According to Mr Elvin of the National Union of Clerks, even in prosperous times there are always 3 per cent. of unemployed clerks.  In bad times the percentage must be greater.  Whether the times are good or bad, young girls with the most elementary education are being turned out by hundreds from typing schools.

The only remedy is that the output of clerks should be restricted; no one should be allowed to become a clerk who has not reached a certain standard of efficiency.  The parents are the chief offenders.  Many of them do not seem to have the necessary energy or intelligence to find out for what their daughters are best fitted.  Advisory Committees are wanted in connection with all elementary and secondary schools.  Of the girl typists and shorthand writers who resigned from the Civil Service from 1894 to 1906 for various causes, 17 per cent. left to take up other work.  The lady superintendent in one of the Civil Service typing rooms pointed out a girl and said:  “That girl would have made an excellent milliner or a kindergarten teacher, but she is not at all suited for this work.”

The chief grievance of the really efficient woman clerk and secretary is that she has not enough scope.  One woman writes: 

“If the various firms and professions who employ girls as typists were to give them an insight into the business, whatever it might be, it would add enormously to the enthusiasm of the worker.  In America they do this very often.  The wonderful Miss Alice Duckin, the lady skyscraper builder, was once a typist.  When she entered the firm they allowed her full scope to develop, and she mastered the building trade and is now the chief partner of Messrs Duckin and Lass.  There is one firm of lawyers in London who allow their typists to attend the Law Courts, and give them work to do which is usually reserved for men.  Only under such conditions can the profession expand.”

There is often a chance for a secretary in a newspaper office to develop into a journalist.  But there are instances when the private secretary, who begins writing for the paper on which she is employed, is told that she was engaged not as a contributor but as an efficient secretary.

One girl who had been for ten years private secretary to a literary man in London, horrified her relatives, and gave her employer a shock, by suddenly throwing up her much-envied post and entering herself at a hospital for a particularly strenuous kind of nursing.  Her salary as secretary was 35s. a week; she had a comfortable room of her own to work in, a good annual holiday, and other blessings.  Her chief said “good morning” and “good evening” to her, but she saw no one else, and frequently she had technical German translations in the evenings, for which she got nothing extra.  Her chief did not know German, and thought she did the translations as easily as she wrote shorthand.  Her whole work was moderately interesting, but the dullness of her life became insupportable.  Another private secretary at the end of fifteen years in an excellent post, opened a tea-shop.