Looking back: Was your office like the one portrayed in 'Mad Men'?

People worked longer hours, often in more uncomfortable conditions and with much fewer holidays. Many jobs were seen to be ‘jobs for life’ especially in Local Government or steelworks, often with a gold watch or carriage clock at the end of it when people certainly had little interest in watching the clock anymore.

Today, it seems that there is more work-related stress due to job insecurity and the precarious cost of living.

People may be familiar with the images of the 1950s office as portrayed in programmes like ‘Mad Men’ with booze, cigarettes, and a sexually charged atmosphere, not least because of the pointy bras, high heels and stockings worn by the secretaries, together with office pests and very little encouragement by management to clamp down on sexist remarks or behaviour. In fact secretaries were encouraged to dress provocatively.

Generations of women went to commercial college when they left school like the one in Sheffield on Melbourne Avenue, to learn shorthand, typing and other secretarial skills in order to have ‘something to fall back on’ Many parents hoped their daughters would become secretaries and marry the boss! They were seen as ideal wife material.

An early manual of secretarial skills advised ‘Learn his preferences and obey them. Assume he is always right and look after him. A man likes to have his wants attended to’ - sound advice for wives at that time also, courtesy of magazines like Woman’s Own!

The stereotypical view of secretaries carried through to the 1950s and 60s, often associated with husband hunting, coffee making and a sex bomb image which wasn’t helped by many of the saucy seaside postcards of the day depicting buxom blondes sitting on their boss’s knee.

During the 1960s, Helen Gurley Brown in her bestselling book ‘Sex and the Single Girl’ stated that ‘I don’t think that it is wrong to use your sex appeal and femininity to get ahead in your job!

By the 1970s, that statement was considered quite shocking, and the term ‘sexual harassment’ was heard for the first time. For decades, young women working in offices had endured the unwelcome advances of older men brushing past them deliberately too closely, or sexual remarks considered to be ‘banter’ A friend of mine working in a local steelworks office had endured lecherous behaviour by a persistent pest. He was well known to the management, but it was attributed to his time spent in the Korean War and the girls were told to ignore it.

The equipment in the early offices meant that it took forever to actually get a job done. Much of it dated back to the pre-war era. Slowly, accounting and dictating machines, reproductive equipment, sit up and beg typewriters were upgraded, with innovative items like staplers, hole punchers and pencil sharpeners coming into use, but copying machines remained huge and laborious to use, taking ten to fifteen minutes to produce one copy.

Typing pools, tea ladies, carbon paper, correcting fluid and protocol including separate dining rooms and toilets. Even lifts for the management. They were all part of early office life. The ‘clack, clack, clack of the typewriter is heard no more, with the last machine ever to be manufactured in the UK now in the National Science Museum in London.

Thank goodness now for computers and equality in the workplace!