From clerical work to chatbots

Lessons from a century of office transformation in Cape Town

In 1937, a Cape Times reporter visited a busy Cape Town office and found a young woman at the switchboard. Between managing calls, she typed up letters, sorted the mail, kept the books, and ensured the goods went out on time. ‘Nobody really knows what my job is besides running the switchboard’, she admitted. The journalist called it ‘a truly three-dimensional job’. This vignette, reported by historian Amy Rommelspacher in her recent paper published in Gender & History, marks a period of rapid transition, when office work in Cape Town’s Central Business District was beginning to shift from men to women, though mainly for white women at first. The boundaries of opportunity were defined by both gender and race.

At the start of the twentieth century, clerical work in Cape Town, as elsewhere, was a respected occupation for men. These clerks were regarded as reliable and professional, often with a career path that led upwards. But by the 1920s and 1930s, office technology, particularly the typewriter, was changing the landscape. Typing and shorthand were valued skills, and employers began recruiting women for these new roles, which were seen as clean and repetitive, well-suited to what were then considered ‘feminine’ attributes. As economic historians such as Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin have argued, this was not simply a substitution of women for men. The new technology enabled the creation of new roles, such as typist or stenographer, filled almost exclusively by young women.

By 1960, the feminisation of clerical work was complete. In that year, white women held more clerical jobs in South Africa than white men. As Rommelspacher shows, Cape Town followed a similar trajectory to other large cities, but the pattern was distinct in some respects. While women increasingly filled these roles, access was still selective. For most of the twentieth century, clerical jobs were largely out of reach for women from other racial backgrounds, particularly in the public sector and large firms, though there were exceptions.