by Hanna Rosin
“Oh, that’s real educational,” she said when she came back from her study.
“Why would you need to know about Cleopatra?” he snapped back.
“He gets defensive, like I’m insinuating he’s stupid. I know he’s not stupid. He’s just not as educated as I am,” she told me later. “But sometimes I feel like because I spend all these years going to school, I should be shown a certain amount of respect. I did all this, so he should respect it.”
A CENTURY AGO pill-making required considerable physical labor and detailed handiwork. A pharmacist and his apprentice would have to haul fifty-pound bags of compounds, grind noxious substances in a giant mortar and pestle, and then carefully roll each pill using just the right pressure. The shaman factor for pharmacists came from mixing ingredients at the front counter, dazzling patients with a miniature magic show that ended with a personally tailored spell in the form of a pill. Magazines from that era are filled with letters from groupies, writing in for the “scientific secrets” of various potions and even the secret formula for various sodas—the other mainstay of the local pharmacy.
Then at the start of the twentieth century, just as Remington typewriters were infiltrating the market, pharmacists began to covet a piece of machinery manufactured by the Arthur Colton Company in Detroit, Michigan. Every year the moss green–covered catalogs arrived, boasting the latest offerings: Automatic Pill Making Machine No. 2 Complete, an amazing Willy Wonka contraption with twelve rotary wheels turning in all different directions, or a pill-coating machine loaded with tubes and dipping plates, or the company’s gem, the rotary tablet machine that resembles a modern-day she-bot, with four elegant legs and rotary wheels for eyes and two funnels upraised like proud pom-poms. The machine, the catalog promised, is “practically noisless [sic], and pours out a continuous stream of tablets at the rate of 325 per minute.”
The machines promised considerable ease for pharmacists, but like all machines, they also stole some of the mystique. As novelist Sherwood Anderson would write in his bizarre 1931 tract, Perhaps Women, “The machines make me feel too small. . . . My manhood can not stand up against them yet. They do things too well. They do too much.” Men in the profession became nervous about the specter of women pharmacists, although at the time there were relatively few. In the pharmacy magazines, male writers insisted that women could still not carry heavy bags of equipment over to the machines, and that they could never answer the night bell—a traditional duty of pharmacists’ apprentices, who would sleep in the shop. Rumors began to recirculate about Civil War–era wives who had used rat poison mixed with butter to poison their disabled husbands—proof that women could not be trusted with chemicals. The magazine Pharmaceutical Era began running a series of fables in which one recurring character was a lady drug addict who kept coming into the shop begging for refills.
Here and there a few writers defended the profession as suitable for women, drawing on the mythology of Florence Nightingale as a saving angel and mother saint with an uncanny gift for organization. An 1893 article discussing the prospect of the “new woman druggist” argued that prescriptions should not be filled by machines but rather by a “fresh complexioned young girl with delicate touch, glad eyes and gold braids of hair [that] has prepared them, and gives them to you with a bright glance, and a modest smile and a something about her manner which means that she is a business woman as well.” Around the same time, the Druggists’ Bulletin (1887) ran this love-struck and utterly condescending poem to the “girl pharmacist,” advertising her as the perfect wife:
Like sparkles of morning sunbeams,
All sweet with the flowers they kiss,
Comes the gentle evangel of brightness,
The “Registered” girl Pharmacist . . .
Make room all you bachelor chemists,
Make room for this queen on your list
And crown her with all the attributes,
A “Registered” girl Pharmacist.
But in the Louisville College of Pharmacy for Women, started in 1883 because the regular college would not admit women, the first commencement speaker opened the graduates’ eyes to a less romantic reality: “You have chosen to align yourselves with man. You have become his competitor for bread, his rival in work. Look for no other treatment than he gives his fellows.” Feminists began to take it up as a cause: “We [will not accept] the weakling cry of individuals affrighted for the safety of their own unstable positions who entreat that woman be kept out of the professions of pharmacy lest she cheapen it,” wrote Emma Gary Wallace. “No! A thousand times. No!”
