Conference Staff

The conversion of the Geological Museum – then on Jermyn Street in St James’s, London – into an appropriate venue for the 1933 World Monetary and Economic Conference required the employment of a range of people to attend to the venue’s fixtures and furnishings. This was important both for the comfort of delegates, and to ensure that the venue conveyed a sense of prestige equal to the occasion.

The League of Nations employed a permanent Secretariat, based in Geneva, to fulfil the various functions of a transnational bureaucracy. The League’s many conferences and assemblies would not have been possible without departments like the Duplicating Service. The League of Nations Covenant had decreed, under pressure from feminist associations, that the Secretariat ‘be open equally to men and women’. While by 1925 women represented half of the League’s total number of employees, they were dramatically overrepresented in behind-the-scenes roles like these.

A range of professions were involved in the production of typed documents upon which conferences, in this case the 1933 World Monetary and Economic Conference, depended. However, the prestige was far from evenly shared, and it is telling that we only know the name of one of the figures in these photographs: the Secretary to the United Kingdom Delegation at the 1933 World Monetary and Economic Conference, Rupert B. Howorth, seen here dictating letters to a stenographer (left). Stenographers themselves were distinguished by their ability to write shorthand, which set them apart from ordinary typists (below left). Both roles were seen as feminine employment.