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A few reviews ...

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 I'm delighted to have received these reviews for Short skirts and shorthand. Please feel free to email yours to me, or post it on Amazon ,  Goodreads etc.  If you're thinking of discussing the book with your group, by all means get in touch.   Sarah Harrison 'Simply a terrific read. Authoritative, and packed wih Sarah Shaw's characteristic canny humour and perceptiveness. Her interviewees' individual stories are beyond price - anyone who worked in an office between the late sixties and the eary eighties will find so much to recognise, from Tippex and teamaking to saving the boss, the business and the day! SSAS is social history at its very best, informed by the author's own varied experience. Can't recommend highly enough. PS in the sixties I was an editorial trainee with IPC magazines, the undisputed lowest form of life, and I was in total awe of the secretaries, who seemed to know everything, and more or less run the place! QED.'   Alan Charleswort
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SHORT SKIRTS AND SHORTHAND IS PUBLISHED!

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I'm delighted to announce that 'Short skirts and shorthand: Secretaries of the 1970s' is on sale now from Lulu.com in print and as an ebook .  (The print version will be listed on Amazon in a few weeks' time.) What's in the book? The first few chapters describe how young women became secretaries and what it was like to do the job.  This vividly takes the reader into those smoke-filled offices with lino floors, with typewriters clattering and phones ringing all day. Next, it looks at the relationship between the secretary and her boss and whether she was really an 'office wife' ... or was she a dolly bird?  This leads to a short discussion about the issues surrounding sexual harassment in 70s' offices and the use of the secretary in the media as a sexual object.  We then move on to consider whether secretaries became trapped in a dead end job, or could use their experience to move into other fields.  Another chapter looks at how they changed jobs, or w
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