In the twenties, “girls” started to flood white-collar jobs. Just as they do today, they graduated high schools at higher rates than boys, and then went on to clerical schools. The aim was to get hired in white-collar jobs, which were described in the same terms Hannah and her friends describe pharmacy work: “clean, pleasant, respectable.” A woman could bring shame on her family by working in a factory; the enterprise had an air of danger and desperation. But as a secretary in one of the burgeoning new mechanized offices of America, she could brag about her career.
Before that era, secretaries had been of the Dickensian variety: gentlemen in black frocks and green shades who added columns of numbers in their heads. They were not functionaries but guardians of their firms’ treasured secrets, and apprentices to the boss. They could hope to rise quickly and even one day succeed him. Pamphlets for the new career woman at the time reminded her hopefully that “clerk” derives from the word “cleric.”
But once the secretary became female, she had no such hallowed role. In the rapidly expanding economy, she was a stenographer at the insurance firm or a PBX operator at the oil company or a switchboard operator at the bank. But she would never rise beyond that. In a 1939 survey of firms in five states, companies reported that certain jobs were set aside exclusively for women and certain jobs for men, who “would be dissatisfied” if they had “no chance for advancement,” as one firm wrote, explaining why men could not be stenographers. Jobs, economist Claudia Goldin explains, essentially acquired “secondary sex characteristics.” And even for college girls, says Goldin, a job interview centered on one question: Can you type?
A 1939 report on what was known as the “toilet industry,” comprising drugs, medicines, toilet waters, and creams, gives an account of the gender breakdown. In the grand new pharmacy manufacturing operations, men did the “highly skilled” and specialized work, processing and mixing raw materials, supervising the “intricate machinery,” checking the identity, purity, and strength of each chemical mixture. Women, meanwhile, did what was called “finishing operations”: filling containers and labeling. The average salary for men was $27.60; for women, ten dollars less.
The culture was starting to accept the slow entry of women into the profession, but it still exacted a high cost. From 1934 to 1942, the magazine Drug Topics ran a weekly cartoon about a pharmacist named Betty Brown. Betty, although charming and attractive, served as a warning to girls who rose above their station. She is first hired by pharmacist Bob Steele as a “fancy goods sales lady” to boost his sales. Eventually she confesses that she is in fact a trained pharmacist herself, and then buys the store from him. After that bit of hubris, she turns into a Dick Tracy heroine who wins the small battles but never the game of life. She triumphs over counterfeiters, hoodlums, and thieves. (“I’ll fill her so full of holes she’ll look like a fishnet,” says one.) But her personal life falls apart. One love interest dies of a heart attack, and she loses another to her plain-looking cousin after she gives the cousin a makeover. “Love is like some prescriptions,” she concludes. “If it doesn’t cure you, all you get is a bad taste.”
After a brief wartime boost, the rise of the girl pharmacist, and the girl professional as a whole, came to an ominous halt as the men returned from war and the women moved back into the kitchen. Pharmacies were in the heyday of the mom-and-pop era. This was before the era of fast-food chains, and the local pharm
acy almost always doubled as a soda fountain and lunch counter. People came mostly to eat and hang out, and only occasionally to get medicine. If they worked at all, women were relegated to roles that looked a lot like wife: cooking, serving, helping their husband behind the counter. A new tradition was established among the state pharmacy associations of holding an annual beauty contest to decide on the next Miss Pharmacy, who would grace the covers of the trade magazines: “There’s a beauty in Birmingham!” reads the caption under the photo of the comely Margaret Jacks, a fresh-faced teen with natural curls.
