Typewriters as career catalysts: the life of Kathleen (Kay) Midwinter

A blog post by Myriam Piguet.

Pushed forward by the centenary of the organization in 2019-2020, scholarly investigations into the legacy of the League of Nations have been plenty and diverse in recent years.[i] In this context, scholarship on the role of lower-level staff in shaping the internal dynamics of international organizations has been expanding rapidly. Yet, little attention has been paid to how these employees, often recruited locally and often women, used their experience at the League of Nations as a ladder to higher positions in national and international settings.[ii]

In recent works, I have investigated how the typewriter became instrumental in these women’s professional journeys, and in turn, in the transformative establishment of international civil services. These journeys matter in their own right; because these women constituted the backbone of all international public administrations; and because the individual, personal stories reveal biases, patterns and systemic features of international organizations, which might otherwise go unnoticed.

In this blog, I explore the professional trajectory of Kathleen Midwinter, who started her career as a stenographer in the League of Nations Secretariat in Geneva. Throughout World War II, she worked as a clerk at the United Kingdom House of Commons and at the Foreign Office. From 1945, she joined the United Nations, this time as a professional officer, where she remained until her retirement.[iii] Midwinter’s career trajectory allows us to recount the integration of women into multilateralism and to connect it with the development of 20th century international administration from an individual perspective.

Women in international relations

In recent years, research on women in international relations has flourished.[iv] These works explore a wide range of topics, from women’s participation in international thought and international expertise, to the more personal aspects of women’s experience in multilateralism.[v] This growing body of historiography also examines the discrimination women faced, including the overlap between gender and race.[vi] One area that has also gained traction is the perspective of women in international civil service.[vii]

While women were the majority in the general services of the League of Nations and the United Nations Secretariats throughout Midwinter career, they remained a minority within both professional services.[viii] Yet, already in 1920, Article 7 of the Covenant of the League of Nations had invited women to join.[ix] This new version of international diplomacy was, by then, perceived as more organized and more equal. Many women embraced this opportunity, joining the international secretariat enthusiastically. Some, such as Rachel Crowdy at the League and Lucille Mathurin Mair or Alva Myrdal at the UN, used their international experience as a ladder to expand their careers in national contexts.[x] While these high-profile women are relatively well known in their national historiographical context, or at least as much as historical women figures tend to be, their contributions to multilateralism remain largely overlooked.[xi] This blog highlights the case of Kathleen Midwinter. Being acknowledged in the United Kingdom as a pioneer, as she was the first woman to join the House of Commons as a clerk, her extensive experience in international organizations is far less known.[xii]

Kathleen Midwinter’s story offers a unique perspective on how the League of Nations experience shaped the professional trajectories of its secretaries and typists. Midwinter personal archives are kept at The United Nations Career Record Project, set up to preserve testimonies from former U.K. international civil servants.[xiii] Kathleen Midwinter’s file is precious, being one of the only recovered personal testimonies of a shorthand typist of the League of Nations.

Since women made up the majority of the League’s general Services staff, Kathleen Midwinter’s career offers a representative example of the experiences shared by this segment of the League of Nations’ workforce. Furthermore, unlike their male counterparts, a significant number of women who eventually advanced to professional roles in the League or the United Nations began their careers in these general services.[xiv]

Using the typewriter

Like many women who joined the Secretariat, Kathleen Midwinter had not attended university. Before joining the League, she worked as a stenographer in small and medium-sized private administrations.[xv]

In 1930, she passed a League’s open competitive typing examination held in London. She hence joined the administration from the bottom, through the stenographic pool of the secretariat. Aged 21, Midwinter was proactively promoting her career from the start. Her League’s personal files reveal that she applied to multiple internal calls for applicants.[xvi]

