Tea at Trianon: 1950s Secretaries

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, January 13, 2017

1950s Secretaries

Women have always worked, both inside and outside the home, from time immemorial; they worked in offices decades before the fifties. I do think that the qualities mentioned in the article are worth noting. From Little Things:

For the most part, though, ladies of the past were confined to clerical positions in an office. That isn’t to say their work was easy — on the contrary, they often had to work twice as hard to help their boss look good while they got paid significantly less. Taking a glimpse at a few of the documents supplied to women training for the task sheds plenty of light on how put-upon secretaries really were back in the 1950s, which makes their perseverance all the more admirable. See some of the more demanding requirements for administrative assistants below, and be sure to let us know if we missed any other strange rules women were meant to follow while at the office. (Read more.)