The character portrayed by Melanie Griffith in the film Working Girl comes from one cultural milieu, a blue-collar background characterized most strongly by her uncouth boyfriend, and is working in a very different corporate milieu as a secretary, though she aspires to something higher and imitates the successful women she sees in her company. This sets her apart from the other secretaries, who are either content with or resigned to their subservient positions. The film highlights a contrast between the taste level of the working girl and the taste level of the female executive and shows how emulating the higher taste level can allow one to move up the ladder.
There is a series of divisions in the office as presented in this film, divisions based on gender, divisions based on social class, divisions based on both at once. The office is set in New York City, where the class differences in the workplace always seem to be heightened, but there is a basic division between the executives and the plebeian workers who make up most of the office force, the secretaries, gophers, delivery boys, and so forth who do much of the "grunt" work while the executives develop projects, hold meetings, and also enjoy a fair number of perquisites. A large proportion of the lower echelon workers are women, secretaries with little opportunity for advancement except to become secretary to someone higher in the organization. This is the position the heroine finds herself in when she achieves just that sort of promotion, becoming secretary to a woman executive.
For both the "real" woman executive and the working girl turned executive, elements of what Anne Norton calls the "construction of women as rampant consumers" (Norton 57) is evident in the film and is identified first with appearance and second with the control of the male, whether that male is a boy friend or a boss. Griffith's female boss in particular represents the sort of uncontained fe...