The Morning News

WOMEN AS TYPEWRITERS.

A Field of Labor in Which the Demand is Greater Than the Supply.

New York, May 28.-Here is a bit of good news for girls and young women. It was told me by the teacher of the best type-writing school in the city, a woman of the highest integrity, ability and an expert shorthand writer and typewriter. She says the demand for young women who can use the typewriter is far in excess of the supply. A very superior class of young women have adopted the typewriter business as a profession. Many of a class who formerly adopted teaching as a profession are now taking up the business of stenography and typewriting and are occupying very high positions as such in insurance companies, law offices and in most of the large corporations. Experts in these offices earn from $12 to $20 a week. The salary of one who understands typewriting alone does not usually go beyond $15, although there are some expert typewriters who earn as high as $20 a week. Expert typewriters who can take dictation are even more rare than stenographers. Many persons engaged in other professions, such as artists, music teachers, etc., purchase a typewriter and do piecework, thus supplementing their income.

It is a great mistake to suppose that type-writer operators need no special training. The ease with which the keyboard and the mechanical part of the typewriter is learned leads persons into the error of supposing that no instructions are required to make a good typewriter operator. On the contrary, to do neat work on the typewriter and also to take dictation requires a special kind of fingering and touch almost as well timed as is required in the manipulation of the piano. Persons familiar with type-writer copies will notice a great difference in the work of different operators, and the good work can almost invariably be traced to an operator who has had a thorough, systematic training, the poor work to an operator who has taught herself. There is a great difference in the individuals in regard to the time required to make an expert operator. An operator who can take a maximum of seventy-five words a minute must have had two years' practice from the time she commenced to study. The speed at which a woman can take dictation depends on the amount of practice she has had in dictation and also on her acuteness of hearing. A person of superior hearing would reach this speed in less time.

The typewriting business is almost entirely in the hands of women, although within a few years it has been entered into by a few of the other sex. Several women in this city have offices in different buildings and employ a large number of operators. One woman has six offices in six different buildings, employs about fifteen young women on salaries, and has connected with her hundreds of stenographers and operators who work by the piece. These operators are supplied from a large training school connected with the business. They spend from three to six months in the school room. They are then taken up in the business office and put under an office training. Most of them remain in business offices until they are either received in that business or placed in other positions. After this office training they command excellent salaries. The woman referred to was obliged to commence this office training in order to have operators for her own offices. A large number of persons are rushing into the typewriting copying business, but as two-thirds of them are poorly trained, out of every 500 who attempt to learn it there are probably not more than fifty good, well-trained instructors. At the present time the large typewriter offices in the city are unable to get experts enough to supply the demand. Hundreds of people who have managed to scrape together enough money to buy a typewriter have advertised themselves as instructors in typewriting, and as a result many poor girls have spent all the money they could borrow or obtain in any other way in fitting themselves for the business, and have afterward, in applying for work, discovered that both time and money have been thrown away, and that they were utterly unprepared for work.

FOSTER COATES