In the sixties the rigid domestic facade starts to crack. Suddenly in the photos the girls are wearing the white lab coats normally reserved for men. They are not yet pharmacists, though; they are “cosmeticians,” usually engaged in intense conversation with customers about a new glue for press-on nails or home permanents or color charts designed to “scientifically determine a woman’s lipstick shade.” They stand in front of counter displays described as having “intriguing modern designs” with hundreds of white lipstick tubes tucked into holes like so many bottles of pills. They “beam” one another through intercoms that “relieve them of the embarrassment of not having immediate answers to their patrons’ queries.” But those white lab coats and the faux scientific authority must have given the women a taste for the real thing. Before long, Miss and other women’s magazines were running ads claiming that “thousands of pharmacy students in the next ten years will be women!” and inviting YOU to join the herd.
Soon civil rights would make it unacceptable to keep women out of certain colleges, or to reserve certain jobs for unmarried women, or for men. In the seventies women began to flood colleges and professional schools, training to be doctors, lawyers, and businesswomen. With objective measures and explicit credentials, women could easily make the case that they were just as qualified as their male counterparts; after all, they had the exact same knowledge and degrees. By the 1980s women were graduating from college at about the same rate as men; for pharmacy school the tipping point was 1985.
If machines dealt the first blow to work as the exclusive realm of men, office life dealt the second. “Where would a sense of maleness come from for the worker who sat at a desk all day?” historian Elliott Gorn wrote. “Where was virility to be found in increasingly faceless bureaucracies?” Joel Garreau picks up on this phenomenon in his 1991 book, Edge City, which explores the rise of suburbs as home to giant swaths of office space along with the usual houses and malls. Companies began moving out of the city in search not only of lower rent but also of the “best educated, most conscientious, most stable workers.” They found their brightest prospects among “underemployed females living in middle-class communities on the fringes of the old urban areas.” As Garreau chronicles the rise of suburban office parks, he places special emphasis on 1978, the peak year for women entering the workforce. When brawn was off the list of job requirements, women often measured up better than men. They were smart, dutiful, and, as long as employers could make the jobs more convenient for them, more reliable.
Pharmacy, too, was becoming more like office work, with all the same consequences. The mom-and-pops were disappearing and being quickly replaced by national chain stores, which split the old business model. Fast-food chains took over their old lunch-counter business, and a new distinct entity we now know as the pharmacy took over prescriptions, cosmetics, and toiletries. By the 1970s, Walgreens had more than six hundred stores around the country and employed fifteen hundred pharmacists. The image of the pharmacist was no longer an entrepreneur and community leader dishing up fizzy concoctions and cures. A pharmacist was increasingly a salaried employee, and more and more often a woman. As one William S. Apple said at a 1971 gathering of a pharmaceutical group, “Once pharmacy shed the Victorian view that you had to ‘own a store’ in order to practice the profession,” it would unleash “a wave of woman-power into our profession.”
The new setup was more practical for women. Owning and running a store was a monumental undertaking that virtually guaranteed working nights and weekends. But a salaried employee could dip in and out of work at various phases of life and work more flexibly. The workforce was headed in this more agile direction anyway. Workplaces were moving away from a priesthood model with a patriarch at the top who demanded lifetime loyalty. Instead workers were becoming more like free agents who could move between jobs with impunity. Women were just ahead of the curve.
But there was another reason why women were critical to the profession: The death of the corner store may have liberated the practice of pharmacy from Victorianism, but it saddled the profession with a new identity crisis, common to many professions. “Robots can count tablets more accurately and at less expense than humans, technicians can compound medications in pharmacies and huge, automated factories can do likewise. Persons without professional education at University are able to sell drugs and to serve as cashiers,” explained a manifesto by a leading pharmacist scholar, Albert Wertheimer.
Yet in the near future, there will be a need for a person who understands the overall health-care delivery system, who can serve as a health educator, gatekeeper, referral agent, problem solver and coordinator . . . . The pharmacist of the future will offer the missing hand-holding function now disappearing . . . a person who is able to work on incentives, understanding the principles underlying the health belief model, and who is an empathetic, caring professional.
