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1890: President Benjamin Harrison welcomes Alice Sanger as the first female White House staffer. The last (brevet) general of the Civil War to attain the presidency, Benjamin Harrison followed his grandfather William Henry Harrison, winning election as the nation’s 23rd president in 1888. There is a practical side to politics; not only was the combined Women's movement, National American Woman Suffrage Association, on the rise in 1890; but Caroline Harrison, the very proactive First Lady, was open-minded about suffrage. She supported the hiring of Alice Sanger as the first woman stenographer at the White House. On February 12, 1880, a wooden crate had arrived at the White House containing a new contrivance which would revolutionize presidential letter writing: a Fairbanks and Company Improved Number Two Typewriter. Neither Presidents Hayes, Garfield, Arthur or Cleveland used the “type-writing” machine for correspondence, but by the time Benjamin Harrison arrived at the White House, the typewriter was important enough to have its own two small rooms – shared with the telephone and telegraph – and its own operator, Miss Alice Sanger. The first typed white house letter-a thankyou note- also spelled the end of presidentially autographed letters...the advent of the typewritten letters would make the presidential autograph letter rarer and rarer – driving it, almost, to the point of extinction. http://www.presidentbenjaminharrison.org/learn/collections/women-s-suffrage