Do Secretaries Have a Future?

THE 1950s and ’60s brought many new things to American offices, including the Xerox machine, word processing and — perhaps less famously — the first National Secretaries Day, in 1952. Secretaries of that era envisioned a rosy future, and many saw their jobs as a ticket to a better life.

In 1961, the trade magazine Today’s Secretary predicted that, 50 years hence, the “secretary of the future” would start her workday at noon and take monthlong vacations thanks to the “electronic computer.” According to another optimistic assessment, secretaries (transported through office hallways “via trackless plastic bubble”) would be in ever-higher demand because of what was vaguely referred to as “business expansion.”

But nearly 60 years later, on the date now promoted as Administrative Professionals Day, we’re living through the end of a recession in which around two million administrative and clerical workers lost their jobs after bosses discovered they could handle their calendars and travel arrangements online and rendered their assistants expendable. Clearly, while the secretary hasn’t joined the office boy and the iceman in the elephant’s graveyard of outmoded occupations, technological advancements haven’t panned out quite the way those midcentury futurists imagined. There are satisfactions to the job, to be sure, but for many secretaries, it remains often taxing, sometimes humiliating and increasingly precarious.

New technologies did make the lives of 20th-century secretaries easier. By the 1920s the typewriter had cemented women’s place in the outer office, and later versions made for faster, less strenuous typing (“Alive After Five!” was the way a 1957 ad put it). The introduction of the Xerox 914 photocopier in 1959 did away with the laborious routine of carbon copies.

Secretaries have always been underrated. Nowadays a person thinks just because he/she can plunk away at a keyboard that THAT makes them a secretary. Not so. In the old days, especially for legal secretaries, you had to be very intelligent AND a fast typist.
15 posted on April 28, 2011 11:59:08 AM EDT by Paved Paradise

Secretaries are still great for organization things, transcribing dictation, cover letters, etc. But the workload per attorney is just a lot less now.

. . . you just don't need as many as you used to, and that's being proven across the legal industry.

Many attorneys, particularly the younger ones, draft their own documents. Word processing programs make it easier to format them, and you can email or electronically file documents yourself with little additional effort.

The big deal about word processing is that it is so much easier to compose/edit a document that way than it is to cut and paste paper. That was what I wanted WP for, not for the formatting. I deliberately edited my copy of your post, specifically to illustrate my point. My edited version says the same thing as yours, in fewer words and is a little sharper (that's no reflection on you, people don't necessarily trouble to edit their posts on FR to the optimum; it's not usually worth it to them to do so).
My point is that WP makes me a better writer than I was when I drafted documents longhand.
But wordsmithing is one thing, and formatting is another; formatting is a time sink. The trouble is that while in the past everyone made allowances for imperfections in formatting typewritten documents, with the advent of WP everyone knows that you could have tweaked the formatting a little better if you had taken a little more trouble. And there just seems to be no end to it.
Same thing writing a program to do a technical analysis - a little program might take a bit of time to do, technically - maybe only a couple of days - but the next thing you know you have spent a week or two prettying up the output for a report.
So, yes to composition/editing on WP in preference to longhand - and no to the overuse of professional time to pretty up documents.

Oh brother... all you proved is you have more “free” time right now than I do.

Yes, that's likely. I'm retired.
But the real reason I went off on a rant there is that in my work I was in a situation where secretarial support was in short supply while, in the pre-WP era, the only way to compose text was with a pencil (tho I am, and was, a touch typist, I never found it practical to use that skill on the job until I had easy time-share access. And even then, people thought it was "unprofessional" to use the keyboard. I got criticized by my boss for doing it, once - because it came to his attention because the secretary got upset because I asked her to do precisely what I advocated in the rant - function not as the originating typist but as the one to convert it from plain text computer printout to standard typed document format.
It's the same reason that I know that Col. Killian, GWB's commander back at TANG, certainly was not a typist. I didn't know the man, but I know the type - and that type of man didn't do keyboarding back then. It was a sexist thing with them. The memos attributed to him would not have been typed by him. And his secretary said that she didn't type them either. Which as we know is perfectly true because they were not composed by Col. Killian, and they were not typed in his office back in the early 1970s on any machine that an ANG would have had, or would even have bothered to use even if you gave one to them. They were, as you know, ponied up in 2004, or 2003 at the earliest, with a view to embarrassing President Bush. By someone who wasn't aware of the visible differences between typewritten documents and those produced by the default settings of Microsoft Office.

You are right about much. I remember the days where perfect typing was very important since you had to erase several carbons so even one or two boo-boos were not good. I recall many times have to redo papers because of a large mistake (e.g., typing a few lines from a sentence below) or because of a boss’s revision. Cut and paste is a godsend!

However, people today think because they can wordprocess that they can do their own work and I think there is a great deal more error in today’s newspapers and even in legal documents that one did not see in years past. I blame it on the lack of professionals who are producing the product.

perfect typing was very important since you had to erase several carbons so even one or two boo-boos were not good.

"Not good?" "Not good!"
Even without the carbon copy issue, I found that correcting a single typo was enough to slash my efficiency dramatically.
And single typos are by no means guaranteed. In fact, a single typo tended to make me upset, and cause another.
Cut and paste is such a godsend, indeed. As I suggested, my composition skills were no better than I needed them to be; often when I had written a paragraph I would look at it and know that although it had all the facts in it, it just didn't read well at all and I would have to reorder the sentences. I found that in the very toughest cases of that problem, the solution would lie in completely inverting the sentence order in the paragraph. Doing that in word processing is no big deal - but if you have to have someone else retype the paragraph 3 or 4 different ways before you get it right, that becomes troublesome. Ultimately you wouldn't bother to get it really right.

I hated that.

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