Gender and control in offices of the New Zealand public service, 1880-1920

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of the transformation of office work in the New Zealand public service from the 1880s to the 1920s. It focuses on the intersection of 3 phenomena in this transformation- bureaucratization, mechanisation and feminisation - and how these have contributed to the constitution of the occupational and control structures that have come to predominate in the "modernn office. This paper represents a preliminary investigation of the origins and development of what, by the 1920s, had become a fully-feminised occupation concerned entirely with the transcription of copy.