All was well, until I lifted my hand to throw the carriage return and once again came back to the wrong keys. Perhaps I needed to abandon Mr. Curtis. I did not have time for this. I tried looking down at my fingers for several words—my words!—and it was better. I could still use the home-key method, but if I could look to find the less familiar keys—the O, the P—it was much better. I hoped if Mr. James were simply dictating, I would have a chance to look down, and I might be able to typewrite for him without so many mistakes.
One afternoon, in frustration, I pulled a newspaper from a pile and began using the typewriting machine to copy the first article I saw:
The New Woman
Special to the “Gazette” by M. Perry Mills, on assignment in America, August 1, 1907
It is only at the end of the last century that women have entered the professions or gone into business. Among our grandmothers it was an unheard-of thing for a woman of good family to earn her own living. If her husband died, or if she were a spinster with no money of her own, she was taken care of by the next of kin in the masculine line, or scraped together a scanty living doing embroidery or some other “ladylike” task. It never even occurred to her that she could fit herself out for work, enter public life or the professions. . . . Such a suggestion would have been met with exclamations of horror as something truly impossible and unfeminine.
My thoughts went to my aunt Emily and the box of books our “maiden aunt” always brought along with her when she was required to come and stay with us. How I suspected she might have longed for an education.
Reading on, I skipped down to
How different conditions are today! Girls go to college with their brothers, take their degrees and sally forth into the world to struggle for themselves, if not on quite equal footing with men, yet every day more and more attaining that end. It is the age of “working women.”
And yet such a state of affairs did not come about suddenly, nor is it wholly the result of women’s discontent with domestic life. It is rather more the outgrowth of the times—the natural evolution of womankind in the history of the race. The increased cost of living, the higher standard required of young men entering the professional and business life, and the consequent necessity of prolonging the period devoted to preparation for that life, are heavy factors in the movement.
That nine women out of ten would prefer marriage and the making of a home for themselves to achieving success in any profession is just as much of a truth today as it was a hundred years ago.
I stopped typing and made a rude noise, then looked around to see if anyone were still in the office, but it was so late that the office was empty. I laughed and said out loud to myself, “This is one to show to Nora and Clara back at the flat!” Then I bent my head back to my exercise book. Meaningless letters were easier to deal with than some idiot’s rantings about the New Woman.
After another hour of practise, when the evening light was nearly gone, it was time to stop and go back to the flat or do something fun. I rubbed my hands, stretched my fingers wide apart, curled my fists, and, with a groan, stretched my tired arms over my head. I heard an answer to my groan.
“That bad, is it?”
I turned to find that Clara, my closest friend in London, had come in behind me. She came over to give my shoulders a quick, comforting squeeze. I must have seemed tired. She looked as fresh and bright as when she had set out that morning from our flat for her job as secretarial assistant to Lord Milne. Her perfect frock was without a wrinkle, her heavy gold hair was still perfectly smoothed up into its high combs, her clear white skin was as flawless as ever. I put my hand up to my chin, where I knew there was another inky blotch. Clara laughed her light laugh and held out my jacket from the rack by the door.
“About ready to go? We can stop for a quick bite at the pub and still reach the theatre in time.”
I collected my things into my string bag. “I’m so tired. I’m not at all sure about this . . .” and I showed her the exercise book. “It’s been weeks, and my neck hurts, my fingers are sore, and my back aches. I actually like it when the machine breaks down. I know how to fix the blessed machine—but I don’t know how to use it.”
“Now, now, Dora, you always underestimate yourself. You’re getting really good. Look at this!” Clara pulled a sheet from the waste-paper basket and read in her melodious voice, “Pap nap tap sap, pip nip tip sip, pop mop top sop. Not one mistake! Oh, look at this one!” Clara picked up several half-filled pages lying on the table beside the machine and read out loud,
The Tattler Tells All
The Huntsman’s Ball was honoured with our most brilliant young debutentes, Miss Georgina Sedly and Miss Maria Whitworth, but the person most talked about this lively season is the handsome raven-haired, blue-eyed Miss Margaret Haig Thomas. . . . It is rumoured that Miss Thomas, one of the wealthiest daughters of the land, may soon be leaving our glittering dinners and gorgeous balls for the less than brilliant weather of Oxford and the dingier halls of Somerville.
“Dora, what made you type that one?”
“I don’t know. It caught my eye, someone very rich who leaves the social scene to go to university—It seemed different.”
“This is good typewriting. You’re getting better. The only mistakes here are in the spelling of ‘debutante’ and in the spacing.”
I put the cover over the machine with one motion, then gave the cover an extra tug. “I hate the space bar. I hate the machine. I wish I could secure this job some other way.”
I took Clara’s arm as we walked side by side down the long hall, past the empty rooms. “You know, Clara, there really are not enough jobs. Even if all of us go to university and complete our degrees, there will not be enough work for women unless men open up the rolls and hire women to teach in men’s classes, hire women to write and edit the newspapers and books, fill the publishing houses, hire women to be the lawyers and clerks and agents.”
Clara stopped and turned to look at me. “Dora, you surprise—You, the shyest woman I know, you’re starting to sound like one of those militant Suffragettes.”
“But, Clara, I’m stuck. I have no money of my own, only a little more than the hundred pounds a year my mother left me. And my old home is no longer my own, now that Father and his new bride are all caught up with planting the garden with exotic shrubs. The only future Father and Annie can imagine for me is to teach horrid little girls or find a husband or move about again and again to all the cousins. I guess Annie still believes I will find someone to marry someday. After all, I might have the same good luck she did, catching someone older and settled, like my father.”
“Can you try to talk to them, tell them that what you want is different, that you want to be on your own?”
“Oh, no, no. I feel muffled up and invisible when I’m there. I don’t dare even speak. But what I really want is to write. The real excitement of this typewriting business is that now I can typewrite my own stories and make them look quite professional, as if I had hired a secretary. It’s curious what the typewriting does. I can feel my writing all so much more clearly when I am typing my own words. It flows out of my fingers; it’s so different from writing with a pen. I even practise on the typewriter on pieces from my diaries. Maybe I’ll send them to you and Nora when I am with Mr. James. Oh, I don’t know how to express it, but taking this job seems to be changing everything.”
Clara
