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2. THE POLICE
Law
enforcement has a long history, although the earliest policemen usually
had to serve as garbagemen and firefighters as well. The world’s first
organized police force operated in Egypt around 3000 BC, although they
were mostly concerned with maintaining public order and collecting
taxes. Egypt’s 42 provincial police chiefs bore an ominous title that
translates to “chief of the hitters .” In Ancient Greece, the city-state
of Athens had a group of magistrates called “The Eleven” who oversaw
criminal justice. They were assisted by a team of 300 armed Scythian
slaves charged with maintaining order in the city.
Other ancient
cultures also drew their police force from slaves or the lower classes,
meaning it was usually perceived as a degrading job. The Romans,
somewhat typically, barely bothered with law enforcement at all,
preferring to let citizens sort out their own problems via lawsuits in
the civil courts. Augustus did create three “urban cohorts” of police,
but they were more concerned with maintaining public order than stopping
individual crimes. The tendency to view crime as a private issue rather
than a problem for the government lasted into the Middle Ages, with
rulers seldom attempting to establish any sort of police force.
In
England, the Anglo-Saxon Frankpledge system required communities to band
together to protect themselves and maintain the peace. If a crime was
committed, all the men in the community were required to raise a “hue
and cry” and pursue the criminal. Anyone who refused to join the pursuit
would be considered a criminal himself. If there were no witnesses to
the crime, the victims were basically on their own to investigate, since
there was no permanent police organization. The Normans introduced the
office of constable, charged with overseeing local watches and providing
security, but essentially kept the “hue and cry” system where civilians
were responsible for apprehending criminals.
England’s first
salaried police force, the “Bow Street Runners,” was created by two
London magistrates in 1750, but it took until 1812 for the government to
establish the London Metropolitan Police Department, which served as
the model for policing in the rest of the English-speaking world. In the
US, Boston became the first city to establish a professional police
force in 1838 , replacing a system of voluntary watchmen (who were
mostly trying to avoid military service) and semi-professional
constables.
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3. NURSES
Today,
men make up only about 6 percent of all nurses in the US. But the
world’s first nursing school, established in Punjab around 250 BC, only
accepted men, since women weren’t considered “pure” enough to become
nurses. An early Christian group known as the Parabolani was comprised
of men who acted as nurses to the sick and dying (although they also
developed a nasty reputation for violently clashing with local
non-Christians). In the Middle Ages, a number of religious male nursing
orders emerged, including the Alexian Brotherhood, which still exists
today.
Modern professional nursing is often traced back to Florence
Nightingale , who believed that the sick would greatly benefit from
gentle care based on scientific principles. She put her ideas into
practice during the Crimean War, when she brought a group of female
nurses to reorganize the military hospital at Scutari, slashing death
rates and becoming famous around the world. Nightingale’s success
revolutionized European healthcare and established nursing as a
respectable profession for women. Meanwhile, the number of male nurses
decreased. The US Army even banned male nurses entirely in the early
1900s and some nursing schools continued to reject male applicants until
the early ’80s .
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4. BARBERS
Professional
barbers date back at least to Ancient Egypt, where wealthy nobles kept
personal barbers on staff. In Ancient Greece and Rome, the barbershop
was known as a fountain of gossip and political debate. But things
really got interesting in medieval Europe, where barbers started
performing surgeries as well as cutting hair.
It all started in AD
1163, when the pope issued a degree banning members of the clergy from
shedding blood. This was a problem for priests and monks, who often
carried out bloodletting and other minor surgical procedures. Instead,
they turned to barbers, who already carried razors and were stationed at
many monasteries to keep the monks clean-shaven. Since medical doctors
viewed bloodletting as beneath them, they were happy to let barbers take
it over entirely, along with other unpleasant procedures like
amputations and lancing abscesses.
Barber-surgeons became even more prominent due to the bubonic plague, which caused a
high
mortality rate among trained medical doctors. In England, the barbers
and surgeons were originally two separate guilds, but grew together
until Henry VIII merged them in 1540. Ambroise Pare, considered the
father of modern surgery, started out as a barber. It has even been
suggested that the familiar red and white barber pole originally
symbolized
bloody bandages . Of course, the emergence of modern
medicine clashed with the idea of an informally trained barber-surgeon,
causing barbers to be gradually forbidden from carrying out medical
procedures during the 18th century.
