We have recently processed a collection from our holdings and added its finding aid to ArchivesSpace . Currently, the Historical Commission is offering limited research assistance. Please see our main webpage for the most up-to-date information.
We have digitized a significant portion of this collection, so that it is available from the safety of your home. The items are available for viewing on our Flickr page here. If you would like to research this or any other collections, please email us at chcarchives@cambridgema.gov.
The Alice Darling Secretarial Service Inc. Ephemera collection contains records of the business activities supplied by the corporation from 1948 to 1991. The bulk of the items were created between 1948 and 1955 when the Alice Darling Secretarial Services changed management and expanded its Alice Darling Secretarial School. Present are textual records that reflect the legal status, certification process, job descriptions, and financial costs involved in providing the vocational service of clerical work. Also available are draft letterhead designs and other evidence of the products of contracted work for clients, including correspondence and marketing tools. Of particular interest are the correspondence and business transactions connected to members of the Shia sect of Islam, some of which are written in Arabic. Scroll down to learn more about the historical background of this collection.
The Alice Darling Secretarial Service Inc. was started in 1913 at 1384 Massachusetts Ave. in Harvard Square, Cambridge. The founder, Alice Darling, born Azniv Beshgeturian in Turkey in 1883, belonged to a prominent Armenian family of clerks, bishops, professors, and ministers. She was brought to America in 1885 and attended Boston public schools and Bridgewater State Normal School (now Bridgewater State University), where she graduated in 1902. After graduation she taught for several years in Boston.
As a savvy businesswoman, Darling knew she’d find no lack of demand in Harvard Square. Typewriting began to supplant handwriting in business correspondence in the late 19th century. While many employers once employed male secretaries exclusively, women began to find employment opportunities as typists and stenographers, taking dictation in shorthand (coded language) and typing finished documents. Typing and stenography were skills that allowed women access to relatively high-paying office jobs, but were not widely valued by men; throughout the 20th century secretaries were almost always women. Many girls learned to type in high school, but men did not.
While America’s growing businesses and industries were the major employers of secretaries, Cambridge’s academic community offered special opportunities for Darling’s services. Harvard students (entirely male until the 1940s) needed papers typed, often overnight; doctoral candidates required professional typists to prepare flawless dissertations meeting rigid standards for format, layout, and paper quality; and faculty authors needed assistance to prepare their manuscripts for publication. (It was cheaper to have a typist create a draft from an author’s longhand than to commission a printed page proof.) The gendered bias of mid-twentieth-century academia and its “approved” tasks made it undesirable for male students and scholars to type their own work.
In 1920 Darling expanded her business to include the Harvard Square Stenographers Bureau, also known as Miss Darling’s Business Employment Bureau, which facilitated job connections for secretarial services. In 1923 she founded the Alice Darling Secretarial School to provide women and college students with formal secretarial lessons. A person seeking to assume a role in Boston’s competitive secretarial market had to possess this knowledge. In the early years, the secretarial school only offered general stenography and typewriting courses, but it soon expanded its curriculum. In 1928 it introduced training in transcribing dictation from an Ediphone, an early recording machine.
Darling’s school went above and beyond teaching classic secretarial competencies. Her school incorporated a psychological component, business ethics, and personality training. The Alice Darling School implemented a “tutorial system” that integrated office procedures and practical applications. Known for its talented secretaries and stenographers, Darling’s school drew people who wanted to make clerical work their vocation. A Cambridge Chronicle article from June 29, 1928 stated that the school “aside from enabling pupils to have confidence in themselves, which is an essential requisite for ultimate success, is also a means of increasing on a large scale their earning capacity.”
The school grew throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The Great Depression saw a rise in attendance because pupils were drawn to learning viable skills and networking through real world jobs in the public stenographic department. Graduates at this time were likely to earn a monthly income of $100, according to a Cambridge Chronicle article. During WWII, the school expanded again to accommodate war emergency courses. After the war, many women college graduates found that their employment opportunities were limited if they lacked secretarial skills.
In the late 1940s, Alice Darling Secretarial Services was taken over by Theodora L. and John S. Marston, who had a prior business, Marston’s Office Services, at 1735 Massachusetts Ave. Theodora and John lived at 60 Brattle Street, Cambridge, and later at 17 Spring Street in Lexington. They received their state license to conduct business services in 1949. They were active participants of Cambridge’s Lesley-Ellis School, with John acting as treasurer of the Parents Association in 1954.
At this time, the Alice Darling Secretarial Services Inc. served as a licensed intelligence service for major clients, including the Internal Revenue Service. Its role as an employment facilitator extended to other state and federal positions because the company provided its workers certification by issuing the Civil Service Exam.
In the 1950s, the business served Prince Shāh Karim al-Husayni, the current Aga Khan (IV) of the Imāmate of the Nizari Ismāʿīli Shias, a sub-sect of Shia Islam. He was attending Harvard University at the time and his grandfather, Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah, Aga Khan III, provided the school with an endowment to create the Aga Khan Professorship of Iranian. When Aga Khan III died in 1957, Karim Aga Khan assumed the tenure of the religious leadership position while still attending school. Addressed as Karim Aga Khan in this collection, some of his business transactions are available for research.
Alice Darling published a “semi-autobiography” two years before her death in 1966. She recalled that she had typed papers for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his sons; Henry Cabot Lodge and his sons; John F. Kennedy; John DosPassos; and many others. She typed so many papers for law students that she became interested in field and took a law degree from Northeastern University, graduating in 1939. Her profession, she said, had enabled her to acquire “a college education, free of charge, in one of the leading universities in the country.”
In 1998 Alice Darling’s long-time location in the Read Block in the heart of Harvard Square was sold for redevelopment. Now operating from an office on Mifflin Place, Alice Darling Secretarial Services offers transcription services via electronic media for “conferences, interviews, focus groups, meeting, film, press conferences etc.”
