An Overview

It's the 1970s. Women are entering the workforce more than ever, for a multitude of reasons, with varieties of experience. Every woman, however, is greeted with a glass ceiling years thick. No matter what your role is, you are automatically less important and expected to be less knowledgeable. From day one, you are expected to be near perfect, initially known as a "typewriter" yourself, yet many conversations with your boss are not about work at all. You are expected to run personal errands, fulfill needs for the boss' family, make him coffee, let him flirt, make fun, and belittle you, to keep your job. You make less than 65% of your male coworker's paycheck, but talk about it, and you're fired. It's a game that you can never win, so what happens next?

In Boston, Ellen Cassedy and Karen Nussbaum were employed as secretaries at Harvard. The two were appalled at the environment they found themselves in and started meeting with women feeling the same way. It started as small groups talking over lunches and evolved into a movement. They started creating newsletters pointing out the gender-based discrimination, telling stories from secretaries themselves, asking for submissions of thoughts, stories, and more, passing them out to women on the way to work. Then, they confronted Harvard's director of personnel, and nothing happened.

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"We are referred to as girls, until the day we retire without pension."

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Ellen Cassedy had applied to a program training movement organizers, and was accepted, studying at the Midwest Academy in Chicago, learning how to organize. With this information, she returned to Boston, and the women worked harder than ever. They were more daring and direct, talking to the clerical workers across the city, asking them the hard questions about how they were treated. Even if they were turned away, the goal was to get them to notice. They started holding demonstrations, speeches, gaining press, and as the term "sexual harassment" grew, they gave these women a plan to navigate all of it. 9to5 was established, and other cities were taking the same ideas and growing them, but the movement lacked the power to legally stand up for these women.

That's when they decided to unionize. This was not an easy process, either, but by using the laws ignored by employers against them, advocating for change, and exposing their boss' lies, 9to5 undeniably made the foundation cracks in these systems.

Jane Fonda noticed the work of this organization and saw an opportunity to bring these issues to a new level of recognition. Working with the leading women of 9to5, collaborating with Dolly Parton, Patricia Resnick, and Lily Tomlin, they created 9 to 5, a movie for women, by women. The story was created from Fonda interviewing clerical workers with one simple question: "Have you ever fantasized about killing your boss?"

9 to 5 not only skyrocketed the recognition of workplace feminism but showed the trials of the workplace in a hilarious way. This might have minimized the secretaries' experiences, if what they experienced was not so irrational and inexplicable, that seeing it on a screen was easily laughable. This movie captured the public, but on a deeper level, it was a call to action, and it worked.

It was because of an organization unlike anything seen before, that we've gotten to where we are today, and 9to5 is an inspiration for the future.

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"We at 9to5 would be drawing on the wisdom of the past while inventing our own way forward."

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