On the cover of Jerome Bjelopera's compelling book, City of Clerks, is a photograph of five well-dressed Victorian ladies at a millinery counter at the Philadelphia department of Strawbridge and Clothier in 1898. Towards the end of the book we learn that at the turn of the century these saleswomen and their male colleagues, “indulged in blackface minstrelsy as both performers and consumers during their time away from their jobs, an activity through which they forged a notion of whiteness that referred both to workplace ideals and to the racist content of the minstrelsy they imbibed.” In fact, Bjelopera continues, “through minstrelsy, the traits of the exemplary worker became white traits” (p. 116). In 1906, women, such as those featured on the front illustration of the book, joined Strawbridge and Clothier's Clover Mandolin Club to learn the instrument and performed their music, as well as typically racist minstrelsy acts, in blackface and white dresses in local establishments. Through these forms of everyday resistance, Bjelopera claims that the white-collar labor force and all it represented—the exclusion of African Americans, standards of middle-class Victorian values and decorum, sexual division of labor, and the ideal of the family wage—was forged. “These performances as well as other features of experiences of office and sales workers signaled that [w]hite collar work was for whites only” (p. 129).

These dramatic and disturbing episodes are the heart of this book that describes the work and lives an important and growing segment of Philadelphia's, and all large cities', labor force—office and sales workers. Bjelopera provides a complete description of the growth and diversification of this labor force and how it was divided by sex. Bjelopera states that in Philadelphia, “men expected that the jobs they took would offer upward mobility. Women understood that the positions they took would neither pay as well as the posts men held nor offer advancement. Jobs such as typewriting, stenography, and operating telephone switchboards crystallized in the industrial period.” Women in offices and stores were entering into new workspaces and employers accommodated this in both progressive and repressive ways. He describes the ways in which the work itself changed as bureaucratization appeared in industry and corporations. An entire chapter is devoted to the educational opportunities provided by one important private business school, the Peice School, and the important gatekeeping work that created the racial, gender, and class characteristics of the emerging white-collar labor force. “Business schools served as quintessential conduits for intergenerational occupational mobility” (p. 78). There is, however, no discussion of clerical education in the Philadelphia public schools.

In the last chapter, Bjelopera situates this population within certain sections and neighborhoods of Philadelphia, providing a satisfying ground-level description of the urban, white-collar world. All of this builds from existing work on many aspects of office and sales workers' lives that have appeared in the last ten to 20 years. This useful monograph documents for another important city many previously known aspects of this population while making some important contributions of its own.

Bjelopera's insights into the lives of male office and sales workers provide an important corrective to the focus in the literature on women and their entrance into the field. He also described how men and women played together. Descriptions of the various clubs and organizations (such as bicycling clubs!) provided by some employers and less edifying amusements in the neighborhoods enjoyed by men and women alike, show us a completely different white-collar social world. Bjelopera ends his book provocatively by asserting that the youthful, white-collar workers of Philadelphia's furnished room districts (FRD) foreshadowed the lives of twenty-first century, postmodern American urbanites because they “rented their lodgings, ate at restaurants or saloons, washed their clothes at laundries, and entertained themselves in the situations of the new leisure economy” such as theaters, restaurants, and vaudeville houses. Some, Bjelopera continues, “even purchased sex while others sold themselves to make ends meet” (p. 161).

Bjelopera's book might have been even more interesting if he had included a conclusion that reconciled his two fascinating insights: the performance of whiteness in the minstrelsy shows and the emergence of the FRD's environment of relatively open sexuality that “encouraged many clerks and salespeople to challenge larger society's mores” (p. 160). Nevertheless, by taking the whiteness of the emerging white-collar sector seriously, Bjelopera makes an important contribution to this field.