In 1932, Kathleen Midwinter moved to the Financial Section & Economic Intelligence Service, initially as a shorthand typist and later as an unofficial senior assistant. Midwinter was thus part of the intermediate class, a semi-official grade given to the employees in the limbo between the general and professional services. Of this cohort, most women worked as secretaries of services and men as senior assistant. Yet, many women secretaries of services performed the tasks of senior assistants.[xvii] Midwinter recalls that in this position, she helped put together the World Economic Survey, a major League publication led by Professor J. B. Condliffe. She described her work as organizing a timeline of events, preparing drafts for printing, proofreading in English and French, making sure both versions matched, and putting together the index. She also drafted statistical tables for the League’s Commercial Banks report and joined a mission to Greece as a secretary.[xviii]

In 1934, Midwinter spent nine months on loan in the secretariat of the Central Opium Board. In 1935, she was appointed secretary shorthand typist in the Staff Pensions Fund. About her time on the Permanent Central Opium Board and in the Secretariat of the Staff Pensions Fund, Midwinter says that she mainly conducted the writing of minutes and assisted in keeping the summary of the proceedings for publication in the Office journal. These tasks were standard for secretaries of section.

While some of her tasks were administrative in nature, her role in the World Economic Survey underscores her contribution to the League’s legacy. These tasks were, to an extent, executive in nature. Furthermore, the World Economic Survey was one of the leading publications of the League, and such surveys increasingly became the norm in the operating procedures of international secretariats, including after the demise of the League. Her experience thus exemplifies a broader trend: women in the League’s general services often assumed responsibilities akin to those of junior officials in professional services.[xix]

Furthermore, through her work in the Staff Pensions Fund, she performed work “to some extent of a statistical nature.”[xx] As her supervisor noted, the position was “more clerical than shorthand-typing.”[xxi] In another correspondence, he further emphasized Midwinter’s unique contribution: “Miss Midwinter is the only one who has taken a real interest in the records of the Fund and is able, under direction, to work on her own.”[xxii] While this position was far from the expertise’s function she previously had in the Financial Section, the Staff Pension Fund nonetheless carried its legacy into later born international organizations.[xxiii]

Kathleen Midwinter left the League of Nations on the brink of the Second World War due to the imperative and massive reduction of the secretariat. Among her personal archives is an unpublished biographical article she drafted, primarily meant to be circulated among her family. In it, she recalls that “her arrival in Geneva in the early 30’s was the beginning of a fascinating few years in international affairs, entailing (…) the acquiring of experience in the fields of administration, economic research, statistics and committee work which included editing and recording meetings”.[xxiv] In this testimony, her experience as a shorthand typist is omitted. Perhaps the routine tasks of stenography seemed mundane to her in comparison to the broader challenges she ultimately tackled later in her career.

Getting rid of the typewriter

The next chapter of Kathleen Midwinter’s career unfolded in 1940, when a visit to the U.K. for family reasons unexpectedly provided a new opportunity. It led to an interview for a job as a committee clerk in the House of Commons. She was the first woman selected for such a post, as her appointment would free a man for military service. Over a number of candidates, she was chosen for her experience with committees, honed during her years at the League.

Never again would she be a shorthand typist. Instead, she gained the unprecedented right to enter Parliament while the House was in session, a privilege previously reserved exclusively to women MPs. As a committee clerk, her responsibilities included summoning witnesses for testimony, organizing committee workflows, and drafting final reports, which were later published as government White Papers. The White Papers produced by the committees were presented to the House by the clerk during parliamentary sessions. Kathleen Midwinter vividly recalls the first time she bowed to the speaker: a “momentous moment for her (and for the House!)”.[xxv] Indeed, her historic appointment gathered significant press attention.[xxvi]

Her professional journey continued far beyond this milestone. In 1943, Midwinter joined the Foreign Affairs Services, again accomplishing a first, as she was among the first generation of women to enter its administrative ranks.[xxvii] There, she continued to climb the ladder building on her League experience. Her tasks included acting as a joint secretary to a committee on the legal, administrative and financial problems of winding up the League of Nations. She was also a joint secretary to the U.K. delegation to the inaugural conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization held in Quebec in October 1945. Finally, she acted as an adviser attached to the U.K. delegation for economic and social matters to the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations held in London in November 1945.[xxviii]

