Edit. In other words did people used to get paid for lunch breaks and then somehow we lost it?
While there’s a place for an answer related to the history of the 40-hour-work week, unions, and fair labor practices, it misses the point of Parton's song to take the title literally. That is, instead of “9 to 5” being a literal marker of the limits of a work day, the song, the movie, and the organization of the same name used it to a way to evoke a particular kind of employment, and the related benefits and perks, that had historically been denied American women. The history behind your question isn't about the work day: it's about second-wave feminism and signaling.
Though the boundaries and even the moniker are debated among women’s history scholars, “first-wave feminism” is typically seen as the efforts of women in the late-1800s and first half of the 1900s to get the right to vote and create social safety nets for women and children. These early feminists (though, again, many didn’t see themselves as such) organized alongside male-led unions to establish safe work practices, including changing and eliminating laws established during the depression that allowed school districts to fire women who got married. “Second wave feminism”, then, was about building on the work of earlier advances towards equity. Whereas the first wave was about big moves, the feminists of the 1960s and 70s tried built on those big wins to build the future they wanted for themselves and their daughters. A popular framing device related to second wave feminism was the phrase “the personal is political” (Milkman & Walkowitz, 1985) and we see that in how second-wave feminists organized, campaigned, and communicated their messages.
Ms. magazine provides one example of what that looks like in practice. The name speaks to the “personal” (a gender modifier before a woman’s name) and the contents were clearly political (the first issue listed the names of women who were not embarrassed they'd gotten abortions.) The name of the magazine served as a signal to its readers: there is more to being a woman than being a Miss (unmarried) or a Mrs (married.) Identity politics, a term coined by the Black women of the Combahee River Collective in the 1970s, was another way to signal a particular political message related to Black women’s activism. In a recent interview, Barbara Smith, one of the founders of the collective explained:
“By ‘identity politics,’ we meant simply this: we have a right as Black women in the nineteen-seventies to formulate our own political agendas.” She went on, “We don’t have to leave out the fact that we are women, we do not have to leave out the fact that we are Black. We don’t have to do white feminism, we don’t have to do patriarchal Black nationalism—we don’t have to do those things. We can obviously create a politics that is absolutely aligned with our own experiences as Black women—in other words, with our identities. That’s what we meant by ‘identity politics,’ that we have a right. And, trust me, very few people agreed that we did have that right in the nineteen-seventies. So we asserted it anyway.”
Which leads us back to the phrase “9 to 5.” Regardless of what wave of feminism we’re talking about, advocates for women’s rights have had to reconcile the tension that in virtually all instances, men held the levers of power. In other words, a great deal of the work of feminists was about persuading men, mostly white, to change their minds. (Edit to add: this helps us understand why the hours of 9 AM to 5 PM were the norm for a particular kind of job, a job mostly held by middle to upper middle class men. Those are the hours that the men in power, which includes those who lead unions, wanted to work. Likewise, if your thinking is that 9 to 5 were the hours of the "typical" job, you're defining "typical" by the jobs held by a small segment of the American population.) This tension was what inspired Karen Nussbaum and Ellen Cassedy, two Boston-area office workers to create “9to5” (no spaces) in 1973, an organization committed to supporting women to speak up for what’s was rightfully theirs.
So, what did “9 to 5” signal? First, it was meant to signal a workplace free from harassment and subject to fair work rules, not the whims of a boss. One of the first protests that the organization 9to5 led involved an incident where a secretary was fired because she brought her boss a sandwich with rye bread, not white like he wanted. The women stood outside some of the largest office buildings in Boston (and later NYC and Chicago) and polled elderly office workers to collect names and data related to age discrimination and sexual harassment in the office. Second, it signaled a workplace that worked for all, not just men. In the 1980s, 9to5 partnered with medical centers to support studies of pregnancy hazards in the workplace and how the presence of computers (the machines, not the women) in the workplace impacted the secretarial workforce. They pushed for flex schedules, a practice that is mentioned in the movie.
Many of these details come from articles in Boston papers that covered the work of the 9to5 organization and in one editorial in 1985 refuting claims that the organization was shutting down, Nussbaum and Cassedy wrote: “Employers and office workers alike should be assured that 9to5 is still going strong. The battle will not be over until fair pay and decent working conditions for office workers are the rule, not the exception.”
Third, "9 to 5" signaled respect. In theory, it meant clocking in at a set time (meaning your morning was your own), and being able to leave when your day was over, not when your boss was done with you. However, in practice, "9 to 5" was a grind. Just working the set hours didn't guarantee a safe workplace. American Songwriter did a nice deep dive on the history of the song and spoke to one of the founders of 9to5 who describes that gap between the promise of a 9 to 5 job and the reality inside a capitalistic society:
"I think the song is brilliant. It starts with pride: ‘Pour myself a cup of ambition.’ It goes to grievances: ‘Barely getting by.’ It then goes to class conflict: ‘You’re just a step on the bossman’s ladder.’ And then it ends with collective power: ‘In the same boat with a lot of your friends.’ So in the space of this wildly popular song with a great beat, Dolly Parton just puts it all together by herself.”