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5. FOOTBALL REFEREES
Early
soccer matches had no referee. Instead, the captains of the two teams
were responsible for settling all disagreements on the field. As
football became more competitive, each side would bring an umpire to the
pitch. The two umpires ran around the field observing the game as it
progressed, but did not interfere in disagreements except when asked by
the players.
Since the umpires were on the payroll of the competing
teams, they often got into lengthy disagreements, prompting the
introduction of
a neutral referee appointed by both teams. The
referee watched the game from the touchline and acted as the timekeeper.
He did not interfere in the game, although he had the power to warn
players and even send them off for repeated rough play. Instead, he was
only consulted when the two umpires could not reach an agreement.
In
1891, the laws of the game were amended to give the referee the final
say on the pitch, effectively creating the modern referee. The two
umpires evolved into the linesmen or assistant referees. However, the
referee would have to wait until the 1970 World Cup to get his familiar
red and yellow cards, which were modeled on traffic lights and
introduced to help avoid confusion over whether a player had been sent
off or not.
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6. TELEPHONE OPERATORS
In
the early days of the phone, people couldn’t simply dial a number and
expect to be connected. Instead, they would first call their telephone
operating center, where a telephone operator would manually operate a
switchboard to route the call to the intended recipient. A particularly
complicated call might require up to six operators furiously plugging
switches into wall-sized switchboards.
The first call operators were
young teenage boys . Telephone companies knew that working a switchboard
was hard work and thought teenage boys would have the dexterity,
energy, and reflexes needed. More importantly, they were cheap.
Unfortunately,
there were some predictable problems with employing only teenagers. The
boys soon developed a reputation for playing
practical jokes on
callers , including ending their calls without warning and deliberately
connecting two strangers together to enjoy the resulting confusion. They
also had a tendency to swear at customers and were known for fighting
and drinking alcohol while working.
The whole thing was such a
disaster that Bell eventually fired all of its teenage male operators en
masse, replacing them with young women, who were considered more
genteel and equally cheap. Other telephone companies followed suit and
men only became operators again after equal rights legislation was
passed in the 1970s.
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7. COMPUTER PROGRAMMING
Today,
we think of computer programmers as young male geeks. But the first
computer programmers were usually women. In fact, arguably the world’s
first computer programmer was Ada Lovelace , a female mathematician and
the daughter of Lord Byron. Lovelace was a close friend and colleague of
Charles Babbage, who first conceived of a programmable computer. While
translating an article on Babbage, Lovelace wrote an algorithm that
would prompt Babbage’s “Analytical Engine” to perform mathematical
calculations. This is considered the first program. Lovelace was also
the first to suggest that computers had applications beyond performing
calculations, since it was possible to represent any type of data using
only numbers. Unfortunately, Babbage never actually built his computer,
so Lovelace’s work
remained theoretical .
In the 1940s, the
University of Pennsylvania developed the ENIAC machine (pictured above),
one of the first electronic computers. Six women were hired to “set up”
computations on the machine, becoming the first practical computer
programmers in the process. Women continued to dominate the field into
the 1960s, with Cosmopolitan magazine declaring that programming offered
some of the best opportunities for women to develop a career. A leading
female computer scientist, Dr. Grace Hopper, even told the magazine
that women were naturals at programming, since it was “just like
planning a dinner.” Meanwhile, men preferred to stick to hardware, which
was seen as more prestigious than “clerical” software work.
Sadly,
male programmers eventually came to dominate the field by making
deliberate efforts to force their female counterparts out. Among other
things, they formed male-only professional associations and encouraged
hiring requirements that benefited men, who were more likely to have
studied math at school and university. Male programmers also pushed for
the introduction of personality profiles for job candidates, which were
slanted toward male applicants. Incidentally, those same personality
profiles argued that the ideal programmer would be disinterested in
people, helping to create the stereotype of the antisocial computer nerd
so prevalent today.
