The Factory as "Finishing School"

NCR in its early years developed certain rules for hiring female employees. They had to be single (no widows), at least 17 years of age and weigh at least 115 pounds. Preference was given to high school graduates and to native-born women. A company publication asserted, "Many factories recruit their lower and cheaper grades of labor from a new or foreign immigration which is wholly uneducated. These we do not want."

Women workers at NCR were also encouraged to participate in company-sponsored activities in their after-work hours. The Women's Century Club met to recite poetry and discuss literature and current events. The Domestic Economy Department offered classes in "cooking, sewing, marketing, and the details of domestic economy." Other classes for women only included hygiene and emergency nursing. Chaperoned dances with male employees took place and interdepartmental courtships were encouraged. In 1904 NCR provided women employees with an excursion trip to the St. Louis World's Fair. Every detail of comfort and safety befitting "well-bred ladies" was carefully planned in advance.

Outside visitors were usually impressed by what they saw. According to the Cincinnati Chronicle, "to one who had just come from tales of petty oppression, of factory girls fined for violating rules that are in conflict with nature, the sight of these young ladies sitting in a fern-embowered dining room eating their lunches, with soup and coffee furnished by the Company, was overpowering." NCR itself boasted that "nowhere in America is there another similar body of factory women. . . They are serious-minded, well-bred, well-dressed, self-respecting and profoundly respected."

There was an irony in the "factory as finishing-school" concept. By limiting its female workforce to the young, unmarried woman, and then encouraging them to develop the qualities of "true womanhood," NCR was in effect hastening their removal from the workplace altogether. Thus it deprived itself of a "return" on its investment in these workers that would have come, as it did with male employees, in the form of a stable, experienced, long-term worker. Once a young woman worker at NCR got married, as most of them did, she had to be replaced.

SOURCE: Andrea Tone, The Business of Benevolence: Industrial Paternalism in Progressive America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 34-35, 66-69, 161-65, 223-26.