exhaustive list, see: Elmer Winter, How to be anEffective Secretary (New York: Pocket Books, 1965), 46–58.

71 (Emphasis in original.) Personnel Journal 43 (1964): 439.72 Winter, A Woman’s Guide.73 Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap.74 Barry, Femininity in Flight; Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A

History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1982); Blackwelder, Now Hiring; Goldin, Understandingthe Gender Gap; and, Susan Rimby Leighow, Nurses’ Questions/Women’sQuestions: The Impact of the Demographic Revolution and Feminism onUnited States Working Women, 1946–1986 (New York: Peter Lang, 1996).

75 Susan Rimby Leighow, “An ‘Obligation to Participate’: MarriedNurses’ Labor Force Participation in the 1950s,” in Not June Cleaver:Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Joanne Meyerow-itz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 37–56.

76 “Renting Workers to Industry,” Fortune, September 1960, 254.77 (Emphasis in original.) Chicago Tribune, 19 August 1965, p. A12.78 Winter, A Woman’s Guide. For the quotes: “you are no longer merely

the daughter,” see p. 22; “at the supper table,” see p. 19–20; and, “if bothwife and husband arrive home,” see p. 90–1.

79 Winter, A Woman’s Guide. For the quotes: “it takes a most unusualwoman,” see p. 19–20; and, “why is it that every women with a job,” see p.12–3.

80 William Russell Kelly and Richard Kelly, Work Smartly (New York:Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), 10.

81 David Herzberg, Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac(Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming 2008).

82 Joanne Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique,” in Not JuneCleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. JoanneMeyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 242.

83 Winter, A Woman’s Guide, 58–9.84 Kelly and Kelly, Work Smartly, 79.85 May, Homeward Bound; see also: Blackwelder, Now Hiring; Chafe,

The American Woman; and, Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were:American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books,1992).

28 Erin Hatton


86 In response to these early 1960s survey findings, Manpower leaderslaunched a “full-scale recruiting program” – with advertisements in news-papers, radio, television, and even on the sides of buses – to convincehousewives that the “two careers can be combined successfully” (“CouponAds Lure Women Back to Jobs,” Editor & Publisher, 15 October 1966, 20).

87 May, Homeward Bound. For the quotes: “I gave up,” see p.86; “I’m notthe ‘career girl’ type,” see p. 29; and, “marriage is my career,” see p. 31.

88 W. Keith, “Married Women, You’re Fools to Take a Job,” Chatelaine,January 1960, 148, quoted in Vosko, Temporary Work, 103–4.

89 Chicago Tribune, 2 September 1965, p. B3.90 New York Times, 12 May 1965, p. 86.91 (Emphasis in original.) Moore, “The Role of Temporary Help Services,”

158–9.92 Hatton, “The Temp Industry.”93 Timothy Brogan, Scaling New Heights: ASA’s Annual Analysis of the

Staffing Industry (Alexandria, VA: American Staffing Association, 2001).



the making of the kelly girl

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