Will Brehm 0:53
Cristina Groeger, welcome to FreshEd.

Cristina Groeger 1:43
Thanks so much for having me.

Will Brehm 1:44
So, in the 1880s, in Boston, Massachusetts, what sort of jobs did people have?

Cristina Groeger 1:51
Good question. So, the workforce was very much divided and gender was probably the biggest division. So, the men and women’s workforce looked really different. And for men, one of the biggest categories of work, or sectors of work, was working in the trades. So, craft workers in Boston. There were a lot of tailors, carpenters, and builders, machinists and kind of metal workers. There were also kind of a fair number of white-collar jobs. Things like clerks, or merchants, apprentices, essentially. Boston was a big commercial center and there was a lot of trade going in and out of the port. And then a large sector of low-wage work. And in the book, I sort of lumped together -for men, it was manual labor. Building Boston, building the subway system. A lot of outdoor work. Working in factories as helpers and laborers. And that was kind of one of the largest types of work for men. For women, women had fewer options. And the vast majority of women worked as domestic workers. So, sort of low-wage service work was really the biggest category of work for women with a smaller number of women working in factories, and in some white-collar jobs, although by 1880, that was pretty minimal. White Collar work was still predominantly for men. And the only really profession available for women was teaching. So, a small number of female teachers kind of at the top of the economic ladder.

Will Brehm 3:36
And was there a high employment rate at the time?

Cristina Groeger 3:39
For men -I mean, this is, again, a sort of very gender structured labor market. So for men, the majority of men worked in the workforce. And for women, the rates would have been high for younger women. And then almost all women as soon as they got married left the formal labor market. So, the majority of women overall in Boston are actually outside of the paid workforce. But of course, that didn’t mean they weren’t working, it just meant that their work was usually unpaid labor in the home. So, even you could say, for women, both in and out of the formal labor market, the vast majority of work that they’re doing is things like cooking and cleaning and care work for young kids, for older relatives, that kind of thing.

Will Brehm 4:32
And so, what sort of pathways existed at the time to get into these different professions?

Cristina Groeger 4:38
Yeah. So, at the beginning of my book, I tried to paint a picture of what this world looks like. And I think this is what history is useful for -to kind of get into a really different world and one that looked very different than what we see now. And the point that I tried to make is that formal education was pretty marginal to the vast majority of jobs in the workforce. So, most people had a primary school education but did not go on beyond that. And the pathways into work that existed were mostly through kind of family and kinship and really informal networks that were also shaped by race and ethnicity and sort of local communities in Boston. So, for recent immigrants who were primarily going into low-wage laboring and service jobs, their immigrant communities would help each other, help new arrivals find work, but it would have been sort of going to the worksite and getting a job. Becoming a street paver or another kind of laboring job, kind of getting hired right on the spot. And then learning work on the job. Not getting any real formal training in a school for work. And even craft workers often had either a formal or informal apprenticeship process to learn the trade. So, they wouldn’t learn in a school building, they would just become an apprentice and learn on the job. And then even for white collar work and jobs that we think of now as the “learned professions”, so jobs like lawyers, doctors, teachers, most people who went into these fields, they had high school education, usually, they might have a college education as well but there were almost no professional schools, really. So, the actual process of learning, what does it actually mean to be a lawyer, that was done also on the job. So, you would work alongside a practitioner, or if you were a clerk, you would work alongside a merchant, or a business owner, and you would really learn the skills of that job alongside a mentor in the practice of doing that job.

Will Brehm 7:04
So, skills and training were happening on the job, not necessarily in and through schools in the 1880s. And so, for a white-collar job like being a lawyer, as you brought up, did lawyers have to pass the bar to sort of be qualified to perform law? To actually work and be certified? Was that something that existed at that point?

Cristina Groeger 7:05
Yes. The bar exam is organized earlier on in the 19th century. So, there was, in the case of law, there was a formal exam. I talk a little bit about how for the professions and even future processes of professionalization, we really see existing practitioners try to control entry into the profession by using things like exams or licensing, and then eventually, higher education becomes sort of the primary way of controlling entry. But anyone could study and then pass the bar exam. You wouldn’t need to attend a specific school to do that. You might learn that on your own, and some of the earliest -really, they were for profit, or sort of upstart- law schools, basically start because if you didn’t already have a contact with a lawyer, and you couldn’t get that practice working alongside a mentor, then you might pay to go to a school that in the evenings where you could learn the law and then pass the bar exam. So, that’s sort of one of the early ways that schools provide this alternative pathway. If you didn’t have that family, or that sort of social network available to you.

