The typewriter created a new profession and assigned it almost entirely to women.
In the 1870s, the first commercially successful typewriters entered American offices, and with them came a new occupation.1 The Remington company, which manufactured the Sholes and Glidden typewriter beginning in 1874, initially marketed the machine using women as demonstrators and operators, establishing an association between typing and women's work that would persist for more than a century.
Before the typewriter, the word secretary referred to a confidential clerk, almost always male, who managed correspondence and kept records for a patron or executive. The word itself comes from the Latin secretarius, a person entrusted with secrets.2
The typewriter transformed the secretary from a trusted adviser into an operator of a machine. As typing became mechanized clerical work, the role was feminized and its status declined. By 1930, more than ninety-five percent of stenographers and typists in the United States were women.3
The Temp Agency industry that emerged after World War II drew heavily from this labor pool, marketing temporary typists and secretaries as Kelly Girls, interchangeable units of clerical labor available on demand.
The secretary's role expanded throughout the twentieth century to include scheduling, office management, correspondence, and gatekeeping access to executives. Despite the breadth of the work, the position was classified and compensated as support labor rather than professional labor.1
In 1952, the National Secretaries Association designated the last full week of April as Secretaries Week, later renamed Administrative Professionals Week, a recognition that the role needed external validation because the system itself undervalued it.4
The personal computer eliminated the typist as a distinct occupation. Word processing software transferred the act of typing from a specialized clerical role to a universal office skill performed by every worker at every level. The secretary's other functions, scheduling, communication, and information management, were absorbed by email, calendars, and digital assistants.1