admired her so, we wanted to emulate her. But I really didn’t want
to be a teacher. I wanted to be an actor.”
Still, Kauders went to the University of Pennsylvania to study
“all the good subjects” —“history, social studies, English, not math-
ematics.” She had a fantastic time at the school, and understood her
mother’s insistence on a good education.

“Penn taught me how to think, bless them for it,” Kauders said.

She has remained an active and appreciated alum; there’s an en-
dowed lecture series in her name at the Kelly Writers House.

But when she first graduated and went to look for a job, she got
a wakeup call.

“A woman at an employment agency said to me, ‘My dear, you have
a wonderful education, but you don’t know how to do anything.’ ”
So she went to secretarial school, took a typing and shorthand
course, and learned how to do something. Those skills, she said,
were the key to getting hired.

“In my day, it was very rare that women moved into professional
jobs [from the beginning],” she said. “You always started as some-
body’s secretary.”
Aside from dealing with chauvinism, she often wondered if her
Judaism held her back.

“I would ask myself, ‘Did I not get this job because I’m Jewish?’”
She could tell when it was having an impact on someone’s per-
ception of her. Her first job after secretarial school was as a secretary
at a patent office.

“The guy there tried every which way and Saturday to ask me
whether I was Jewish or not without coming out and saying it,” she re-
membered. “I think it was against the law to ask me at that time. So he
said to me, ‘What’s your nationality?’ I said, ‘I’m American!’ He asked
what’s this, what’s that, and finally I said to him, ‘You know something?
I think patent law would be very boring. I don’t think I’m interested.’”
He was incensed, but the bright, strong-willed Kauders probably
wasn’t cut out to be a secretary anyway; instead, she began a long,
successful career in Philadelphia city government — for five different
mayors — and in public relations. She still loved acting, and did it
every chance she got, but she had to be practical, too.

“You don’t really kid yourself if you think as an actor you’re going
to be busy all the time,” she said. “You can’t count on steady work.

You’ve gotta have a steady job.”
She would, however, take advantage of a slow season in public
relations by doing plays. Things could get a little confusing, though.

After acting in the stage play Crossing Delancey, she went up to New
York to audition for the movie version.

A natural blonde, Kauders temporarily dyed her hair brown to
make a more persuasive case as the character. When she came back
into town, she headed straight to a special event connected to her
PR work — with an unfamiliar mass of dark hair. She had to tell
people, “Hello, I’m Sylvia Kauders — the same Sylvia.”
Though she juggled the two careers rather successfully, her proud-
est moment is actually connected to municipal promotions.

“I created a program called Wednesday is for Women,” she said.

“The city representative felt that the tours of City Hall were neglected,
so I created this program on a Wednesday that the women would
come, the municipal guides would take them on a tour of City Hall,
they’d come back to the Mayor’s Reception Room and we would do
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