Free from the typewriter

Midwinter joined the United Nations upon its establishment. Between 1950 and 1954, she was part of the Social Welfare Advisory Functions of the United Nations Technical Assistance Administration (TAA). The TAA participated in designing the norms for IOs technical assistance in the postwar years. While it quickly became central to the work of the United Nations, it was primarily a vehicle for industrial development.[xxix] Within this framework, Midwinter’s section, specialized in social welfare, operated somewhat in the shadows of the TAA’s more prominent tasks. Indeed, in the early days of the organization, the topic of social welfare was deemed a low priority, as the UN initially favored the international security components of its agenda.[xxx] As was the case with the League, the Social Department and the soon-to-be Social Welfare Division of the UN were originally set up at the periphery of UN bureaucracy. As a result, these divisions were staffed by a higher proportion of women compared to other UN bodies.[xxxi] The Social Welfare Division was also the only major division led by a woman, Julia Henderson.[xxxii]

Although Kathleen Midwinter was not directly assigned to the Social Affairs Department, her placement within the Social Welfare section of the TAA leads us to a similar observation. Here, too, a rhetoric of complementarity was at play. Just as women in lower-grade positions were often deemed suited for stenographic work due to presumed skills, such as piano playing, women in professional roles within the UN were similarly seen as naturally inclined toward social issues, based on supposed feminine qualities.[xxxiii] This familiar mechanism had already been at play during the era of the League of Nations.[xxxiv]

From 1954 onwards, Kathleen Midwinter then worked in the Social Affairs Division of the Economic Commission for Europe. In this last official post, she was in charge of broadening the scope of the European Social Development Program. Similarly to other UN initiatives, the program focused on organizing seminars in collaboration with volunteer countries and international experts, and on facilitating exchange visits among social workers and administrators. Midwinter noted that the program operated with a modest budget and a small but dedicated team. Reflecting on her legacy, she emphasized that this program “had a great impact on many hundreds of administrators and social workers and built up an immense amount of international good will and appreciation of United Nations activities in most countries in Europe.”[xxxv]

The truth, however, was that while Kathleen Midwinter’s career certainly had an impact on international affairs, her dedication did not suffice for her to be promoted to the higher ranks of the new administration.[xxxvi] In 1950, she was ranked 14 – equivalent to a P4 or intermediate-level official (see footnote).[xxxvii] In a letter to the person in charge of archiving her file for the United Nations Career Record Project, she argues that her status in the UN was never properly recognized, and that she never made it to P5 despite often being recommended. She points out that, in contrast, two male colleagues who “were in the division of social affairs for a relatively short time were given promotion.”[xxxviii]

Challenging the Male Gaze

The apparent discrimination of Midwinter echoes the ones other women international civil servants who felt that their gender materialized as a barrier to climb the ladder of the administration. However, while in the League it was fairly common – both for men and women – not to have attended graduate school, it became the exception in the United Nations. Therefore, Midwinter’s lack of academic experience might have worked against her.[xxxix] Yet her story shows that while they were a minority, women who ascended the ranks from the bottom up kept existing in the UN system.[xl]

Beyond the familiar narrative of gender discrimination, this blog shows that diving into one personal story, even of an individual working in the backrooms of the Palais des Nations, can uncover bigger structural trends. Kathleen Midwinter’s life offers two intersecting lenses for historians to gaze into: one about the often-invisible world of stenographic labor in the League of Nations, and another reflecting the evolution of Social Affairs expertise within the United Nations. These two snapshots unveil the inner work of international organizations and uncover women’s contributions to the shaping of their machinery. Turning male gaze to their advantage, these women used positions initially perceived unimportant in IO secretariats hierarchies to stretch the walls of multilateralism and create their own space.

