ABSTRACT
The Dictaphone didn’t displace secretaries, but it deskilled them by rendering shorthand obsolete. The automation of stenography also rationalized secretaries’ labor. Since they no longer needed to drop whatever they doing when a superior demanded dictation, their time management and work rhythms could be supervised more efciently. The Dictaphone depersonalized as well as routinized stenography by inserting a layer of technological mediation between the Walter Neffs of the business world and their secretaries. For better or worse, each began using the same machinery one after the other instead of interacting directly. In ofces as well as factories, automation enjoyed a golden age during the rst two decades of the twentieth century. Occasionally new technology eliminated jobs outright, like the rotary telephone dial and operators. More often than not, however, automation routinized the remaining labor of ofce employees. Sharon Hartman Strom (among others) has documented “the conjunction of mechanization, scientic management and the hiring of women as clerical workers” during this period that led to the entrenched malaise of ofce work later captured by C. Wright Mills in White Collar.2