“Problem solver,” “coordinator,” “hand-holding,” “empathetic, caring professional.” This new definition made it clear that in order to survive, the profession would have to feminize. The profession began to refer to itself as “social pharmacy” or “clinical pharmacy.” Schools began moving from a four-year bachelor program to a six-year professional degree called a “Pharm D,” as women were becoming the majority of graduates from pharmacy school, and their numbers have climbed steadily ever since.
This philosophy happened to dovetail with precisely what was prized in the new economy. Lately economists have tried to measure what are known as “soft skills” or “people skills” and their impact on labor market success. In a 2005 international study called “People People,” Bruce Weinberg, Lex Borghans, and Bas ter Weel did a complex analysis of how attributes such as the ability to work with people or patience and motivation became assets in the job market. The team separated jobs where interpersonal skills are important (nurses and salespeople, for example) from jobs where they are less important (machine operators and truck drivers). What they found was that starting in the 1970s, the growing demand for soft-skills jobs corresponds exactly with the rise in women’s wages.
Companies no longer wanted to present themselves as faceless arbiters of authority; in an increasingly democratic, multicultural age they wanted to be seen as approachable and consumer responsive. In choosing a logo or an ad campaign, a company did not want to project just the old checklist of attributes: strong and dominant in the market. Now they also wanted to be innovative, dynamic, caring, says advertising expert David Redhill. As time went on, the imperative only got stronger. Now, in the era of self-expression and social media, stone-faced patriarchy is the kiss of death.
The irony is noted: Just as suburban developments are named after the things they destroyed, so it went with the large and ever dominant multinational corporations, who strove to convey the warmth of the mom-and-pop stores they had put out of business. Recent Target ads that ran on city buses showed a series of broadly smiling women of various ethnicities with the tagline, ASK ME ANYTHING ABOUT ANYTHING: TARGET PHARMACISTS ARE YOUR FRIENDLY RESOURCE FOR ALL QUESTIONS FROM ASPIRIN TO ZINC. SWING BY FOR AN IN-STORE CONSULTATION (OR JUST TO SAY HI). Would anyone stop by a Target pharmacy “just to say hi”?
But with pharmacists the transition was not entirely disingenuous. In the mom-and-pop era there weren’t all that many drugs to distribute. But now there are thousands, and errors in mixing them could be dangerous. As doctors and drug manufacturers came to represen
t the face of cruel and indifferent corporate medicine, the pharmacist could step in and present herself as the first responder with a friendly face, a modern-day version of a small-town doctor, who knew her pills but also your children’s names.
Over time the feminization of pharmacy, and office work, acquired a life of its own. Women took over human resource departments and hired more women. Once they reached critical mass they began to normalize certain workplace demands—working four days a week, say, or leaving early. The more women worked, the more economic power they had, multiplying the effect even further. Soon marketing experts began warning companies that if they had no women in their executive ranks they would never be able to understand the consumer of the future and they would be doomed.
In the “People People” study, Weinberg paints a picture of this new innovative workplace as a haven for teamwork and reciprocal altruism. The modern era’s new workers, whom he refers to as “caring agents,” go far beyond giving and receiving instructions; they display a talent for successfully interpreting feelings and ideas. For many men, this new innovative workplace sounds like their girlfriends’ book group, or maybe hell.
The 1999 movie Office Space was maybe the first to capture how alien and dispiriting this new feminized office park can be for men, and how resistant they are to adapting. Disgusted by their jobs and their boss, Peter and his two friends embezzle money and start sleeping through their alarm clocks. At the movie’s end, a male coworker burns down the office park, and Peter abandons desk work for a job in construction. Earlier eras of male anxiety were driven by premature fears and delusions about the specter of female takeover. But this time the men had actual, data-driven reasons to worry. Women were actually coming to dominate the workforce, which threw the whole corresponding set of male roles into turmoil. A 2002 study of the pharmacy workforce described the emasculation in more dispassionate terms: “Wage rates for female pharmacists have grown to a point where it is more beneficial, from a financial standpoint, for a family to have the female work full-time and the male work part-time. Gender role reversal may be more common in families where one spouse is a pharmacist.”
