Neither Printer's Wife Nor Widow: American Women in Typesetting, 1830-1950 Author(S): Mary Biggs Source: the Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, Vol
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Neither Printer's Wife nor Widow: American Women in Typesetting, 1830-1950 Author(s): Mary Biggs Source: The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Oct., 1980), pp. 431-452 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4307273 Accessed: 19-12-2017 22:34 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy This content downloaded from 73.55.183.7 on Tue, 19 Dec 2017 22:34:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms NEITHER PRINTER'S WIFE NOR WIDOW: AMERICAN WOMEN IN TYPESETTING, 1830-1950 Mary Biggs Women have been active in American printing since the establishment of the first colonial press. Most historians who acknowledge this cite the contributions of printers' daughters, wives, and widows. This study focuses instead on women employed as typesetters in printing offices where they had no family connec- tions. Special attention is given to the arguments raised against the employment of women, the threat their labor represented to male typesetters, and their relations with the typographical union. Sources consulted while preparing this paper include publications of the national union and several local subordinate unions, internal records of the Chicago local, government reports, books, and newspaper and magazine articles. I do not think there is any other business from which a woman can derive more satisfaction than that of printing. It is like music to me to hear the click of the type as it falls into the stick, and the buzzing sound of the old press as she turns her papers out on the "fly." [RENA CHALLENDER, forewoman of the Manistee (Michigan) News office, quoted in 1897 (1, p. 408)] When Elizabeth Glover arrived in Massachusetts from England- having been widowed en route-and established the Daye Press, she set a pattern which became familiar in America. The printing press which her deceased husband had been transporting was the foundation of this new business, and his intended assistants, Stephen and Matthew Daye, were probably its operators. Throughout colonial days and into the nineteenth century, wives and daughters assisted in family-run printing shops; should a printer die without leaving behind a grown son, his widow typically continued the business. These women performed their chores with varying degrees of competency and for varying lengths of time, but it is certain that some-such as Ann Franklin in Rhode Island and Sarah and Mary Katherine Goddard, mother and daughter, in [Library Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 431-452] ? 1980 by The University of Chicago. 0024-2519/80/5004-0003$01.00 431 This content downloaded from 73.55.183.7 on Tue, 19 Dec 2017 22:34:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 432 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY Rhode Island and Maryland, respectively-functioned for many years as able printers, publishers, and business managers.' In the 1800s, partly because of the example set by printers' female relations, typesetting was regarded as a possible source of employment for girls forced to earn their own livings. Because few statistics were gathered, and those figures which are available often lump compositors with press feeders and other less skilled workers, it is difficult to judge how many young women actually set type as nonfamilial employees. Certainly they were few in relation to the number of men, and girls very rarely served regular apprenticeships. However, significant numbers of nineteenth-century women did set type, and there were frequent pre- dictions that they would eventually outnumber men in the trade. In 1834, female shoebinders on strike in Lynn, Massachusetts, threatened to abandon their craft and turn to printing, which implies that this work was generally available to women, and in 1836 a committee of national trade unions stated that New England printing was "in a certain mea- sure governed by females" [5, pp. 213-14]. Four years later, the En- glish journalist Harriet Martineau visited the United States and identified typesetting as one of only seven occupations open to women [6, p. 202]. As the century wore on, women continued to enter printing shops, but their symbolic significance in the labor movement, as the threat most commonly flung at rebellious journeymen by employing printers, over- shadowed their real importance in the trade. As the typographical union gained strength, it naturally moved to neutralize the threat of cheap female labor. Showing remarkable shrewdness, male printers were able to restrict the numbers of women in their trade by accommodating them-on union terms. Today two popular views of this situation exist: the union view of the typographers as pioneer egalitarians, and the feminist view of the union as destroyer of the first and best opportunity women had to participate in a remunerative skilled trade. As far as they go, both views are correct, yet the matter is still more complex. It is clear that the conflict between men and women compositors in the 1800s was a product, on the one hand, of management's opposition to unionization and, on the other, of an economic and social system which declared most paid labor unsuitable for women, proffered employed women the lowest possible wages, and assumed that all women toiled only temporarily before finding their permanent occupation as wives. Union policies, though ultimately exclusionary, were founded not in sexism but in the workingman's need to survive. 1. Accounts of these women's accomplishments can be found in [2-41. This content downloaded from 73.55.183.7 on Tue, 19 Dec 2017 22:34:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms WOMEN TYPESETTERS, 1830-1950 433 Arguments against Women Compositors In the mid-1800s women were considered moral guardians of society, and in their early opposition to the hiring of female compositors, union members appealed to that image. At the Buffalo convention of the National Typographical Union (NTU) in 1854, Charles F. Town, a delegate from New York City, warned of the detrimental effect on feminine morals of exposure to "many medical and other scientific works . which contain matter eminently unfitted and highly improper for the perusal of modest young women" [7, p. 423]. During the same year, a communication which appeared in the Philadelphza Daily News and was signed "The Printers' Union" called on Americans to oppose the hiring of "woman" in order to safeguard her "purity," predicting rather vaguely that contact with a man's world "would have a very pernicious effect upon her morals" [7, pp. 426-27]. In a famous editorial, Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune (and former head of the New York printers' union [8, p. 35]) made a wry response. Accusing the printers of "waxing theologic and pious," he agreed that it was appropriate for them "to apprise [woman] beforehand of the moral atmosphere into which promiscuous typesetting would expose her" and of the corrupting effect of "your society and conversa- tion," but suggested it was ultimately the woman's own "lookout" [7, pp. 425-26]. The printers' sincerity was suspect, especially since their con- cerns for female purity were always expressed in conjunction with com- plaints about female competition. However, even an 1863 editorial in an English popular periodical, which argued strongly for the use of female typesetters, mentioned, almost as an aside, that they must not, of course, work in "offices planned for the other sex" [9, p. 40]. Woman's purity was most easily preserved in the relative isolation of her home-and the moral argument against female typesetters was often accompanied by discussions of woman's proper place. Town's fellow New York delegate, Thomas J. Walsh, denounced "the sordid philanthropy and hypocrisy of those who would thus induce woman from her sphere" [7, p. 423], and the printers' union statement referred to "the sphere of action God ... designed her to occupy" [7, p. 427]. In his reply, Greeley proposed that the printers provide their female com- petitors with that alternative by marrying and responsibly supporting them-but noted that single women and those wed to "drunken, loafing, good-for-nothing husbands" had the need and right to work [7, p. 425]. Many disagreed with Greeley then, and some continued to disagree well into the present century. The assumption that women printers in general, and wives in particular, needed money less than men did and, implicitly, should therefore not compete with them for work, was echoed This content downloaded from 73.55.183.7 on Tue, 19 Dec 2017 22:34:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 434 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY by Carlton in 1911 [10, p. 413-15] and described in 1944 by a compos- itor named Constance Roe: "If you had a husband with a job [the men thought], what were you doing here, taking bread out of some man's children's mouths?" She emphasized that there was less, but similar, resentment against single women as well and told of a competent, un- married journeywoman fired during the Depression to make room for an unemployed family man who had proven unreliable in the past.