It's difficult to tell if there was some retconning, but beginning shortly after the song and movie were released, Parton herself said she was inspired by the organization 9to5 when writing. Which is to say, the song isn't about the specific hours people worked - it's a way to signal the listener to a particular type of job - and the struggles of those workplaces - as she explains in the chorus:
Were the most common hours in 1980 really from 9 am to 5 pm?
9-to-5 was a catchphrase by that time. It had been a catchphrase for a very long time. It did not even represent an "average" job when the phrase was first coined.
Furthermore, the 9-to-5 phrase was introduced back when a six day workweek was common. So it wasn't even representing a 40-hour workweek, but a 48-hour one.
...
Let's start by jumping back a bit to the 1890s.
The average work-day for men was 10.2 hours a day and women 9.2 hours a day, out of a six-day workweek.
For men, the bottom decile worked an average of 10 hours a day while only the top decile made it to 8 hours a day. The top decile men got to start at 8 rather than 7 am, and took lunch for an hour rather than a half hour. Even the 70th-80th decile had an average of 10 hours a day.
In 1892, Massachusetts passed a law limiting the hours-per-week for women to 58 hours. So while the concept of an 8-hour workday was already around (most famously in 1886 where hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike to demand an 8-hour workday, and many got it) it was often not a thing in practice.
...
The earliest reference I've found regarding 9-to-5 used as the phrase is from 1918:
Coe, when he returns from his vacation, will find he has graduated from the night force to a 9 to 5 job with the day regulars.
Let's follow up a bit through the years:
1926, interviews with women who write
You can't make a 9 to 5 job out of it and really get anywhere. And it's not a snap job. But the work is absolutely fascinating...
(For reference, the above quote is roughly when work started to change from six to five days a week, but it wasn't instant or universal.)
You will be helping to lick "the winter of our discontent" -- and maybe fitting your wife for a 9-to-5 job should she ever need it.
It is far from a 9-to-5 job, but it is a real challenge, and as law students are truly wonderful people...
For five years he got up early enough to practice a couple of hours before the 9 to 5 job, practiced in the evenings, studied until 2 or 3 in the morning.
We know that we have a great responsibility when speaking to people who risk freedom and even life when they listen to us. We know ours can never be a 9-to-5 job from which one goes home and forgets.
His is no 9-to-5 job. Too much is at stake; the lifetime dreams of those he serves.
Nursing does not appear to be all that was promised in the classroom. They feel inefficient, and long for a nice tidy '9 to 5 job' in an office or elsewhere.
Observations:
There was a vague sense of 9-to-5 as a "women's work" stable job -- finding your wife a 9-to-5 -- but it wasn't universal; the phrase was more nebulous and could include both men and women.
9 to 5 was "low responsibility, low stakes"; you could "go home and forget".
9 to 5 was "nice and tidy".
My general point is that the exact hours of 9-to-5 were picked up as a catchphase very early.
The first quote is notable because it involves railroad workers. Railroads are where much of the early 8-hour day push happened. The Adamson Act of 1916 -- only two years earlier -- established an 8-hour workday for a certain subset of railway workers, and other workers soon demanded the same. Here's another quote from the same section:
Bros. Martin, Lee, Umbaugh, Howard, and Lynch are still on the 12-hour grind. However, relief has been promised ... When these brothers first made heir request for an 8-hour day, before joining the O.R.T., it was almost ignored. Since their committee strolled down to see the boss man a new man is now posting on the job, with the promise to line up more extra men as soon as they can be secured, thus giving the boys their "eight-hour day".
(Also, notably, early railroads are the only instance I have been able to find where 9 am to 5 pm are regularly the actual exact hours; it is possible they were even the origin of the phrase, but there isn't enough evidence to tell.)
9-to-5 certainly did not describe a typical job. It described, in some sense, an ideal job.
I can find no point in the history of work where it was "the most common". For example, in 1937, in the District of Columbia, 2,892 women who worked in department stores were surveyed about their working hours. Only 7 worked 40 hours exactly and only 15 worked 48 hours exactly. Overwhelmingly, the most common number of hours was exactly 45 (9 hours a day for 5 days a week).
I unfortunately haven't been able to find any survey of an exact start time for 1980, a survey from 1991 gave 8 to 5 as the most common hours, and the general data on hours indicate very little change between the two. So, in summary: there is no missing hour: as a catchphrase that dated back more than hundred years; even though such hours have existed in the past and even still exist today, the phrase "9-to-5 job" hasn't meant the actual hours of 9 am to 5 pm for a very long time.
...
Costa, D. L. (2000). The Wage and the Length of the Work Day: From the 1890s to 1991. Journal of Labor Economics, 18(1), 156-181.
DeVault, I. A. (1991). "Give the boys a trade": Gender and job choice in the 1890s [Electronic version]. Work engendered: Toward a new history of American labor (pp. 191-215). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Southerland, A. T., Best, E. L. (1937). Women's Hours and Wages in the District of Columbia in 1937. United States: U.S. Government Printing Office.
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