Will Brehm 7:42
It sounds a lot like private tutoring today, where you cram for the examination outside of certain hours, and the whole institution of tutoring is set up to help you pass a particular examination.

Cristina Groeger 9:09
Yeah. And I think that there were a number of jobs when it was very much about learning a particular skill. And I think we see this today in new jobs where existing schools aren’t providing necessarily the right kind of skills, thinking of computer coding or something like that, where basically what matters is this technical skill. And if there isn’t existing ways of learning that then this can lead to basically educational entrepreneurs coming in and offering this as a service and a lot of schools at the time were very small. I talked about one law school, Suffolk Law School, that now exists as a university, but when it started, it was just a lawyer who in his living room tutored a few other lawyers, or aspiring lawyers, to pass the bar exam.

Will Brehm 10:02
But on the other end of the spectrum in terms of types of work, so not the white-collar work, but more of the manual labor that say recent immigrants or African Americans were in a sense relegated to in many ways, there wasn’t a similar sort of “You have to pass certain qualifications or have certain licenses to do that manual labor”, right? You would just learn how to do it on the job.

Cristina Groeger 10:29
Yes, yeah. And I think it really depends on the position of a job in the overall economy and whether it was profitable and lucrative for the overall economy. We need to understand that position in order to understand the role that education and formal schooling could even play. So, in a profession, like law, where -this is also the time when corporate law is emerging- this is becoming a really important and highly lucrative profession in the new economy. So, it makes sense that people would pay to get the training to enter that kind of work. At the lower ends of the labor market and low wage jobs. These are jobs that in Boston, recent immigrants and African Americans are really limited to, or they’re excluded from a lot of other sectors of work, in particular, African Americans. And these are jobs that have very little power in the economy, right? There are very few labor regulations in 1880. So, schooling is not going to provide the same opportunities to sort of advance in the labor market. But of course, I talk about how there are attempts to try to do something similar. To try to professionalize jobs like domestic service. I should also mention that I think in terms of how workers actually learn the skills in these jobs, I think, in some ways, one of the reasons that domestic work say, cooking and cleaning, paid very little wasn’t that there wasn’t skill involved, it was just that these were the kinds of skills that women often would learn informally from their mothers or aunts. It was kind of a devalued skill because it was informally acquired. And of course, there are gender dimensions to that too. So, I avoid using the word “unskilled”, which is often a way that low wage jobs are talked about, in the book just because I think that the connection between wages and actual skill involved is not as straightforward as that language would imply. But so, reformers are looking at low wage work that occupations like domestic service, and I think because many progressive era reformers were college educated themselves, they were seeing in other professions, at the time, they were observing how something like law, more and more schools were emerging to provide training and skills. And their assessment was, “Oh, well, that means that if we just provide domestic workers with more formal training in skills like housekeeping, and personal hygiene, and nutrition and sanitation that will elevate the status of this job just like a field like law or another profession”. And they use that language of profession to try to turn housekeeping into a profession. And I make the point that this in some ways is similar to kind of a human capital understanding of if you just increase skills, you get more wages. And it’s a very sort of simple relationship. But of course, in the sector of domestic workers, this was a field that women did not want to stay in, were looking for any alternative to get out of it. So, they just didn’t show up to these classes that new professionals and reformers launched. Schools of housekeeping ended up being a total flop because no domestic workers really wanted to show up and if they were going to spend time in school, they wouldn’t do it going to a school of housekeeping, they would go into some other kind of jobs. So, that assessment and the reformers understanding of the way education could shape the labor market just really didn’t apply because low wage work was in a very different structural position in the economy than other professions.

Will Brehm 14:42
It’s a really interesting insight that these progressive reformers were trying to basically replicate the system through which they succeeded for lower levels of work or work for groups of people that have been probably oppressed in society. So, does that mean that these reformers first were focusing on professionalized sort of schooling before what we might call “basic education”?

Cristina Groeger 15:10
Oh, well, I think they saw a promise in what we might call vocational education. And vocational meaning that for them this was training in a specific occupation or in a profession. And I talk about how vocational training efforts were applied widely in almost all sectors of work. And some of them were very successful in white collar and professional jobs but other kinds of training really fell short. And that happened both in low wage work and then craft work is a slightly different story of why that failed. But those forms of vocational training were not as successful,

Will Brehm 15:53
Right. I’m just wondering when did sort of mainstream public schooling become available for African Americans and new immigrants who might have been the target of these more vocational training by the reformers? I mean, when did that sort of fit into this historical narrative?

