April 11, 2013 • 26 mins
What was the gendering of the typewriter? How did women take over secretarial work? Join Cristen and Caroline to learn about the history of secretarial work from ancient scribes to the steno pool, along with how to overcome negative secretary stereotypes.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told You from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline and Caroline. AP is Administrative Professionals
Day formerly known as Secretary's Day, and that celebration, along
(00:27):
with the fact that administrative assistant slash secretary is still
the most common job for women in the United States,
is the reason why we wanted to do this podcast
on secretarial work in the history of the secretaries, how
women took over clerical work from men. Yeah, it does
(00:47):
go beyond Madman Kristen, if you can believe it. It
actually does have a very interesting evolution as far as
why secretary jobs became so important in the first place,
and those origins lie in the Industrial Revolution. Yes, um,
but should we offer first a snapshot of what secretarial
(01:09):
work looks like today? Yeah. The two thousand ten media
and pay for a secretary is just under thirty five
thousand dollars, which is roughly sixteen dollars and sixties six
cents to just pull that out of your head. I
did not. This is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
but that's sixteen and sixty six cents per hour. And
(01:30):
the qualifications are usually a high school diploma and basic
office and computing skills. The job outlook is decent twelve
percent projected growth for any uh job walks out there
who were curious, which is about on average. And like
I said, it's still the most common job for women.
(01:50):
And that made headlines a lot of headlines actually when
those numbers came out not too long ago, because people
were shocked that secretary is still the number one job. Yeah.
According to CNN talking about this, between two thousand and
six of people who call themselves secretaries and administrative assistants
(02:16):
were women. That's that's most of them. Yeah, in case
you didn't know. Well. And the thing about secretarial work
that will talk about as well is that even though
it's a solid job sector and is pretty important, the
inspecter has never been raised. We we still kind of
(02:37):
think of it. No One was happy to hear that
women still fill of secretarial jobs because I think there
is a stereotype that goes along with it, that is
that it's kind of demeaning work. Right. Well, there's still
I mean, there's still the perception also that you don't
do much as an administrative assistant. Um Lynn Peril, who
(02:58):
we will cite a lot in this episode. She wrote
Swimming in the Steno Pool, a retro guide to making
it in the office, write an opinion piece for The
New York Times in ap she kind of goes back
to when people in the you know, fifties sixties thought that,
oh man, we are going to have all these amazing
technological developments and secretaries won't even have to come in
for most of the day, like computers, electronic computers will
(03:22):
solve all of our problems. And she points out there's
one little sticking point that no matter how much technology
we develop, administrative assistance are really office assistance of any
kind are still expected to fetch the coffee. That's still
such a sticking point in so many offices. And she
cites a lot of women who ended up running into
(03:44):
trouble at their offices or even being fired for refusing
to go get coffee for people. Yeah, and perhaps because
of things like being expected to make coffee for people,
and perhaps because of the lack of respect that administrative
work get, it still remains quote and often taxing, sometimes humiliating,
an increasingly precarious job. But if we go back to
(04:09):
ancient Rome, and this is coming from the International Association
of Administrative Professionals. It was a respectable job of Secretaries
were usually highly educated men who took dictation as scribes
and often acted as trusted advisors. Yeah, you know, chiseling
all those little memos into uh, into stone tablets and
(04:29):
what not. We needed a steady head to steady steady hand. Um.
Moving into early modern times, though, members of the nobility
also had male secretaries who could speak several languages and
were required to have abroad education. And really, I mean
going forward until the Industrial Revolution, men dominated the field.
It was until the eighteen eighties that women took over,
(04:51):
and so in even even in the late nineteenth century,
women are still kind of in the home. They haven't
moved outside of really domestic work, I would say, um,
and you know, they were in their own spheres. The
clerk did the bulk of the work in the office
is drafting letters, copying documents, filing, keeping the books. But
(05:12):
because they were men, any clerical work they did could
reasonably be expected to help them move up the ladder eventually,
So you could start in an office in the late
nineteenth century as a clerk, but eventually become the VP,
the boss, the guy running the store. That's not so
much the case with women, but that whole moving men
(05:34):
up and paying them more also has a lot to
do with why women took over clerical work in the
first place. So with the Industrial Revolution came an enormous
amount of paperwork, and with that we have the quote
unquote feminization of low level clerical work and also a
(05:55):
revolutionary machine that really is a big reason to thank
for women taking over the sector, and that is the
invention of the typewriter. So after this is really interesting.
After the Civil War, the company E. Remington and Sons
was looking for a way to expand its product line
(06:16):
because rifles were not in high demand in peacetime. So
in eighteen seventy three it took on this typewriter design
that was designed by this guy last name Shoals, and
they sold it. Now, there are a ton of other
people who were also developing typewriters at the time, um,
but they weren't considering the typewriter for office work. A
(06:37):
lot of times it was marketed as more of a
quote unquote literary piano how melodic, yes, for for writers
and such. But Remington took a bet that it would
be used for clerical work, and it paid off. And
one other way that Remington made bank was by marketing
it towards women. And one way that they did that
(06:57):
was by casing one of their early is typewriter models
with a floral a floral casing. Casing it with a
floral casing, thank god, because I hate typing on just
plain black typewriters myself. Well in many of those early ads.
So for that Remington model, it was often modeled by Schuls,
(07:18):
the inventors daughter Lillian. So from the outset you have
these advertising images of women next to typewriters, and pretty
soon once you enter the early twentieth century, you have
the icon of the typewriter girl. Yeah, well, so why
did this become? Why why do we have a typewriter
(07:40):
girl icon to begin with? And part of that has
to do with companies realized they could pay women lower
wages to do the work. They realized when women started
entering the office during the Civil War because of employment shortages,
people are like, oh wait, wait, wait, women can do
other things besides just like cook me dinner. So they
(08:00):
realized that they need to get more women in the office.
Because a they can work and use their brains and
be they can be paid less. So you get these
secretarial schools opening up that offer professional training that make
it possible for women to enter the workforce without having
a college education. So that kind of broadens the appeal
for a lot of people. And there were a lot
of considerations for women too. I mean, yes, you can
(08:22):
argue that they're being taken advantage of, But for women,
like I said, there wasn't much outside of domestic work.
They had relatively high wages in the office compared with
the alternatives, and there was a certain status and respectability
to office employment. Plus you got that education if you
went to one of these secretarial schools. And so to
look at some of those salaries at the end of
the nineteenth century in the Northeast, for instance, domestic servants
(08:45):
earned two to five dollars a week, factory workers a
dollar fifty to eight dollars per week, whereas typists and
stenographers earned six to fifteen dollars a week. Yeah. But
and even though that uh, stenographers six to fifty dollars
a week was anywhere from a third to half of
what men would make doing the same thing, Like you said, Caroline,
(09:06):
that was a great option considering that in five the
only female employment sectors you could go into we're teaching,
which was something that was also revolutionary at the time
because women had only recently taken over for men as teachers, uh, nursing, clerking,
doing the domestic servant work, or factory work, or of
course just getting married. And the number of women working
(09:31):
as stenographers actually rose pretty rapidly. In eighteen seventy there
were just seven seven women working as stenographers according to
the Census four. That's four point five of the one
d fifty four stenographers in the country. But by nineteen
hundred there were two hundred thousand, and by nineteen thirty
(09:53):
two millions, So that's an incredible increase I think as
far as women coming into that line of work and
quote unquote feminizing it. And these typists generally were from
the middle class urban households because typing was considered more
morally acceptable than factory and servant positions, so there there
(10:14):
was kind of a general type to the typeist, if
you will, yeah, um, speaking of the moral acceptability of it.
In nine the Ladies Holme Journal editor Edward Bach said
that office work is quote the best paid and most
respectable employment for a young woman. And again, I mean
(10:35):
the the whole advertising imagery of the women next to
the typewriter really can't be underscored enough. This was something
that Donald Hoake explored in his paper The Woman and
the Typewriter, a case study and technological innovation and social change.
And there was also at the time a picture postcard craze,
(10:55):
and uh, there were all of these postcards that would
come out showing the typewriter girl. And sometimes it would
be yeah, sometimes it would just be kind of a
you know, a pretty generic image of a girl next
to a typewriter. Sometimes it would be yes, a little
more titilating. There was one from seven that's three part
(11:16):
card showing a wife catching her husband with a secretary.
In one of the panels, she calls her an amorous
little upstart. So pretty quickly there too, though you have
the there's there is this discomfort of these women entering
the office, even though it's considered more morally acceptable. And
the novelty of the typewriter was really important because that
(11:38):
meant that this was a gender neutral job. It wasn't
women pushing men out of typing jobs. They were simply
filling positions in an expanding industry. Yeah, and it should
be noted that, Okay, so women weren't pushing men out
of jobs like, you know, physically, or they weren't being
hired over men necessarily, but the number of men really
(12:01):
did start to dwindle. And a nineteen or six book
even encouragement to think hard before they took one of
these jobs, because by the turn of the twentieth century
the position was already so feminized that they were like,
do you really want to, you know, get into like
a woman job. And one thing to think about two
is the fact that you know, even though we might
(12:22):
still consider you know, typing in low level clerical or
even in that description, oh it's just low level jobs.
This was revolutionary because typically women had moved out of
the house by you know, going for occupations, so they
had typically performed at home, which is why so many,
for instance, at that time, we're working in garment factories.
They were simply taking their jobs out of the home
(12:44):
and into the workplace. But the typewriter opens up this
whole new thing. Yeah, and in two we start organizing
the two the National Secretaries Association formed and it's now
the International Association of Administrative Professor Channels, and in nineteen
fifty one that group administered the first Certified Professional Secretaries examination.
(13:07):
And for anyone who does watch mad Men, you know
that there is a hierarchy among these secretaries, especially in
you know, the nineteen forties, fifties, and sixties. Yeah, and
a lot of that hierarchy is very evident in the
steno pool. This is again coming from Lynn peril Uh.
She talks about how these cento pools are groups, large
(13:29):
groups of desks where all the women are hard at
work typing. They might be listening to a dictation on
their headphones, their headset um or or typing up notes.
