Unless a girl has a claim on a school where she has trained, or has influential friends, it is very difficult for her to get a post suited to her needs in London.  The whole profession seems to be in a chaotic condition, and the chances through advertisement are haphazard and unsatisfactory.  Employment bureaux maintain that there are more good posts than there are qualified women to fill them, but individual secretaries are timid about giving up unsatisfactory posts as they do not know how to get better.

Take the case of a private secretary to a Member of Parliament.  He loses his seat, retires to the country, and gives up his London secretary.  He gives her a number of introductions.  These lead to nothing, and she is forced into the competition of the City.  Her particular training is of no use in a commercial office, and her value falls to 30s. a week.

A woman with an intimate knowledge of women clerks and secretaries in the City for the past twenty years, says that it is difficult to overestimate the poverty of a vast number of girls.  Many of them are the chief breadwinners of the family.  She knows of half a dozen cases of men of forty and a little older who are living on the earnings of their daughters; there may be two girls in the family, one getting 12s. and the other 25s. a week.

The private secretary who lives in, has usually excellent food and pleasant surroundings, but in some cases the life is a solitary one.  Unless there is a governess or other educated employee in the household, she has no companionship.  The salary varies from L30 to L120 and sometimes more.  There is apparently no fixed rate.  One lady writes: 

“For two years I lived in the house of Sir——­, the most hopelessly isolated and uninteresting existence, within the four walls of his study.  A secretary should certainly stick out for a free week-end once a month when living in.  Isolation is horribly bad for one.”

The secretary living in with congenial literary or medical people, where she is made one of the family circle, has a happier time, but the payment is not high.

Apart from salary, the conditions in which the woman clerk works are by no means ideal.

Twenty years ago, in a far northern city, there was a flourishing new school where over thirty girls of from fifteen to twenty were being taught shorthand, typewriting, book-keeping, and all that goes to the making of a fully-equipped clerk.  This school was the first experiment of the kind in an enterprising community.  As the pupils qualified, with Pitman certificates of varying degrees of speed, at the end of six months or longer, the way in which old-fashioned lawyers accepted the innovation of attractive young women on their clerical staff, seemed almost magical.  Decorum relegated the young women to separate rooms from the rest of the employees, and the formality in the bearing of heads of departments towards these pioneer females must have been gratifying to Mrs Grundy.