Friday March 6, 1942. Rationing typewriters

From Sarah Sundin's blog 

Today in World War II History—March 6, 1942: US Gen. Joseph Stilwell meets with Chiang Kai-shek for first time in Chungking. Typewriters are rationed in US; sales of new and used typewriters are banned.

Also from her blog is this excellent poster.  Normally I wouldn't repost it, but it's just too good for the topic we're going to expand out a bit on.

 

The massive increase for the need of all sorts of government employees in the war is something that we are, of course, well aware of, but this really emphasizes it. The war created a shortage of "stenographers", i.e., typists, and typewriters.  An interesting article on that in Washington, D.C. can be found here:

DC's World War II Typewriter Shortage

And another one, from a court reporter's firm, appears here:

How Stenographers Became Critical During WW2

We've dealt with the role of machines in relation to the change in women's place in the workplace before, and while our big thread on that dealt with domestic machinery, it also mentioned the typewriter.

Well, in one sense, not much. The concept that World War Two's working women stayed in the workplace is grossly exaggerated.  For the most part, they didn't.  Most in fact left their wartime employment and returned to domestic lives they'd hoped for, or at least expected, prior to the war.  Indeed, a lot of occupations did not open up for women for decades.  Lawyers I know, for example, who went to law school right after World War Two have related to me that it was extremely difficult for a woman to get through the schools as they were harassed, in part, by male professors (and students) who didn't feel they belonged there.  I know one woman who did go through law school in the 1940s, and was a highly respected lawyer, but she's an example of one. For the most part, women's occupations weren't a lot wider in variety after the war than they were before. A big exception was the role of secretary, which had become an exclusively female role by the 1940s, but then it was very much well on the way to that prior to World War Two.  And that role is telling as to the reason.  The reason women replaced men as secretaries (which was controversial at first) was due to a machine. . . the typewriter.

 

Manual typewriters, 1940s.

Of interest there, women actually did not work much as secretaries, as this thread notes, until the typewriter.  Their introduction into that role was actually quite controversial when it first occurred, but as noted above, in the period from 1910 to 1940, women completely took over the role as the prior occupation of scrivener, a nearly all male role consisting of people who transcribed things by pen and ink, died away.

Not that men didn't actually occupy this position in the military.  "Clerk Typist" was an Army occupation, and there were thousands of them in the service, mostly men.  Typing skills in men were still so valued as late as the Vietnam War that a demonstrated ability to type nearly guaranteed that an enlisted man would be assigned to that occupation while in the service.