Glamor for Standard

The rarefied air of high office in U.S. industry has often been considered too thin for women to stand. Last week, the staid old Standard Oil Co. (New Jersey) broke this antifeminine taboo. Into two of its five executive posts of assistant secretary it raised two ex-stenographers: brown-eyed, brown-haired Miss Muriel E. Reynolds, 42, and small (5 ft. i in.) Mrs. Margery M. Porter, also 42, who wears her brown hair in a feather cut. They are the first women ever to become corporate officers in mighty Standard.

Standard's prettiest executives have both been working since they were children. Miss Reynolds, a native of Waterbury, Conn., was a bank clerk at 15. She worked her way through Wheaton College, taught junior high school just long enough (one year) to decide she did not like it, settled down as a stenographer in Standard's accounting department 19 years ago.

Mrs. Porter packed manicuring sets and sold Christmas cards while she was in school. She once wanted to be an actress but decided it was "too unsteady." After graduating from high school she did nine years of clerical work for the National Society of Penal Information, finding jobs For ex-convicts. In 1930 she went to work as a stenographer in Standard's sales department.

As Assistant Secretaries, the new executives, like their predecessors, will have little to do with policy matters, will be primarily concerned with keeping records. Neither has a success formula for girls who want to make the long climb from hot kitchen to air-conditioned office--except ambition. Said Mrs. Porter: "It has been wonderful, though, to see the effect our appointment has had on the other women of the company. It has given them all renewed hope. . . . It's a milestone for women in the conservative man's world."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.