In 1885, a young, single, white, native-born woman named Isabel Wallace did something that was still considered quite unusual in its time; she took a job as a clerical worker in Chicago. Isabel, who lived with her mother and apparently needed to help supplement the small family's income, took a temporary position as a copyist in an office in Chicago, where her uncle already worked. (Copyists copied letters & other important documents into large ledger books in the era before typewriters, carbon paper, & photocopying.)
Even though Isabel was grateful for the job, she expressed some anxiety writing to her mother. "The desks are comfortable, the chairs, etc. light, good, and the room well heated," & "there seemed a pleasant set of ladies," but, "I felt like somebody else all day. Out of my element and sphere somehow. It made me feel less womanly and somehow as if I was doing something I didn't approve of. I suppose it's because it's in the Court House and in an office."
Throughout much of the19C the image of a clerk was a man. But, by the end of the 19C century in large cities like Chicago this association began to change & young women like Isabel Wallace were in part responsible. When Isabel Wallace penned these lines to her mother, she probably did not realize that she was a pioneer & that her painful & tentative steps into the office would help not only to change office work into woman's work, but also initiate a transformation of urban spaces in cities like Chicago, making the city more accommodating to women's daily presence. Young women like Isabel Wallace helped to open up an array of office jobs to women workers, & woman's work in the city, for better or for worse, would never be the same.
In Isabel's day, office work was very different than we think of it today, especially because it was still primarily a man's job. Before the widespread use of the typewriter (during the 1890s) & its association with stenography, most office workers were copyists, file clerks, & bookkeepers. In 1880 in Chicago, almost 90 percent of the 1,120 office workers listed in the census were male. The huge increase in the number of Cgicago office workers between 1880 & 1890 (from 1,120 to 41, 015), due to the creation of the position stenographer/typist, doubled women's percentage of the office work labor force to 21 percent. And this started an unstoppable trend. By 1920, the number of office workers in the city approached 200,000, with women comprising half of the labor force.
In 1863. Virginia Panny wrote that stenographers are employed to write from dictation, generally by authors. Prescott, who was nearly blind for several years, employed one or more. Editors whose papers have an extensive circulation, sometimes require the services of an amanuensis.
Female secretaries, or writers out of books, were not unusual in Rome. "Origen," says Eusebius, "had not only young men, but young women to transcribe his works, which they did with peculiar neatness."
Some persons in London (whose employment, perhaps, scarcely brings them under this title, yet we know not where else to place them) make it a business to write letters for beggars, for which they are paid a small sum by each applicant.
Stenographers or office workers are usually employed by the week, month, or year. Some education is of course necessary, and will doubtless influence their pay. Experience increases their value still more; and those who have to exercise their brains, are of course best paid.
I have been told by competent authority, that amanuenses are usually paid according to agreement; that authors of distinction can afford to pay a good price, and that the most common salary is $600.
See The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman's Work by Virginia Panny Published Boston, MA. by Walker, Wise & Company. 1863