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8. FIRE FIGHTERS
Firefighting
itself began as soon as humans started living in packed-together,
flammable houses. However, the first professional firefighting outfit we
know of dates back to Ancient Rome, where the famously wealthy
Marcus
Licinius Crassus formed his own private outfit. Whenever there was an
outbreak of fire, his team would rush to the scene and begin
negotiations with the owner of the property. If both sides agreed on a
fee, they would put out the fire. It not, Crassus’s team would simply
leave, allowing the property to burn.
Possibly inspired by Crassus,
the Emperor Augustus eventually formed his own fire brigade, known as
the Vigiles or “bucket brigade.” Unlike Crassus and his men, the
Vigiles’ services were free. Later, firefighting was mostly left up to
the local watch, who were often more concerned with catching criminals
than fighting fires. In 1666, the Great Fire of London prompted English
insurance companies to form their own fire brigades. Policyholders would
be given a badge to attach to their building. Whenever there was a
fire, local fire brigades would be called out, but would only put out
the fire if the building was insured with the right company . As a
result, houses were frequently left to burn until the correct fire
brigade arrived.
Edinburgh finally formed the first proper fire
brigade in 1824. The chief officer was James Braidwood, who was later
recruited to enact similar reforms in London. After establishing the
principles of modern firefighting, he was killed while battling a London
warehouse fire in 1861.
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9. FLIGHT ATTENDANTS
Today,
the stereotypical flight attendant is a beautiful woman in a tight
skirt. But the very first flight attendants were exclusively male. Known
as “couriers,” they often included the young sons of the businessmen
who sponsored early flights. As air travel became more common, the
responsibility of attending to passengers and serving drinks actually
fell to the co-pilot. Professional flight attendants were only hired
again in the 1930s, when the first female flight attendants are
recorded. The women in question were actually nurses, since airlines
believed passengers would feel much safer with medical assistance to
hand.
The very first female flight attendant was Ellen Church , who
was both a pilot and a registered nurse. Since airlines refused to hire a
female pilot at the time, Church convinced a reluctant Boeing Air
Transport (now United Airlines) to hire her and seven other nurses as
attendants. As well as assisting with airsickness, Church argued that
female flight attendants would help deal with nervous passengers,
telling the airline that it “would be good psychology to have women up
in the air. How is a man going to say he is afraid to fly when a woman
is working on the plane?”
When World War II broke out, most nurses
left to serve with the military, prompting airlines to begin hiring
ordinary women to replace them. Men only became flight attendants again
in the 1960s and have not regained their dominance to date.
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10. OFFICE SECRETARIES
Secretary-like
work dates back to the scribes of the ancient world. In fact, the name
itself derives from the Latin word for secret ( secretum), since early
secretaries were often trusted with confidential information by their
employers. By the medieval period, secretarial work was largely done by
priests and other clerics (hence “clerical work”), but full-time
secretaries reappeared in the Renaissance.
Almost all of these early
secretaries were men, but large numbers of women began to enter the
field during the American Civil War, when a shortage of manpower caused
the US Treasury to hire 1,500 female clerical workers. Women dominated
the profession by the late 19th century, helped by the invention of the
typewriter, which was seen as better suited to delicate female fingers.
Unfortunately,
the job remained poorly paid and offered few opportunities for
advancement, even as it came to require a great deal of skill ( Time
magazine boasted secretaries able to take dictation on two separate
stories simultaneously, one with each hand ). Secretaries were often
required to perform humiliating, menial tasks or perform personal
errands for their boss. Future
Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown
recalled her early days as a secretary in the 1940s, when the men in
the office would pick a female secretary “to chase and catch so they
could take off her underwear.”
Still, secretarial work remained the best option for many women, with one guidebook
advising
women to “be a lawyer’s or a doctor’s or a scientist’s secretary
because you once hoped to be a lawyer or a doctor or a scientist.”
Things started changing in the ’60s and ’70s, when the women’s
liberation movement and increased opportunities in other fields resulted
in a secretary shortage. The National Secretaries Association began
training its members in accountancy and other skills needed to move up
into management positions, while the US government warned senior
bureaucrats against treating their secretaries as “char help.” Even the
name “secretary” began to fall out of favor, replaced by the more
professional-sounding “administrative assistant.”
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