Mapping Mobility: Spatial and Class Change in the Gilded Age Wall Street Workforce

Conclusion: Digital and Digitized Histories of Gender

Digitization has made it possible to reap a surfeit of data about Wall Street’s ambitious male clerks. Brown Bros. had its own team in the Bank Clerks’ Bowling League, and the results of its matches were reported in the New York Times. Those employees who were college graduates reported on their activities in triennial class reports that have now been fed into HathiTrust. Others joined patriotic societies, like Edward F. Myers, who was necrologist of the Sons of the American Revolution chapter in Montclair, New Jersey, or took part in other civic associations: Edmund Maeder, for example, was both a volunteer firefighter in Jamaica, Queens, and a member of its board of alderman before its consolidation into Greater New York. While finding these sources helps enrich our understanding of the shared cultural vocabulary men at Brown Bros. and other workplaces carried with them to and from their offices, it is notable that there is not nearly as much rich, text-searchable documentation of the lives of Wall Street’s female clerks.

These results reveal the importance and potential of digital and digitized sources for learning the history of gender. The growing urban middle-class demand for low-density housing in these decades—whether in the suburbs or on the fringes of the city—has been amply studied, yet not, perhaps, its gendered dimensions, in part because this has been deemed too difficult to study. One of the obstacles to tracing women through Census records—aside from the precarity of working women’s lives that has often placed them on the periphery of the enumerator’s gaze—has been the expected difficulty of tracking name changes due to marriage. In fact, I was able to find 10 of the 22 women who worked at Brown Brothers in both Censuses; only two names had changed due to marriage. In addition I found 6 women who worked at the firm in 1910 in the Census that year, but did not search for them in 1900 because they were too young to have been in the workforce.

This anticipation of methodological difficulty has created, in a sense, a preemptive roadblock to researching clerical workers’ lives: accepting contemporaneous assumptions that office work was only a temporary occupation for women before marriage, it has seemed futile to try to trace clerical workers over multiple decades to determine if this is accurate. Among other consequences, this presumption means that research into men’s and women’s lives has run on non-parallel tracks, a situation that portends to continue even with the use of digital methods: a recent paper on using machine learning to automate Census record linking regretfully concludes that this is a difficulty that cannot yet be surmounted. Meanwhile, databases like Ancestry.com that focus on tracking blood relatives currently have interfaces that make it a cumbersome process to trace the lives of “communities” like office-mates and the lives of people who belong to chosen families. Unless historians participate more vigorously in the discussion of how digital methodologies will be applied to old forms of records, we are likely to continue to rely on suppositions about women’s lives—and all people’s lives—based on imperfectly gathered evidence.

This page has paths: