OK Computer: Typewriters and the bosses wives

April 23, 2004

Typewriters and the bosses wives

Women at work.

A 1923 book on the early history of the typewriter*, featured a portrait of Christopher Latham Sholes, inventor of the first production typewriter, as the savior of women.

It is highly unlikely that Sholes consciously invented the typewriter with the intention of furthering women's liberation, but it is a fact that this office appliance had a major impact on office life in the western world.

The typewriter gave women jobs in the office and an opportunity to work as freelance 'typewriters' in offices where a fulltime use for the machine wasn't feasible yet.

In that sense the invention of the typewriter played a major role in eventually giving women economic power, an equal position in the labor force and a voice in business.

But there was still a long way to go, as is illustrated by a sheer endless series of telltale postcards that appeared in the early 20th Century. One more explicitly than the other (pic 5), they all told the same story about the boss cheating his wife with his secretary.

The same theme also appeared in several series of stereo view pictures, usually ending with the lovebirds being caught by the boss' wife. Note that the wife in these series always beats up the secretary, and never the husband...

From the excellent Virtual Typewriter Museum

Posted by ro_G at April 23, 2004 12:48 AM | Email a friend this entry | TrackBack

Comments

"Before 1900, male clerical workers, as apprentice capitalists, performed a wide variety of tasks that helped them learn the business. By 1930, the class position of clerical workers had changed, and autonomous male clerks were transformed into working class females—a 'secretarial proletariat'."

From: "Woman's Place Is at the Typewriter
Office Work and Office Workers, 1870-1930"
by Margery W. Davies

http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/273_reg.html

Posted by: micko at April 23, 2004 07:08 PM

so, was the typewriter a liberator for women, or a means to sheckle them to the lower rungs of an organisation

Posted by: ro_G at April 24, 2004 11:50 AM

Both. It works both ways. Typewriters themselves, unlike eg weapons of mass destruction, aren't intrinsically good or bad. The ways they were used in society were both good and bad, shackles and liberating devices.

If Billy Bragg were in the secretarial proletariat in the era of the typewriter, his machine would probably have a sticky label saying "This Typewriter Kills Facists".

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