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The Real Little Typists

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office gril
louis_malteste_petite_dactylo_01The line drawing by Malteste is taken from the Petite Dactylo (the little typist), which was a spanking novella by Pierre Dumarchey, published under the name of Sadie Blackeyes. The heroine of the novel suffers a series of misadventures, most ending with a spanking or a birching.

Whether or not it was grounded in reality is doubtful, yet there does seem to be an age when typists and secretaries were punished.

As reported here before, whilst at college as part of my course I trained in shorthand and typing under a woman of the old school. This was the 1980s and the 50-something woman had mostly taught office workers since the 1950s when she had received her own training.  When confronted with a student who hadn’t put the work in or hadn’t done their homework (we were learning T-Line at the time), then she would often remark that we were lucky it wasn’t like the old days.

She was heard to mutter in her Glaswegian accent, “Back in the day a girl would get a few swipes of the stick across their backsides for less.”

She didn’t elucidate but it seems up until the 1960s it was common for trainee typists and secretaries to experience a good spanking or even the cane. Of course in those days these trainees were invariably women.

I have written about this before and have read various accounts of CP at adult typing schools up until the 1970s. I remember two women, one trained in the late 1950s and the other the early 1970s, comparing notes about getting the cane at secretarial college.

Both thought it was no big deal. The first said it was a formal thing with a formal note. She had to bend over in an office and get about eight strokes on the seat of her skirt, although she had heard that other girls had been caned on the knickers, including one who had worn trousers to class.

The other said it was unofficial and that she was caned a couple of times rather than get a formal warning, but essential she too got eight on the seat of her skirt.

In another discussion one woman who trained in the 1940s ventured that she had been caned twice on the bare bottom for wasting paper and on a separate occasion for getting a typewriter ribbon tangled. This, she said, because of rationing immediately after the War being a very serious problem and that such mistakes would get you sacked in a real office.

Following on from this I found an article (I think from Forum magazine) on Google reader.

This was about ‘blue-stockings’ and flappers in the 1920s and 30s who were trying to break into business and journalism. Well-to-do women of all classes saw typing and business schools as a way of breaking into a man’s world. Being tough and seen to be tough was an important to them and the prevailing attitude was ‘taking it like a man.’

Ironically, it seems unlikely that young business men were ever caned by anyone, yet serious minded independent girls of the interwar era seemed to have shrugged off corporal punishment as a price to pay or a rite of passage.

Caning before the Second World War in these environments seems to have be rather fiercer and tended to applied to the bare bottom.

One Rose Fenton-Barnes reported, “I had been called into the office several times before by Mrs C-J, all rather bothersome, but I can’t say it wasn’t entirely without merit. This time I was told off right royally and then asked to take up my skirts and so forth. I thought it all a bit grisly when she got out the dreadful stick. Then she told me to take down the necessary and bend over the back of her chair. I didn’t count, but I must have received 15 strokes or more. Jolly well hurt and my tail end looked chopped liver after. Of course I didn’t cry until I was in the ladies room, but I couldn’t sit down for a few days. That was the first time and very much not the last. Those things didn’t get any easier.”

Amy JK wrote of her experience back in the 1930s. “We had a dreadful dragon. One word from her and you would be shaking in your boots. There were always girls going in and out of her office: wide-eyed a terrified going in and usually crying and rubbing their bottoms when they came out.”

“I was one of those girls at least a dozen times. After a dressing down it was bottom bare and bend. No set number of strokes, just fast and cutting swipes until I cried. I couldn’t stand still after, but I was told to dress and get out.”

“It was straight back to our desks in that dreadful room with 20 girls clattering away on their exercises. Hard to sit or concentrate, I can tell you, but a good preparation for work.”


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