Cristina Groeger 16:12
Yeah. That’s a good question. I mean, the primary school system, Boston had developed since the common school movement, which is kind of in the mid-19th century, and there were high literacy rates and high rates of school attendance and enrollment in Boston. It varied across by class to a certain extent. So, the sons and daughters of white-collar workers and professionals were attending, maybe 90% of their children were already getting some primary school education at this time, whereas 50% or 60% of the children of laborers were. But I think the norm was still to acquire a basic numeracy and literacy, you would attend primary school and what changes in the period that I write about late 19th, early 20th century, it’s known as the high school movement because the big shift is a huge sort of surge of enrollment in high schools and high school becomes really something -only a few percentage of Bostonians attend high school in 1880. And then this becomes almost sort of a universal experience for teenagers by 1940 where I end the story.

Will Brehm 17:34
And was the logic to bring more people into high school connected to the labor market? Was it a way of providing the skills that different laboring classes needed to perform their jobs?

Cristina Groeger 17:47
Yes. And so here, I think, there’s reformers attempts, and I think there’s a lot of different ideas about what education could accomplish and kind of different interests. But really the success story that I talk about and what the main driver of the high school movement was in my assessment is that essentially, this became a really successful form of vocational training for white collar jobs. In the expanding corporate economy, these would be jobs like accounting and bookkeeping, secretaries, typists, sort of all the paperwork and the sales involved in new corporations, new kinds of industries. And initially on the scene, before high schools really take over this function, we see something similar to what I was describing in law where there are a lot of upstart proprietary schools, they’re called. Some of them are just a teacher and a classroom but they’re often called business or commercial colleges. We can think of them as kind of the for-profit sector of their day. And they start offering business training, so commercial arithmetic and book-keeping, accounting, penmanship at the beginning, and then mostly typing and stenography, like shorthand by the early 20th century. And yeah, they really provide avenues for those who otherwise would not have access to a mentor or practitioner. They provide this pathway into port -or they allow a lot of children of immigrants and women to access these skills that otherwise they wouldn’t be able to obtain to then enter -this is the fastest growing sector of work for both men and women. And by the end of this period, it’s about 20% of men and 40% of women are now involved in some kind of white-collar work. So, this is a really big shift, especially for women in the labor market.

Will Brehm 19:50
So, there’s a big shift in the labor market, and you have a lot more people of potentially lower classes being trained in these new institutions, in these new skills but yet you still see a division when it comes to which classes are getting which jobs and which are getting paid higher amounts of money. Is that right?

Cristina Groeger 20:11
Yes. And one of the things I think that happens in this sector of work and white-collar work is I think, most pronounced again, as a gendered division, but also is shaped by race and ethnicity. These jobs were almost exclusively men in the 1880s but jobs like being a typist or a stenographer, they very quickly feminize. And as women are first getting some training in these proprietary schools but then very quickly, high schools become the dominant institution. And there’s a real effort to, I think, by reformers who see sort of the potential for exploitation in the proprietary field, they try to promote the high school as this is the public alternative that we want students to attend instead. And for students, of course, public high schools are free, so they don’t have to pay for it. So, high schools become sort of the dominant training ground, especially for women. But as more women enter these fields, we start seeing and this is repeated in professions that women enter and I think there’s many contemporary parallels, but as a profession is feminized, we see ways that that sector differentiates and men are usually successful in claiming the top of the ladder. So, in this case, new jobs in business management or sort of as the supervisors of typists and secretaries. We start seeing this differentiation in the white-collar workforce. So, what used to be an avenue into business ownership or a kind of upwardly mobile job becomes by the end of this period, a kind of dead end or, you know, entry level job where the maximum that a woman could rise would be to become a secretary but management jobs end up being closed. And we have a large pool of what then becomes pink collar work, or basically feminized white collar jobs that get this new designation, and a large number of pink-collar workers, and then a smaller number of male managers that supervise them at the top.

Will Brehm 22:36
And how did education operate within that system of differentiating between the labor force? Between the high-end management jobs, and then what you’re calling the pink-collar labor force made up of mostly women?

