A Tale of Two Sisters and Hamlet

By Kathy Waller

Do young female college graduates still worry about being consigned to the typing pool?

English: Smith-Premier Typewriter Company of Syracuse, New York – Model 2 – December 1905 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

That was a big issue when I was in college in the 1970s: It was well known that educated, qualified women often had to settle for clerical work while their male counterparts filled professional positions.

At a women’s conference I attended in the early 1980s, a college junior announced her plan to prevent such gender discrimination: Both she and her sister had decided they would never learn to type.

Her tone hinted that they looked at typing as royalty once looked at writing by hand: a variety of manual labor reserved for lesser folk. It occurred to me they might regret skipping that skill: after all, because Prince Hamlet could write, he was able to ensure…