S.S. Packard, who founded the Packard Business College.
“She has come to stay,” wrote S.S. Packard in the Standard Stenographic Magazine in 1889. “Let us accept her as a fact, and treat her like a man. She deserves it and will thank us for it. When I say ‘treat her like a man,’ I mean hire her to do her work, expect her to do it, and pay her for it.”
The S.S. Packard who wrote this commentary may well be the same individual who founded the Packard Business College. That Packard was Silas Sadler Packard (1826-1898), who published a number of books on penmanship, bookkeeping, and clerical work (see here), and ran commercial schools from 1858 until his death.
Packard likely did not anticipate the influx of women into business, but he championed their arrival. While others welcomed women because they could be paid less, Packard asserted simply that they should be paid for their work, a progressive stance in the mid-19th century.
After his prefatory comments, he directed the bulk of his attention to women themselves (“dear girl”) offering advice for success in commercial industries. Interestingly, newspaper reprints of Packard’s article omit the progressive introduction (see here for an example).
According to blogger Tom Miller, “Packard admitted 30 young women to the school, educating them for free. The Penman’s Art Journal said he did it ‘for no other purpose than to prove to the business community that he had at command a number of well-trained and efficient women clerks, who were not only able to work, but were willing to do so, and who could readily supplant inefficient office boys and young men, who depended upon, their sex to hold their own, as against women, of whatever qualifications.'”
More about Packard can be found at Miller’s blog here.
The Standard Stenographic Magazine (Iowa City), February 1889 –
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