It’s hard to imagine, but the zany 1980 fantasy-comedy film 9 to 5, starring Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin, was initially going to be a drama. When Fonda took on the project of making a movie about the exploitation, harassment, abuse, and mistreatment women suffered in the workplace, she approached it with all the seriousness she thought the topic called for.
Fonda had been friends with Boston clerical worker and labor leader Karen Nussbaum for years, having met in the anti–Vietnam War movement, and Nussbaum kept her abreast of the state of things for women workers. It was dire: women faced rampant sexism in the office, were regularly passed over for job opportunities in favor of less-qualified male counterparts, often made half of men’s salaries, and had little to no protections at work.
In response, Nussbaum, along with fellow Harvard office worker Ellen Cassedy, founded a Boston-based organization called 9to5 in 1972. Growing out of a local newsletter titled 9to5: Newsletter for Boston Area Office Workers, 9to5 brought women office workers together to organize for better conditions at work. They built a new model of organizing, somewhere between the labor and women’s movements, harnessing the energy behind rising feminist struggles while also recognizing that women organizing as workers was essential and powerful.
“On the one hand, we were building a wing of the women’s movement that was for working women, who didn’t otherwise identify with the women’s movement,” Nussbaum told me in an interview. (You can read the interview in full here.) “This was a way to expand the women’s movement to a new group of women who otherwise weren’t getting there. And we were bringing the women’s movement into the labor movement. So we were trying to create a home for working women in the women’s movement, and for women in the labor movement.”
To accomplish this, 9to5 appealed to women workers through tactics full of humor and personal connection. They held mock contests, such as one for the “pettiest office task,” once awarded to a secretary who had to sew up the crotch of her boss’s pants while he was still wearing them. They made up songs and funny slogans; one flyer featured an illustration of a stick of dynamite struck in a high-heel shoe and read “women in insurance: an explosive situation.” They “pilloried these bosses by name,” as Nussbaum puts it. “We would take the press with us to go announce who the bad boss was that year.”
“We did things that were fun because we wanted to have fun,” Nussbaum says. “It wasn’t a tactic so much as we wanted to build the kind of organization we would want to join.”
The tongue-in-cheek-ness lowered the barrier of entry for the white-collar workers 9to5 was organizing and made their message easier to deliver. Upon seeing this and understanding its appeal, Fonda quickly changed course: she would make an over-the-top comedy instead, a kind of movie-length narrative that channeled the spirit of the hilarious-yet-deadly-serious gags 9to5 was staging in the streets.