The hours of work in most all offices are from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon. The employment is not more arduous than any other sedentary occupation. In large offices an amanuensis will receive from thirty to sixty full-page letters in a day and transcribe them on the type-writer. She could not do so much work without the aid of that instrument.
It is sometimes the case that a woman can take dictation work for professional people who only occasionally need such assistance, and be paid for it by the "job." In such a case the rate of pay for taking and transcribing the notes will range from six to twenty cents per hundred words, depending partly on the class of work, but more particularly on the liberality of the employer.
There is one thing favorable to young women who want to become telegraph operators: the qualifications required for success in this line of business are very simple. An ordinary common school education, with a special ability to spell well, and to write plainly and more or less rapidly, is all that is required in a pupil before commencing to learn this art. This may account for the large number of young ladies who, of late years, have sought employment in this field of labor. Another thing, it is office work, with just enough bustle and activity about it to keep it from being dull, with the occasional chance, in times of public excitement, of its being exceptionally interesting.
In the city of New York there are, at the present time, about two hundred ladies engaged in this occupation. They are nearly all employed by the Western Union Telegraph Company, three fourths of the number being employed at the main office of the company. Here and there a lady may be found employed in a broker's office, a position, by the way, which is considered exceptionally good, the pay being generous, with the sure chance of the employé receiving a present at the Christmas holiday-time. But the great majority of women are employed by the companies, in hotels, in the smaller stations situated throughout the city, and throughout the country in the offices located in various villages and towns.
Instruction in telegraphy has become a special feature in about forty colleges in different parts of the Union, and in several special schools, among which the New York Cooper Union School of Telegraphy is preëminent. Instruction in this last institution is free, and the Western Union Telegraph Company is so far interested in the success of the school, that when operators are needed, graduates of the Cooper Union are preferred over anybody else. The school is always crowded; it is difficult to gain admission, and situations are not provided by the company alluded to for all the graduates. Last year (1882) one hundred and sixty applied at the regular examination of the school and passed, but they could not be admitted to the class for want of room. The school admitted sixty pupils during the year. The number receiving certificates was twenty-eight. Some time since the Kansas State Agricultural College added telegraphy as a branch of industrial education, using Pope's "Hand-book of the Telegraph" as a text-book.