References

[i] Which has also triggered the total digitalization of the League archives through the LONTAD project: https://libraryresources.unog.ch/lontad

[ii] I won’t quote here all the existing research on IOs general services, but it includes: Auberer, Benjamin. 2023. “Female Staff in the Legal Section of the League of Nations”, In Tallgren, Immi (eds), Portrait of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023, 286–95; Haakon Ikonomou, ‘Underpaid and Overperforming: Interwar Disarmament and the Woman That Made Sense of It’, History Matters, 2 February 2022. [Online] https://historymatters.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/blog-archive/2022/underpaid-and-overperforming-interwar-disarmament; On international organizations outside the UN and the League ecosystem, the EUI researcher Aude Foucoin is currently working on a PhD thesis exploring the women of the general services of the European Coal and Steel Community High Authority.

[iii] Mari Takayanagi, Midwinter [married name Midwinter-Vergin], Kathleen Margaret [Kay], Oxford Dictionnary of National Bibliography, 25 of September 2014.  [Online] https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-107218

[iv] For instance: Devaki Jain, Women, Development, and the UN a Sixty-Year Quest for Equality and Justice, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005.

[v] See for instance the recent: Patricia Owens, Erased: A History of International Thought without Men, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2025; Susanna Erlandsson, Personal Politics in the Postwar World: Western Diplomacy behind the Scenes, London, England, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

[vi] For instance: Johanna Gautier-Morin, “The Women’s Faces of Development in Latin America and the Caribbean: The First Generation of Cepalinas (1960s–1980s)”, Journal of Global History 20 (2), 182–98; Khushi Singh Rathore, “Excavating hidden histories: Indian women in the early history of the United Nations”, in Adami, Rebecca, and Dan Plesch (eds), Women and the UN: A New History of Women’s International Human Rights, London: Routledge, 2021, 39-54.

[vii] For instance: Alanna O’Malley, “Internationalism from the Inside: The Women of the United Nations Secretariat in New York”, in Sluga, Glenda, and Madeleine Herren, Sites of International Memory, 321–46, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023, 321-346.

[viii] See Madeleine Herren, “Gender and International Relations through the Lens of the League of Nations (1919-1945)”, in Sluga, Glenda, and Carolyn James (eds) Women, Diplomacy and International Politics since 1500, edited by, 182–201, Abingdon, Routledge, 2016; Kristen Timothy, “Women in the United Nations Secretariat”. In Winslow, Anne (eds), Women, Politics, and the United Nations, Westport, Greenwood Press, 1995, 117–29.

[ix] https://www.ungeneva.org/en/about/league-of-nations/covenant

[x] Crowdy seated in two U.K. Royal Commissions while both Mair and Myrdal became ambassadors for their countries.

[xi] With the notable exception of Crowdy and Myrdal, for whom academic work on their accomplishments in the multilateral sphere exist, such as Housden, Martyn, “Crowdy, Rachel Eleanor”, in Bob Reinalda, Kent J. Kille and Jaci Eisenberg (eds), IO BIO, Biographical Dictionary of Secretaries- General of International Organizations. [Online] www.ru.nl/fm/iobio; Glenda Sluga, “The Human Story of Development: Alva Myrdal at the UN, 1949–1955”, in Frey, Marc, Sönke Kunkel, and Corinna R. Unger, International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990, London, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014, 46–74. By contrast, the existing research on Mair acknowledges her work in multilateralism but remains centered on her legacy in national settings: Verene A. Shepherd, Lucille Mathurin Mair, Kingston, The University of the West Indies Press, 2021.