And that's usually where the newbies got their start, is
in the stenopool. At the desk, so lowest on the
totem pole you have the type is moving slightly up
the totem pole, we have the stenographers who took the
dictation that the typists typed. Usually they took it by hand.
(13:53):
And then moving up even further you have secretaries. And
these folks provided support to execute cutives. And something that
like just kind of made me feel icky and awful
inside was reading about not that women wanted to be secretaries.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's the fact that
(14:14):
a nineteen sixties author told readers that you may have
once dreamed about being a doctor, a layer, or a scientist, ladies,
but today you can study to be a medical or
legal secretary. So it was like kind of accepting the
fact that that was as high as you could go
on the totem pole was to be a secretary to
a doctor or to an executive. Well, yeah, and I
(14:36):
mean again, it was still at the time this kind
of respectable work. You go to your typing school, you
you know, you graduate, and you go into whatever office,
whatever stenopool you might land in UM. But then they
we have the evolution from secretary to administrative assistant. And
Lynn Peril, who wrote that book Swimming in the Stenopool,
(14:57):
talks about how by the nineteen seven d's calling yourself
an administrative assistant was this intentional way of communicating to
your usually male superiors that listen, buddy, I'm taking myself
seriously and I expect you to take me seriously as well.
Because she recounts horror stories from other secretaries having to
(15:21):
to deal um with with guys, especially because of this
idea that secretaries were a little more than just quote
unquote hot to trot, pencil pushing woman who are there
to have affairs with their boss, right, Yeah, and the
whole the whole suspicion of the wife. And yeah, there
were a lot of those cards like you mentioned that
showed even back in the very turn of the twentieth century,
(15:43):
that showed wives walking in on their husbands cannoodling with
the secretary. Yeah. Um, speaking of the whole secretary stereotype,
this is something that sociologists Seawright Mills is called doing
the housework of your boss's business. And secretaries were very
quickly either considered to be spinsters or seductresses. They were
(16:07):
essentially like the two schools of secretarial thought, where you
devote your entire life to being a secretary. I mean
even in these secretarialal manuals where they advise women to
really form their entire social lives around their secretarial work,
just to make sure that if their boss needs them
at the drop of a hat, they can be there
(16:27):
with their steno pad um or you pull a Megan
on Madman spoiler alert and you married boss. Yeah, there
was one of those manuals, like in the fifties or sixties,
I guess, talking about doing the housework for your boss
at the business, talking about how you know, with all
of this new technology, you know, you don't want to
get displaced and kicked out because they have computers or anything.
(16:50):
So you should really try to do stuff like dust
and empty the ash trays. Because what computer can do that, Kristen,
It can't, it can't. Roombas did not exist. But in Nino,
with the publication of a series of articles by May
Christie in the San Francisco Chronicle, um, we have the
emergence of the quote unquote office wife stereotype who is
(17:13):
really married to her job. But that also then gives
way to this more even more directly sexualized image of
the secretary. Yeah, which is why I mean, I think
there's still that stereotype in a lot of places about
you know, oh, my husband has a hot young secretary,
you know, just worrying that constant like stereotype of oh
(17:35):
he hired a good looking secretary, I've got to keep
an eye on him, right, And in the nineteen seventies,
even as some of these secretaries were shifting to the
the administrative assistant title and obviously wanting to you know,
have more dignity in their work. There does come a
point where secretaries and second way feminists do butt heads,
(17:59):
and this is something that Peril talks about as well,
because in nineteen seventy one, for instance, Gloria Steinham gave
a commencement address at Smith College and she references in
it a a idyllic future where women refused to learn
how to type. And then in March nineteen seventy two,
the National Organization of Women protested at the AD agency
(18:22):
that created the Olivetti Girl, as these are ads for
this type of typewriter which depicted dizzy headed sexpots her secretaries.
And I've looked at the ads and they are that
the whole thing is like, are you an Olivetti girl?
And it's you know, very pretty girls looking kind of vacant.
And so now is protesting this AD agency and they
(18:44):
were very anti secretary obviously coming from a good place
of you know, not having women kind of under the
thumb of these sexist male bosses. But there were also
a lot of secretaries administrative assistance at the time who
were like, hey, you know what I'm not really on
board with your feminism because you're saying that my job
(19:05):
is demeaning, but I say my job is an honest paycheck. Yeah,
I think, wasn't that. One woman in response to this said,
you know, like administrative assistance don't carry signs like like
we're fine where we are. We chose this line of work.
Go speak for somebody else, right, And and it's kind
of it is kind of interesting to think about that
when you consider how, um, you know, the typewriter, even
(19:28):
though it did create this initially create this massive gender
pay gap, which I'm sure is still the case because
there are some statistics finding that male secretaries still make
more than female secretaries today. Um, but it was you
could say it was revolutionary time in post Civil War America. Unfortunately,
(19:53):
the stereotype and pop culture really turned it into this
spinster or seductoris kind of thing. Well, speaking of male secretaries,
you don't really see them a lot, do you. I mean?
In her book The Elite Secretary, The Definitive Guide to
a Successful Career, Sandard Warbock talks about one man who
(20:14):
described male secretaries as being viewed with suspicion. He he
said that he felt like he was bucking societal preconceptions
by working in that arena. Well, and I feel like,
even though that was the eighties and today, like we said, um,
from those Beer of Labor statistics statistics that women comprise
of all administrative professional jobs, so obviously there's still very
(20:37):
much in the minority. But I was sure I was
going to find some kind of academic study of the
perceptions of male secretaries in the workplace. I did not
find a one, not a single one. And I don't
know maybe if whether that's because it is so narrow
or not, but I was surprised to see that. Um
almost as surprised to see how much itch of a
(21:01):
headline maker it was when the White House recently appointed
its first male social secretary, Jeremy Barnard, And it was
kind of like a double headline because he was male
and openly gay. But seriously, Washington kind of fell over
on itself at the idea of this male social secretary
appointed by the Obama administration. And he didn't want to
(21:23):
talk about it publicly for a long time. And the
only public statement that I've seen Barnard make dealt specifically
with organizing one event, not about like what do you
feel about being this male secretary? Yeah, it's probably like
I feel great. I make a great amount of money
doing Yeah, I get to work in the White House.
What do you Do? Podcast? Podcast? So I do think though,
(21:49):
that there needs to be a greater appreciation for those admirals,
Like you said at the top of the podcast, Caroline,
a lot of times there is an assumption that they
don't do anythinging. I mean, I know from working at
how Stuff works, our office manager, who is a male,
He is in that four percent, and this office would
(22:09):
fall apart if he were not here. I don't know
how we would function exactly. Um. And I think that
you know, male, female, whatever, that secretarial work should get
more of a stew and also recognize, um, it's historical significance. Yeah.
And just how I mean, just how crazy it was
to read about the typewriter helping to create this gender
(22:33):
neutral job where none had been before. As far as this,
this job was really created out of thin air. I
mean for the most part. Yeah, we had scribes, we
had assistance, we had things like that. But this this
type ist job or these stenographers, that was really something
new after the Civil War, and there was no preconceived
notion of it being a very gendered male thing. Yeah,
(22:56):
and it's unfortunate that those pop culture stereotype have in
a large way, you know, overshadowed with those archetypes of
the typewriter girl or the office wife. You know, it's
always always characterizing these women in relationship to men in
the office. But maybe that does reflect still kind of
the lingering discomfort with kind of women plowing through in
(23:19):
the office. Yeah, perps, So any administrative professionals listening, we
want to hear, especially from you. Oh and also here's
wishing you a happy admin day on ap But yeah,
right into us about what you feel about your job.
Do you enjoy it? Is it horrible to people look
(23:42):
down on you and make you just get coffee all
the time? What is it like? Right to us? Mom?
Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can send
your letters. I don't want to hear from Michelle about
our dress code episode. She said. When I was in
high school, during s You're a Week, we always had
gender bender Day where the boys dressed like girls and
(24:03):
the girls dressed like boys. Every year, without fail, boys
would get sent home for their skirts being too short
or their breasts being outrageously big, and girls were just
fine wearing oversized T shirts and drawing on facial hair.
So there you have it. Michelle's evidence on gender Bender
Day that it's easier to dress like a boy. Well,
I got on here from Sarah and she's writing about
(24:25):
the dress codes as well, which we've gotten a lot
of mail about the dress code issue, and it's it's
all been very much entertaining, and she writes, I went
through my punk rock face during junior high. I fought
in one on two different issues concerning our dress code.
I often dyed my hair, staying within a dress code
of not doing wild bright colors, and I often did
natural red, brown and black. But one time I went
(24:47):
all out and did half of my head red, half
my head black, and split right down the middle where
my part was. I went through three classes, and finally
in my fourth, my science teacher gave me a disgusted
look and said, no, you cannot come into office like that.
Go home. And when I asked why, he said, you
expect me to be able to teach you with your
hair like that? No, So I was sent home for
(25:08):
the day and told him my hair had to be
solid by the next day. My mom would have none
of it and went straight to the dress code, which
red hair must be of natural color. And my argument was,
what about girls with highlights? Brown hair and highlights, It's
not natural, but you allow it. The school's response was
people were just used to that, and so he took
that one all the way to the district office and
(25:28):
I was allowed to keep my hair. And that same
year I got an industrial piercing through the curled cartilage
at the top of your ear. The same teacher sent
me up and I recited the section on piercings that
said no excess of jewelry in or about the ear,
and said there were plenty of other girls who had
two piercings in their card lists, just not joined by
(25:49):
a single bar. Again, I was able to keep my piercing,
and they changed the dress code the following year. I
did not go around finding things to beat in the
dress code. I didn't wear spaghetti straps or flip blogs
because it explicitly said not to. But when there was
a wriggle room, I was sure to use it to
my advantage. Get them oh the punk rock phases of
(26:10):
our youth. So thanks to everyone who has written to
mom Stuff at Discovery dot com. You can also find
us on Facebook like as Sarah, follow us on Twitter
mom Stuff Podcasts, and you can also find us on
Tumbler at stuff mom Never Told You dot tumbler dot com.
And if you would like to read our blog as
(26:30):
well this week, you can find it on our website,
it's how stuff works dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, is how stuff works dot
com
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told You from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline and Caroline. AP is Administrative Professionals
Day formerly known as Secretary's Day, and that celebration, along
(00:27):
with the fact that administrative assistant slash secretary is still
the most common job for women in the United States,
is the reason why we wanted to do this podcast
on secretarial work in the history of the secretaries, how
women took over clerical work from men. Yeah, it does
(00:47):
go beyond Madman Kristen, if you can believe it. It
actually does have a very interesting evolution as far as
why secretary jobs became so important in the first place,
and those origins lie in the Industrial Revolution. Yes, um,
but should we offer first a snapshot of what secretarial
(01:09):
work looks like today? Yeah. The two thousand ten media
and pay for a secretary is just under thirty five
thousand dollars, which is roughly sixteen dollars and sixties six
cents to just pull that out of your head. I
did not. This is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
but that's sixteen and sixty six cents per hour. And
(01:30):
the qualifications are usually a high school diploma and basic
office and computing skills. The job outlook is decent twelve
percent projected growth for any uh job walks out there
who were curious, which is about on average. And like
I said, it's still the most common job for women.
(01:50):
And that made headlines a lot of headlines actually when
those numbers came out not too long ago, because people
were shocked that secretary is still the number one job. Yeah.
According to CNN talking about this, between two thousand and
six of people who call themselves secretaries and administrative assistants
(02:16):
were women. That's that's most of them. Yeah, in case
you didn't know. Well. And the thing about secretarial work
that will talk about as well is that even though
it's a solid job sector and is pretty important, the
inspecter has never been raised. We we still kind of
(02:37):
think of it. No One was happy to hear that
women still fill of secretarial jobs because I think there
is a stereotype that goes along with it, that is
that it's kind of demeaning work. Right. Well, there's still
I mean, there's still the perception also that you don't
do much as an administrative assistant. Um Lynn Peril, who
(02:58):
we will cite a lot in this episode. She wrote
Swimming in the Steno Pool, a retro guide to making
it in the office, write an opinion piece for The
New York Times in ap she kind of goes back
to when people in the you know, fifties sixties thought that,
oh man, we are going to have all these amazing
technological developments and secretaries won't even have to come in
for most of the day, like computers, electronic computers will
(03:22):
solve all of our problems. And she points out there's
one little sticking point that no matter how much technology
we develop, administrative assistance are really office assistance of any
kind are still expected to fetch the coffee. That's still
such a sticking point in so many offices. And she
cites a lot of women who ended up running into
(03:44):
trouble at their offices or even being fired for refusing
to go get coffee for people. Yeah, and perhaps because
of things like being expected to make coffee for people,
and perhaps because of the lack of respect that administrative
work get, it still remains quote and often taxing, sometimes humiliating,
an increasingly precarious job. But if we go back to
(04:09):
ancient Rome, and this is coming from the International Association
of Administrative Professionals. It was a respectable job of Secretaries
were usually highly educated men who took dictation as scribes
and often acted as trusted advisors. Yeah, you know, chiseling
all those little memos into uh, into stone tablets and
(04:29):
what not. We needed a steady head to steady steady hand. Um.
Moving into early modern times, though, members of the nobility
also had male secretaries who could speak several languages and
were required to have abroad education. And really, I mean
going forward until the Industrial Revolution, men dominated the field.
It was until the eighteen eighties that women took over,
(04:51):
and so in even even in the late nineteenth century,
women are still kind of in the home. They haven't
moved outside of really domestic work, I would say, um,
and you know, they were in their own spheres. The
clerk did the bulk of the work in the office
is drafting letters, copying documents, filing, keeping the books. But
(05:12):
because they were men, any clerical work they did could
reasonably be expected to help them move up the ladder eventually,
So you could start in an office in the late
nineteenth century as a clerk, but eventually become the VP,
the boss, the guy running the store. That's not so
much the case with women, but that whole moving men
(05:34):
up and paying them more also has a lot to
do with why women took over clerical work in the
first place. So with the Industrial Revolution came an enormous
amount of paperwork, and with that we have the quote
unquote feminization of low level clerical work and also a
(05:55):
revolutionary machine that really is a big reason to thank
for women taking over the sector, and that is the
invention of the typewriter. So after this is really interesting.
After the Civil War, the company E. Remington and Sons
was looking for a way to expand its product line
(06:16):
because rifles were not in high demand in peacetime. So
in eighteen seventy three it took on this typewriter design
that was designed by this guy last name Shoals, and
they sold it. Now, there are a ton of other
people who were also developing typewriters at the time, um,
but they weren't considering the typewriter for office work. A
(06:37):
lot of times it was marketed as more of a
quote unquote literary piano how melodic, yes, for for writers
and such. But Remington took a bet that it would
be used for clerical work, and it paid off. And
one other way that Remington made bank was by marketing
it towards women. And one way that they did that
(06:57):
was by casing one of their early is typewriter models
with a floral a floral casing. Casing it with a
floral casing, thank god, because I hate typing on just
plain black typewriters myself. Well in many of those early ads.
