Daily Inspiration Quote by Brenda Blethyn

“Being a secretary was considered a very good job in those days” lands with the quiet punch of someone describing a compliment that now reads like a constraint. Coming from Brenda Blethyn, it’s not a sweeping manifesto; it’s a small, lived observation that smuggles in a whole social order. The phrase “considered” does heavy lifting: it points to an external committee of approval - parents, teachers, employers, the era itself - deciding what counted as “good” for a woman. Not “what you wanted,” but what was respectable, stable, and safely legible.

The subtext is economic as much as cultural. Secretarial work once promised a rare mix of wages, proximity to power, and a ladder of sorts, but the ladder typically leaned against someone else’s office wall. “In those days” is doing the second punch: it’s nostalgia and critique in one. It invites you to hear the datedness - not of the job, but of the value system that elevated it partly because it kept women in supporting roles, organized, presentable, indispensable, and politely invisible.

Blethyn’s actorly sensibility matters here. She’s attuned to how status is performed: the “good job” isn’t just pay, it’s what it signals about being sensible, employable, marriageable. The line functions like a period detail that reveals the whole room. You can almost see the typing pool, the dress code, the expectation to be grateful. The real sting is how easily “good” becomes a synonym for “acceptable.”