[xii] On her experience in UK House of Common, see Mari Takayanagi and Elizabeth Hallam Smith, Necessary Women, The Untold Story of Parliament’s Working Women, London, History Press, 2023. As well as their blog post on the women history network’s website: https://womenshistorynetwork.org/kay-midwinter-first-female-clerk-in-the-house-of-commons-mari-takayanagi/

[xiii] Kathleen Midwinter-Vergin, MS. Eng. c. 4718: (folder. 1-91), United Nations Career Record Project, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. One of several publications that have drawn on this material is: Daniel Gorman, Uniting Nations: Britons and Internationalism, 1945–1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

[xiv] Egon F. Ranshofen-Wertheimer, The International Secretariat: A Great Experiment in International Administration. Washington, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1945, 369-370.

[xv] Ibid.

[xvi] Ibid.

[xvii] Piguet, Myriam, “Employées à la Société des nations : carrières et conditions de travail, 1920-1932”, Monde(s), N° 19 (1), 2021, 63.

[xviii] Myriam Piguet, “High Powered Assistants: Women in Feminized Secretarial Positions at the League of Nations and the United Nations c. 1920–1975”. Almagest, 16 (1), 2025, 22–41.

[xix] Ibid.

[xx] Ibid.

[xxi] Ms. Mindwinter (Kathleen Margaret), S832/137/2448, op.cit.

[xxii] Ms. Mindwinter (Kathleen Margaret), S832/137/2448, op.cit.

[xxiii] Victoria Jeanne Mumby, “The Quiet Death of the League of Nations, 1945-48”, PhD, Birkbeck University, London, 2021, 218.

[xxiv] Kathleen Midwinter-Vergin, MS. Eng. c. 4718: (folder. 1-91), United Nations Career Record Project, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

[xxv] Ibid.

[xxvi] Ibid.

[xxvii] In 1942, a formal statement from the Foreign Secretary allowed women to join the administrative grades of the Foreign Office for temporary appointments. Helen McCarthy, Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat, op.cit., 163-164.

[xxviii] Kathleen Midwinter, MS. Eng. c. 4718: (folder. 1-91), op.cit

[xxix] David Webster, “Development Advisors in a Time of Cold War and Decolonization: The United Nations Technical Assistance Administration, 1950–59”, Journal of Global History, vol. 6, No. 2, July 2011, 249-272.

[xxx] This aspect, and how it influenced women career, is something I developed in my PhD, which I am in the process of turning into a book. Myriam Piguet, “Gender Before Mainstreaming: The Integration of Women to International Civil Service in the Secretariats of the League of Nations and the United Nations, Circa 1920–1975”, PhD, University of Geneva, Geneva, 2024.

[xxxi] Ibid.

[xxxii] Ibid. In my PhD, I also developed extensively on the career of Julia Henderson, who led social welfare at the UN for almost two decades.

[xxxiii] Ibid.

[xxxiv] Myriam Piguet, “Gender Distribution in the League of Nations: The Start of a Revolution?”, In Gram-Skjoldager, Karen, and Haakon A. Ikonomou, The League of Nations: Perspective from the Present, Aarhus, Aarhus University Press, 2019, 60–69.

[xxxv] Kathleen Midwinter, “One Thing Leads to Another”, op.cit.

[xxxvi] Kathleen Midwinter-Vergin, MS. Eng. c. 4718: (folder. 1-91), United Nations Career Record Project, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

[xxxvii] In the United Nations, the ranks were divided between G (general services), P (professional services), and D (Directors). P ranged from 1 to 5. Before 1950, the ranks were classified between 1 to 19. Following a comparative analysis I conducted in my PhD thesis, 14 corresponds to P4 (Intermediate to senior officials),

[xxxviii] Ibid.

[xxxix] In contrast with the League, all the women international civil servants featured in the United Nations Who’s Who (1951) had attended university. See Christian E. Burckel, Who’s Who in the United Nations: The Authoritative, Illustrated, Biographical Dictionary of Key Persons Associated with the United Nations, Yonkers-on-Hudson and New York, Burckel & Associates, 1951.

[xl] Myriam Piguet, “High Powered Assistants”, op.cit., 34.

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