So for that Remington model, it was often modeled by Schuls,
(07:18):
the inventors daughter Lillian. So from the outset you have
these advertising images of women next to typewriters, and pretty
soon once you enter the early twentieth century, you have
the icon of the typewriter girl. Yeah, well, so why
did this become? Why why do we have a typewriter
(07:40):
girl icon to begin with? And part of that has
to do with companies realized they could pay women lower
wages to do the work. They realized when women started
entering the office during the Civil War because of employment shortages,
people are like, oh wait, wait, wait, women can do
other things besides just like cook me dinner. So they
(08:00):
realized that they need to get more women in the office.
Because a they can work and use their brains and
be they can be paid less. So you get these
secretarial schools opening up that offer professional training that make
it possible for women to enter the workforce without having
a college education. So that kind of broadens the appeal
for a lot of people. And there were a lot
of considerations for women too. I mean, yes, you can
(08:22):
argue that they're being taken advantage of, But for women,
like I said, there wasn't much outside of domestic work.
They had relatively high wages in the office compared with
the alternatives, and there was a certain status and respectability
to office employment. Plus you got that education if you
went to one of these secretarial schools. And so to
look at some of those salaries at the end of
the nineteenth century in the Northeast, for instance, domestic servants
(08:45):
earned two to five dollars a week, factory workers a
dollar fifty to eight dollars per week, whereas typists and
stenographers earned six to fifteen dollars a week. Yeah. But
and even though that uh, stenographers six to fifty dollars
a week was anywhere from a third to half of
what men would make doing the same thing, Like you said, Caroline,
(09:06):
that was a great option considering that in five the
only female employment sectors you could go into we're teaching,
which was something that was also revolutionary at the time
because women had only recently taken over for men as teachers, uh, nursing, clerking,
doing the domestic servant work, or factory work, or of
course just getting married. And the number of women working
(09:31):
as stenographers actually rose pretty rapidly. In eighteen seventy there
were just seven seven women working as stenographers according to
the Census four. That's four point five of the one
d fifty four stenographers in the country. But by nineteen
hundred there were two hundred thousand, and by nineteen thirty
(09:53):
two millions, So that's an incredible increase I think as
far as women coming into that line of work and
quote unquote feminizing it. And these typists generally were from
the middle class urban households because typing was considered more
morally acceptable than factory and servant positions, so there there
(10:14):
was kind of a general type to the typeist, if
you will, yeah, um, speaking of the moral acceptability of it.
In nine the Ladies Holme Journal editor Edward Bach said
that office work is quote the best paid and most
respectable employment for a young woman. And again, I mean
(10:35):
the the whole advertising imagery of the women next to
the typewriter really can't be underscored enough. This was something
that Donald Hoake explored in his paper The Woman and
the Typewriter, a case study and technological innovation and social change.
And there was also at the time a picture postcard craze,
(10:55):
and uh, there were all of these postcards that would
come out showing the typewriter girl. And sometimes it would
be yeah, sometimes it would just be kind of a
you know, a pretty generic image of a girl next
to a typewriter. Sometimes it would be yes, a little
more titilating. There was one from seven that's three part
(11:16):
card showing a wife catching her husband with a secretary.
In one of the panels, she calls her an amorous
little upstart. So pretty quickly there too, though you have
the there's there is this discomfort of these women entering
the office, even though it's considered more morally acceptable. And
the novelty of the typewriter was really important because that
(11:38):
meant that this was a gender neutral job. It wasn't
women pushing men out of typing jobs. They were simply
filling positions in an expanding industry. Yeah, and it should
be noted that, Okay, so women weren't pushing men out
of jobs like, you know, physically, or they weren't being
hired over men necessarily, but the number of men really
(12:01):
did start to dwindle. And a nineteen or six book
even encouragement to think hard before they took one of
these jobs, because by the turn of the twentieth century
the position was already so feminized that they were like,
do you really want to, you know, get into like
a woman job. And one thing to think about two
is the fact that you know, even though we might
(12:22):
still consider you know, typing in low level clerical or
even in that description, oh it's just low level jobs.
This was revolutionary because typically women had moved out of
the house by you know, going for occupations, so they
had typically performed at home, which is why so many,
for instance, at that time, we're working in garment factories.
They were simply taking their jobs out of the home
(12:44):
and into the workplace. But the typewriter opens up this
whole new thing. Yeah, and in two we start organizing
the two the National Secretaries Association formed and it's now
the International Association of Administrative Professor Channels, and in nineteen
fifty one that group administered the first Certified Professional Secretaries examination.
(13:07):
And for anyone who does watch mad Men, you know
that there is a hierarchy among these secretaries, especially in
you know, the nineteen forties, fifties, and sixties. Yeah, and
a lot of that hierarchy is very evident in the
steno pool. This is again coming from Lynn peril Uh.
She talks about how these cento pools are groups, large
(13:29):
groups of desks where all the women are hard at
work typing. They might be listening to a dictation on
their headphones, their headset um or or typing up notes.
