Changing images of women at work
By Simon Hooper for CNN
 |  A husband or a career?A Prudential recruitment advert from the 1970s. |
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LONDON, England -- A new exhibition examines how attitudes to women in the office have changed from the middle of the nineteenth-century to the present day.
"Office Politics: Women and the Office from 1860 to the present," which opened recently at the London Metropolitan University's Women's Library, charts the progress of women at work though politics, fashions, design, technology and furniture.
Using books, letters, photographs, advertising, objects and oral histories the exhibition describes how women entered the previously male sphere of business and commerce and gradually forged a more female-friendly office environment.
When the first British women entered the office in 1860, they had begun to earn an independent living that liberated them from traditional domestic labor such as teaching or housekeeping.
White-collar revolution
And when a "white-collar revolution" in the late 19th century increased the demand for office workers, the female workforce found itself more in demand than ever.
"Female operators drawn from a superior class will, as a rule, write better than the male clerks, and spell more correctly," observed a civil servant in 1912.
In an effort to make the increasingly mechanized work of the office more attractive to women -- and more compatible with Victorian ideals of femininity -- typewriting was compared with playing the piano.
Yet women were also considered a threat and a distraction by their male colleagues and usually restricted to menial duties.
Even at the Prudential building society, one of the earliest employers to welcome female labor, women had a separate entrance and a separate work area, and were warned not to "promenade" in the corridors.
"I am not jealous of women, but I think it would be rather awkward to have men and women working together, shoulder to shoulder in the same department. I do not wish to see it," read the minutes of a Post Office select committee in 1913.
Modesty boards
By the open plan offices of the 1960s male and female workers were sitting alongside each other, yet companies still felt the need to introduce "modesty boards" to hide women's legs from view.
Married women too were expected to give up work to fulfil their traditional roles at home, and were even banned from working at Barclays Bank until 1961.
By the 1970s, attitudes to women at work had loosened up a little, yet a Prudential recruitment advertisement, pictured above, still suggested that women had to make a final choice between either a home life or a working life.
While job opportunities, career prospects and lifestyle choices are better than ever for female workers at the start of the 21st century, the exhibition draws attention to lingering issues of inequality in the office.
Now, as then, women often find themselves paid significantly less than male colleagues.
And a recent survey by business advisory firm Grant Thornton concluded that women were failing to break through at an executive level, describing senior management as "still a male preserve."
"Office Politics: Women and the Office from 1860 to the present" is on at London Metropolitan University's Women's Library until May 1. 
