Bakom stängda dörrar

Abstract

The development of offices and office-work during the 20th century has given women the opportunity to professional work and the chance to earn their living themselves. But it has all the time been men who have directed the more and more dual labour märket, because they have had a historical advantage. The empirical examples of my artide originate from an insurance company in Stockholm, dt a time (the early 1930s) when the division of work had not yet been carried through that thoroughly. The well-educated middle-class women who worked at the office did it under approximately the same conditions as their male subordinate colleges. After the second world-war the frontiers within the social landscape of the office were more clearly and sharply pronounced all the time. In the "male" domains of the office the future was planned. There the rules were created, there the business transactions were performed and there you would find the power and the information. The "female" domains offered more confined possibilities. There the decisions were carried out and there the repetitive everyday tasks were attended to. During låter decades the demand for a workroom of one's own has grown among men as well as among women, but at the same time the competition for rooms has grown harder. Today the spatial segregation of men and women is not that given or not that obvious. Nowadays the questions of status and hierarchy in respect to space center on access to seclusion in the middle of busy, variable meetings. In the most private domains of the office-world the managing directors sit behind doubly closed doors, with a secretary as an extra gate-keeper. This safeguarded seclusion is a privilege for the few, and among them women are but a minority.