Focusing on working-class teenagers who attended the Pittsburgh public high school's Commercial Department in the 1890s, this dissertation reassesses the significance of the expansion of the clerical sector of the workforce at the turn of the century. As the development of large corporations changed both the scale and the content of work in offices, the accompanying sexual stratification of the clerical workforce obscured the relationship between the new clerical work and traditional perceptions of white-collar status. The same dynamics of monopoly capitalism also altered the work and community lives of manual workers. Faced with new work processes which undermined their shopfloor power, employer offensives against their unions, and the entrance of "new" immigrants into their workplaces and neighborhoods, Pittsburgh's skilled workers viewed clerical work for their children as consonant with their own sense of social status within the working class. Analyzed from this perspective, the "collar line" between blue- and white-collar employment proves to be more ambiguous than later social mobility studies would have us think.

The first chapter of this dissertation describes the transformation of the office work from the 1870s through the 1910s, focusing on accountant/bookkeepers and stenographer/typists. Chapter 2 places the new clerical jobs--for both women and men--in the context of Pittsburgh's overall job market. Chapter 3 describes the development of the Pittsburgh public high school's Commercial Department, which trained many of the new clerical workers. The fourth chapter uses the school enrollment records along with the 1900 census to reconstruct the economic and social situations of the families of Commercial Department students, and suggests both the material constraints and incentives for the young people's educational and occupational choices. In order to provide a more qualitative view of those decisions, Chapter 5 examines two working-class neighborhoods which sent unusually high proportions of skilled workers' children to the Commercial Department. The final chapter describes the benefits of commercial education for these young people by tracing their career patterns and the women's marital opportunities.