A secretary is a woman, the word says it all. The term conjures up a whole arsenal of cliché images, all of them feminine in meaning. The modern secretary wants to get rid of that. She wants to be taken seriously as an employee, regardless of her gender. Around 1900, however, it was precisely thanks to their femaleness that women managed to conquer a place in the offices. These were always male strongholds, but with the arrival of new office machines such as the telephone and the typewriter, that changed. Employers increasingly hired neat young ladies for this light work, because they had to pay them less than their male colleagues. The reputation of the profession decreased accordingly.
“He may act like he wants a secretary, but most of the time they're looking for something between a mother and a waitress”. According to secretary Joan Holloway in the popular television series Mad Men, set at an advertising agency in America in the 1960s th century. Holloway embodies the cliché of a secretary:a sexy figure who is subservient, compliant and loyal to the boss at all times.
The ideal secretary with the care of a mother and the obligingness of a waitress, qualities that were seen as typically feminine. It's a cliche that in spite of the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, the feminism of the sixties and seventies has persisted in a sense, coupled with the image of the 'typyp' who spends her days in the office typing letters and delivering coffee, all the while staring longingly at her. casting chief whom she naturally wants to marry eventually.
Male domain
However, the profession of secretary has not always been a women's profession. Offices were th until the beginning of the 20th century mainly the domain of men. The office clerk position was one of the most important in the office. The administrative work was therefore highly regarded in society and the office clerk had a position of trust in the company because he was aware of the entire ins and outs of the company and was directly under his boss.
The first women made their appearance here around 1900. This was made possible by, among other things, the far-reaching mechanization of work, which changed the character of office work, and the new views on the participation of women in the labor process. During the National Exhibition of Women's Labor in 1898, Catharina van Tussenbroek, one of the first female doctors in the Netherlands, pleaded for "proper professional training that enables women to live on self-earned bread".
The service sector has developed into a major provider of such 'decent' career opportunities for women. Due to the expansion of office work and new inventions such as the typewriter and the telephone, new functions such as typing, shorthand and telephony were created, which mainly attracted women. This kind of office work was considered appropriate for unmarried middle-class girls, for whom working outside the home had hitherto been considered indelicate and unfeminine.
Girls from the lower classes naturally took part in the labor process much earlier, for example as domestic servants, in the cottage industry and later in factories, but now unmarried bourgeois girls could also support themselves in good decency. Historian Anna Davin has therefore called the typewriter "the Trojan horse of the weaker sex" because its introduction allowed them to participate in the labor process. In this way, as women, they conquered a place in this male domain, which they would not give up again.
However, social appreciation for the work that women started doing in the offices from about 1900 was low:they were given special 'girl contracts' that were immediately terminated as soon as they got married. In addition, women received a much lower salary than men, as the perception prevailed that women should not be breadwinners.
Male office clerks initially saw the arrival of women in the office with dismay. After all, they formed competition in the labor market. People also wondered whether the woman was suitable for office work and the hard business life. Her monthly physical discomforts would cause too much absence, which in their view meant that she was not really entitled to a monthly salary, not to mention her fluctuating moods.
However, the resistance to the arrival of women also disappeared once they populated the offices, given that with the increase in staff, new senior positions such as supervisors arose. And those were of course only reserved for men, was the prevailing opinion.
Schoevers
For the new office functions that will be available at the beginning of the 20 th century, new training courses also emerged. In 1913, for example, the Schoevers Institute was founded, named after Adriaan Schoevers (1891-1965). The book The Girls of Schoevers was recently published about the history of this institute by Petra van den Brink and Peter de Waard. The training institute became legendary and has delivered generations of secretaries.
Adriaan Schoevers was a descendant of a family of teachers in Amsterdam. After several office jobs, he decided to start his own business out of dissatisfaction with the way things were going in the companies where he worked. The number of office courses increased rapidly at that time, and Schoevers looked for ways to differentiate itself from other trade courses in the growing service sector.
He started his 'institute' with some shorthand courses in his mother's tea room in the parental home on the Reguliersgracht in Amsterdam, but soon expanded. Schoevers was able to sell his courses well and also developed his own method:touch typing with ten fingers. By having the students tap to the beat of the popular Charleston dance music, he made sure that the exercises became less mind-numbing.
Schoevers focused specifically on girls as a target group. He thought they were ideally suited for the job of secretaries and saw the typewriter as the ideal means of increasing the economic independence of women. Moreover, there was money to be made. He increased the name recognition of the program with demonstrations and typing concerts.
Secretaries
The position of secretary grew into the women's profession, a means of emancipation that women eagerly took advantage of. But it was precisely because of the emphasis on the so-called feminine qualities that it was at odds with the same emancipation and the image of the fairy godmother who worked invisibly in the background in the service of her male bosses, as the feminist magazine Opzij het in the eighties expressed. She knew better than anyone else, better than the boss himself often, what was going on became the new image – even if she sometimes got too little appreciation for it. It is significant that the Secretary's Day came over from America at the end of the eighties.
Although there has been a lot of improvement in career opportunities, training opportunities and salaries, the female term secretary still evokes the association with servitude, while the male term secretary makes a connection with power. There is now even a movement that has set itself the goal of so-called desecretaries, to respond to the changing working conditions of the profession as a result of the advancing information revolution.
The term secretary is increasingly being replaced by more neutral terms such as 'office manager' or 'executive assistant', which should show more respect. This should give the profession just as much social value as that of the 19 e century office clerk, where mobile phones, laptops and iPads naturally fit in both the handbag and the men's bag.