Cristina Groeger 22:51
Yeah. So, one of the stories that I tell in the book, and maybe one of the correctives that I’m making at least in understandings of the history of education is that we really need to see what’s happening in colleges and universities at this time as a reaction to what’s happening in lower levels of education. So, we have to look at these different sectors together. And I think what I see is that as more women and the children of immigrants enter white collar work, and attend high school -and remember, high school had been a more exclusive institution in 1880- as it becomes this mass institution, we see basically, a reaction to this among Boston’s traditional elite. And colleges and universities had been associated with elites for centuries already, at least a century already in Boston. But we see new ways that elites work with colleges and universities to try to control entry into what are new and emerging fields in the economy, and particularly the new corporate economy. So, Boston Brahmins, the kind of traditional economic elite in Boston at the turn of the century was in a fairly unstable position. Growing industries in western states, and the center of finance had moved from Boston to New York. So, there’s a lot of concern about what is the future of this traditional elite in Boston going to be and there is a real effort to try to create new pathways into the new money or like the corporate world. And we see how elites use higher education and Harvard in particular, but also a range of other colleges and universities in Boston at the time -all private. But they use these institutions to try to create new connections to the corporate world and to try to attract, like Harvard, for instance, tries to attract a more national student body to get the sons and daughters of other corporate elites in western states to come to Harvard for the first time. So, through using these college credentials, elites are able to forge these ties. And one of the sources that I use to talk about this is the records of placement offices, which are sort of the career advancement centers. When they’re originally founded, they’re often called University Placement Offices, and they are working with employers, and especially through alumni networks to try to find their graduates jobs. And we can see how in the letters that are written between placement officers and employers, we can see how much of some of what they’re discussing has to do with academic skill but it also has to do with were you in this exclusive club at Harvard? Or did you do the right extracurriculars? Are you of the right race, and ethnic, and religious group? So, what I basically see is the way that through these new employment offices, they are recreating what looks like an older elite but now it’s sort of happening through a university setting. So, universities take on this new function of reproducing wealth and inequality.

Will Brehm 26:32
Right. And sort of legitimizing it through the giving of a credential of some sort.

Cristina Groeger 26:37
Exactly, yes. You could say it launders wealth through an academic meritocracy, or at least what’s perceived to be academic merit at this time.

Will Brehm 26:49
So, that’s the growing corporate sector in Boston at the time and the rise of women in the workforce, and how then the elite finds a way to maintain its eliteness in a sense. What about labor unions? I mean, Boston has a pretty large manufacturing sector. I would imagine labor unions are or were quite powerful. Were they able to counter some of these elite movements to protect the workers in that sector?

Cristina Groeger 27:24
Yeah. Well, so they try. And so, at this time, Boston is home to a very kind of powerful group of craft unions. So, unions for specific trades and in some ways they function similarly to a professional association in the sense that their power comes from being able to control access into the trade. And that means controlling access to training and apprenticeship. So, right. They sort of regulate a union apprenticeship. And one of the key political conflicts in this period is between craft unions and then employers who are very eager to avoid craft union regulations and avoid the apprenticeship process. And so, here’s another example of an attempt to use vocational training. So, employers basically try to use industrial schools, or private trade schools or even industrial education in the public school system, essentially as like a union avoidance tactic. If they can find a cheaper way of training their craft workers and a way of training their workers that avoids craft union influence, and even sort of ideological influence, they are very eager to do so. So, they try to use new forms. And there’s so much discussion about industrial education in this time period is promising that this is going to transform, or revolutionize the labor market and allow employers to really build up entirely new forces of workers.

The problem is that because craft unions are one of the few sectors of work that have real organized power in this period, they’re pretty successful in limiting these industrial programs. So, either they can shut them down, or in the case of public industrial education, they’re able to put some union friendly limits. So, for instance, rather than actually teach craft skills, a lot of what public industrial education becomes is teaching more rudimentary skills, or even more math and science and more theoretical courses rather than craft union skills, which ends up meaning that employers don’t really prefer students who go through the industrial track because it doesn’t actually provide them with these craft skills. And that’s, I think, one of the reasons why industrial education -although a lot of American high schools have sort of vocational tracks, but they’re usually kind of seen as second class or sort of where students who are not succeeding academically go- they aren’t actually providing pathways into good jobs. They don’t end up functioning in that way. So, industrial education doesn’t really work and this allows employers who are still trying to find other ways of dealing with these craft unions. It leads to another strategy by World War One. And that is really to shift the entire workforce away from craft workers on to new types of workers that can be trained more cheaply. And we see this especially in mass production industries, where the proportion of very skilled craft workers declines. And what replaces them are more, say, factory operatives, where you don’t have an extensive training process, you learn much more quickly on the job. And of course, then, like white collar workers are also part of this industrial transformation, because they’re staffing the corporate side of large-scale industries. And what I kind of stress of why this shift is important for thinking about the overall labor market is that these are new types of workers -factory operatives and white-collar workers. There are almost no craft unions in these sectors. So, essentially, this transformation is shifting the whole workforce on to workers who have less power. And even though white-collar work was preferable employment for a lot of women who entered it, if we look at it from the perspective of employers, this was a very useful strategy. They paid women far less than they would have paid male craft workers. And these women had almost no power in the labor market. So, from an employer’s perspective, this is a convenient shift of the workforce on to a labor force that’s more reliant on schooling but has a lot less power in the workplace.

