The Secretary Chant

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1973

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Gender

The issue of gender plays a significant role in “The Secretary Chant,” as the speaker identifies as a woman. Piercy draws attention to various body parts that might typically be isolated in the male gaze such as the hips, breasts, feet, navel, and mouth. The speaker uses these body parts as a way to explore issues of objectification, likening her body—and even her mind—to office supplies. Beyond the metaphor of body as office supply and what that implies, the poem’s office environment suggests expansion of women’s roles outside the home. While more progressive than a more traditional role such as homemaker, the secretarial and clerical office roles mentioned in the poem are historically more closely linked to women than men (who have long been associated with managerial roles, for instance).

Gender is further explored in the closing lines of the poem with an overt pregnancy metaphor. The final lines, “File me under W / because I wonce / was / a woman” (Lines 24-27), say something about the speaker ultimately being reduced to little more than a copied page to be stowed away.

Due to its historical context, gender as it is addressed within the poem can be defined as a more outdated binary understanding of the term versus the more expansive, fluid conceptions of gender in 2021. In its time, however, this poem would have provided a more progressive view of a woman’s role in society and a more biting social commentary regarding how women are treated and perceived in the workplace.

The Workplace

Piercy’s poem utilizes the office environment not only as a way to explore issues of gender. Her focus on the office as the setting of “The Secretary Chant” says something greater about the inherent and harder to break patriarchal structures within capitalism. That Piercy places her speaker in an office environment rather than any other—the home or out for a walk on a city street, for instance—allows her to explore issues of objectification and inequalities within a sphere that to many at the time of the poem’s publication, would have been considered a more progressive space for a woman.

The speaker of Piercy’s poem highlights the office in connection with her physical being—from more sizable physical attributes such as a desk and chair, down to the nuts and bolts (or machines and small supplies) such as paper clips and rubber bands. By critiquing a woman’s role in this seemingly more progressive environment, Piercy suggests that women have not met equal treatment under the capitalist patriarchal structures against which the women’s movement fought; rather, women found themselves pigeonholed in roles that simply replicated existing modes of oppression.

Objectification

Objectification plays a large role in Piercy’s poem; all the metaphors in the poem compare and reduce the speaker’s body and mind to common office objects. The objectification in “The Secretary Chant” is cheeky and intended to mimic the male gaze; however, instead of presenting objectification as purely sexual, Piercy subverts this by providing objectification of another kind. She isolates the speaker’s various body parts to compare them to inanimate objects.

The poem poses larger questions regarding objectification which relate to how women are viewed in the workplace and, even if not explicitly sexually objectified, how they are often reduced to little more than decoration. The speaker’s repetition of “[m]y head is” (Lines 8-13) is noteworthy, as it provides a sense of agency—though that agency is undercut with the suggestion that the speaker’s mind is somehow in disarray. Similar to the “mansplaining” women might face in a contemporary office, these lines suggest much of the same sentiment: The speaker’s thoughts are seen as messy or invalid due to how she is perceived by those around her, which is likely based on little more than her gender presentation.

The final lines of the poem state, “File me under W / because I wonce / was / a woman” (Lines 24-27). Considering these lines alongside the theme of objectification, it seems that the poem’s speaker feels something personally critical has been lost in the office environment. She is not a person anymore—let alone a woman—but simply operates as the various functions of her job which largely view her as decorative support rather than a valued source of ideas contributing to greater influence in the male-dominated corporate sphere.