Private Secretaries in Early-Twentieth-Century America

Based on legal documents, letters, and memoirs, this article describes the lives of private secretaries who often served as personal companions and the social context in which they worked, specifically focusing on the women who Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, a New York society matron and woman's rights advocate, employed in that capacity from 1916 to 1933. It examines the nature of their employment, the emotional and social tensions that plagued their efforts to situate themselves into the world of wealth and privilege, and the way they negotiated those tensions. It argues that the work of women such as these was critical on both a practical and emotional level to the ability of society matrons to carry out their public lives.