And that's usually where the newbies got their start, is
in the stenopool. At the desk, so lowest on the
totem pole you have the type is moving slightly up
the totem pole, we have the stenographers who took the
dictation that the typists typed. Usually they took it by hand.
(13:53):
And then moving up even further you have secretaries. And
these folks provided support to execute cutives. And something that
like just kind of made me feel icky and awful
inside was reading about not that women wanted to be secretaries.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's the fact that
(14:14):
a nineteen sixties author told readers that you may have
once dreamed about being a doctor, a layer, or a scientist, ladies,
but today you can study to be a medical or
legal secretary. So it was like kind of accepting the
fact that that was as high as you could go
on the totem pole was to be a secretary to
a doctor or to an executive. Well, yeah, and I
(14:36):
mean again, it was still at the time this kind
of respectable work. You go to your typing school, you
you know, you graduate, and you go into whatever office,
whatever stenopool you might land in UM. But then they
we have the evolution from secretary to administrative assistant. And
Lynn Peril, who wrote that book Swimming in the Stenopool,
(14:57):
talks about how by the nineteen seven d's calling yourself
an administrative assistant was this intentional way of communicating to
your usually male superiors that listen, buddy, I'm taking myself
seriously and I expect you to take me seriously as well.
Because she recounts horror stories from other secretaries having to
(15:21):
to deal um with with guys, especially because of this
idea that secretaries were a little more than just quote
unquote hot to trot, pencil pushing woman who are there
to have affairs with their boss, right, Yeah, and the
whole the whole suspicion of the wife. And yeah, there
were a lot of those cards like you mentioned that
showed even back in the very turn of the twentieth century,
(15:43):
that showed wives walking in on their husbands cannoodling with
the secretary. Yeah. Um, speaking of the whole secretary stereotype,
this is something that sociologists Seawright Mills is called doing
the housework of your boss's business. And secretaries were very
quickly either considered to be spinsters or seductresses. They were
(16:07):
essentially like the two schools of secretarial thought, where you
devote your entire life to being a secretary. I mean
even in these secretarialal manuals where they advise women to
really form their entire social lives around their secretarial work,
just to make sure that if their boss needs them
at the drop of a hat, they can be there
(16:27):
with their steno pad um or you pull a Megan
on Madman spoiler alert and you married boss. Yeah, there
was one of those manuals, like in the fifties or sixties,
I guess, talking about doing the housework for your boss
at the business, talking about how you know, with all
of this new technology, you know, you don't want to
get displaced and kicked out because they have computers or anything.
(16:50):
So you should really try to do stuff like dust
and empty the ash trays. Because what computer can do that, Kristen,
It can't, it can't. Roombas did not exist. But in Nino,
with the publication of a series of articles by May
Christie in the San Francisco Chronicle, um, we have the
emergence of the quote unquote office wife stereotype who is
(17:13):
really married to her job. But that also then gives
way to this more even more directly sexualized image of
the secretary. Yeah, which is why I mean, I think
there's still that stereotype in a lot of places about
you know, oh, my husband has a hot young secretary,
you know, just worrying that constant like stereotype of oh
(17:35):
he hired a good looking secretary, I've got to keep
an eye on him, right, And in the nineteen seventies,
even as some of these secretaries were shifting to the
the administrative assistant title and obviously wanting to you know,
have more dignity in their work. There does come a
point where secretaries and second way feminists do butt heads,
(17:59):
and this is something that Peril talks about as well,
because in nineteen seventy one, for instance, Gloria Steinham gave
a commencement address at Smith College and she references in
it a a idyllic future where women refused to learn
how to type. And then in March nineteen seventy two,
the National Organization of Women protested at the AD agency
(18:22):
that created the Olivetti Girl, as these are ads for
this type of typewriter which depicted dizzy headed sexpots her secretaries.
And I've looked at the ads and they are that
the whole thing is like, are you an Olivetti girl?
And it's you know, very pretty girls looking kind of vacant.
And so now is protesting this AD agency and they
(18:44):
were very anti secretary obviously coming from a good place
of you know, not having women kind of under the
thumb of these sexist male bosses. But there were also
a lot of secretaries administrative assistance at the time who
were like, hey, you know what I'm not really on
board with your feminism because you're saying that my job
(19:05):
is demeaning, but I say my job is an honest paycheck. Yeah,
I think, wasn't that. One woman in response to this said,
you know, like administrative assistance don't carry signs like like
we're fine where we are. We chose this line of work.
Go speak for somebody else, right, And and it's kind
of it is kind of interesting to think about that
when you consider how, um, you know, the typewriter, even
(19:28):
though it did create this initially create this massive gender
pay gap, which I'm sure is still the case because
there are some statistics finding that male secretaries still make
more than female secretaries today. Um, but it was you
could say it was revolutionary time in post Civil War America. Unfortunately,
(19:53):
the stereotype and pop culture really turned it into this
spinster or seductoris kind of thing. Well, speaking of male secretaries,
you don't really see them a lot, do you. I mean?