Will Brehm 32:23
It’s a really interesting insight to think about employers and also sort of the elite classes using education to, in a sense, it’s to prevent social mobility. In a sense, it’s a way to legitimize some of the inequality that exists in a society. And so, what you saw in Boston between the 1880s and the 1930s or so: is this something that was found in other places in America and potentially outside of America? I mean, are these industrial transformations, labor market transformations, but where you see, using almost a class analysis, where you see these different classes, sort of vying for power and using education in ways that really go against what I think a lot of policymakers might hope education is for in the end.

Cristina Groeger 33:15
Yeah. I mean, I think this is definitely a broader American story. And especially in the northern United States, in other urban centers across the north. I think the southern story is a bit different, because in that case, African Americans were really purposefully excluded from getting an education until the 1950s, and 60s, and what I describe in northern cities is everyone is in included in the educational system. And actually, I find that African Americans have higher rates of educational attainment than immigrant, white children or even native-born white children. But, of course, then, even though they are getting educated at higher rates, they are still excluded from jobs. So, in the north, the story is a very encompassing educational policy but one that if we’re trying to think about “Okay, but how does this play out in the labor market”, we see discrimination and other inequalities happening in the labor market. In the South, I think there is much more explicit discrimination in the educational system, which has a different political economy to go with it. So, I think some of the things that are unique in a US context are a very sort of decentralized and unregulated system of education, which is part of why, in Boston, there’s the public sector but then there are all these private institutions that these white collar business training schools that just can emerge, and there’s very little regulation of these new education markets, which I think -and then what’s happening with private universities is in some ways, kind of reflection of a lack of this unregulated system where elites can use these institutions for their own purposes and there’s very little pushback or very little ways of controlling that. Whereas in other European, continental Europe, where university education and education in general, there’s a much smaller private sector, sort of more centralized state institutions, there’s less of a role that universities can play in controlling access to the top paying jobs. And the other in the story that I just told about craft workers and trade unions, Germany is kind of the country that even in the 19th century, Americans and Bostonians were saying, “Let’s reproduce the industrial schools of Germany in order to create good craft working and manufacturing jobs in the United States”. And that’s something that we still hear today. If it’s not Germany, it’s Sweden or Switzerland, or another school and a vocational training program. But what happened in Germany was actually, craft unions and employers did not fight over the training process in the same way. Unions in Germany’s case sort of industrial unions and employers, and the state sort of were able to come together to regulate a new training process, which allowed schools to actually provide skills into what stayed well-paying jobs. Whereas in the US, you have this race to the bottom where employers don’t want craft workers. And so, they end up trying to replace well-paying craft union jobs with low paid factory operatives. So, in Germany, I think part of it was an education story but it also was a story, like the fact that manufacturing jobs remained well paid and jobs that young people would want to enter into. Whereas in the US, the economy is shifting away from those well-paying jobs. And that’s the reason why we can’t simply just reproduce what’s happening in other countries, through our educational system. We have to be attentive to how it fits into the bigger political economy and bigger forces of power of shaping the economy.

Will Brehm 37:44
But what I love so much about your book is that you’re looking at this particular historical moment but it says a lot about the present, right? The contemporary educational moment in Boston in America. Maybe there are some lessons beyond. And so, there’s something really valuable about that historical approach to these educational problems and seeing legacies persist into the present.

Cristina Groeger 38:11
Yeah. And I think because inequality has been rising in recent years, there’s a lot of attention to how did we get here? How do we have a country with very high educational attainment but yet one of the highest rates of inequality in the world if education is supposed to be “the great equalizer”? And I think the early 20th century, because it was a moment where inequality reached similar peaks, as it is today. And education also, this was the moment where education really first became seen as this tool or pathway to social mobility. And for many, especially in this realm of white-collar work, I think that wasn’t false, that was really based on lived experience. But we have to put that story in this broader context of changes in the economy, how elites are now pursuing other strategies to understand how you can have an accessible system of education and a lot of folks getting educated at higher rates with how that’s compatible with very high income and economic inequality.

Will Brehm 39:27
Well, Cristina Groeger, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. It really was a pleasure of talking today and congratulations on your new book.

Cristina Groeger 39:33
Thank you so much.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Related Guest Publications/Projects

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A “good mixer”: University placement in corporate America, 1890-1940

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Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com