In her book The Elite Secretary, The Definitive Guide to
a Successful Career, Sandard Warbock talks about one man who
(20:14):
described male secretaries as being viewed with suspicion. He he
said that he felt like he was bucking societal preconceptions
by working in that arena. Well, and I feel like,
even though that was the eighties and today, like we said, um,
from those Beer of Labor statistics statistics that women comprise
of all administrative professional jobs, so obviously there's still very
(20:37):
much in the minority. But I was sure I was
going to find some kind of academic study of the
perceptions of male secretaries in the workplace. I did not
find a one, not a single one. And I don't
know maybe if whether that's because it is so narrow
or not, but I was surprised to see that. Um
almost as surprised to see how much itch of a
(21:01):
headline maker it was when the White House recently appointed
its first male social secretary, Jeremy Barnard, And it was
kind of like a double headline because he was male
and openly gay. But seriously, Washington kind of fell over
on itself at the idea of this male social secretary
appointed by the Obama administration. And he didn't want to
(21:23):
talk about it publicly for a long time. And the
only public statement that I've seen Barnard make dealt specifically
with organizing one event, not about like what do you
feel about being this male secretary? Yeah, it's probably like
I feel great. I make a great amount of money
doing Yeah, I get to work in the White House.
What do you Do? Podcast? Podcast? So I do think though,
(21:49):
that there needs to be a greater appreciation for those admirals,
Like you said at the top of the podcast, Caroline,
a lot of times there is an assumption that they
don't do anythinging. I mean, I know from working at
how Stuff works, our office manager, who is a male,
He is in that four percent, and this office would
(22:09):
fall apart if he were not here. I don't know
how we would function exactly. Um. And I think that
you know, male, female, whatever, that secretarial work should get
more of a stew and also recognize, um, it's historical significance. Yeah.
And just how I mean, just how crazy it was
to read about the typewriter helping to create this gender
(22:33):
neutral job where none had been before. As far as this,
this job was really created out of thin air. I
mean for the most part. Yeah, we had scribes, we
had assistance, we had things like that. But this this
type ist job or these stenographers, that was really something
new after the Civil War, and there was no preconceived
notion of it being a very gendered male thing. Yeah,
(22:56):
and it's unfortunate that those pop culture stereotype have in
a large way, you know, overshadowed with those archetypes of
the typewriter girl or the office wife. You know, it's
always always characterizing these women in relationship to men in
the office. But maybe that does reflect still kind of
the lingering discomfort with kind of women plowing through in
(23:19):
the office. Yeah, perps, So any administrative professionals listening, we
want to hear, especially from you. Oh and also here's
wishing you a happy admin day on ap But yeah,
right into us about what you feel about your job.
Do you enjoy it? Is it horrible to people look
(23:42):
down on you and make you just get coffee all
the time? What is it like? Right to us? Mom?
Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can send
your letters. I don't want to hear from Michelle about
our dress code episode. She said. When I was in
high school, during s You're a Week, we always had
gender bender Day where the boys dressed like girls and
(24:03):
the girls dressed like boys. Every year, without fail, boys
would get sent home for their skirts being too short
or their breasts being outrageously big, and girls were just
fine wearing oversized T shirts and drawing on facial hair.
So there you have it. Michelle's evidence on gender Bender
Day that it's easier to dress like a boy. Well,
I got on here from Sarah and she's writing about
(24:25):
the dress codes as well, which we've gotten a lot
of mail about the dress code issue, and it's it's
all been very much entertaining, and she writes, I went
through my punk rock face during junior high. I fought
in one on two different issues concerning our dress code.
I often dyed my hair, staying within a dress code
of not doing wild bright colors, and I often did
natural red, brown and black. But one time I went
(24:47):
all out and did half of my head red, half
my head black, and split right down the middle where
my part was. I went through three classes, and finally
in my fourth, my science teacher gave me a disgusted
look and said, no, you cannot come into office like that.
Go home. And when I asked why, he said, you
expect me to be able to teach you with your
hair like that? No, So I was sent home for
(25:08):
the day and told him my hair had to be
solid by the next day. My mom would have none
of it and went straight to the dress code, which
red hair must be of natural color. And my argument was,
what about girls with highlights? Brown hair and highlights, It's
not natural, but you allow it. The school's response was
people were just used to that, and so he took
that one all the way to the district office and
(25:28):
I was allowed to keep my hair. And that same
year I got an industrial piercing through the curled cartilage
at the top of your ear. The same teacher sent
me up and I recited the section on piercings that
said no excess of jewelry in or about the ear,
and said there were plenty of other girls who had
two piercings in their card lists, just not joined by
(25:49):
a single bar. Again, I was able to keep my piercing,
and they changed the dress code the following year. I
did not go around finding things to beat in the
dress code. I didn't wear spaghetti straps or flip blogs
because it explicitly said not to. But when there was
a wriggle room, I was sure to use it to
my advantage. Get them oh the punk rock phases of
(26:10):
our youth. So thanks to everyone who has written to
mom Stuff at Discovery dot com. You can also find
us on Facebook like as Sarah, follow us on Twitter
mom Stuff Podcasts, and you can also find us on
Tumbler at stuff mom Never Told You dot tumbler dot com.
And if you would like to read our blog as
(26:30):
well this week, you can find it on our website,
it's how stuff works dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, is how stuff works dot
com
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