When I acquired my press I also inherited boxes and trays of unsorted type, the different fonts and letters mixed together in the jumble printers call “pi” (think: pie filling). Sorting the type has been a slow and painstaking process. I don’t consider myself an especially clumsy person, and years of playing a woodwind instrument have left me with decent fine motor skills—or so I thought. The first time I picked up a piece of type, I immediately dropped the half inch long metal slug on the floor. My hands seemed to have the dexterity of oven mitts; within 30 minutes of beginning to sort, my fingers were so sore that I had to stop.
I’m starting to improve: tweezers help, and my fingers have learned how to manipulate a sort of type by holding it at the base nick. But it will be a while before my hands reveal my craft—as is the case in this scene from a 1898 short story:
His hands were slender, and there was something about the right thumb and forefinger which proclaimed his craft at once.
“He’s a printer,” said Watson.1
The printer in this story happens to be a man. But the belief that people with “slender” hands make good printers appears to have helped usher women into the typesetting trade during the nineteenth century. As we’ll see, however, the myth of fine hands was not always enough to secure women a place at the composing table—and at times, proved a harmful stereotype.
Women in the Composing Room
Composing, or typesetting, is the process of arranging individual letterforms into words, lines, and pages. Before the advent of mechanical typesetting technology, compositors worked by picking out type from divided, alphabetized trays and assembling words on a “composing stick,” whose contents were then emptied onto a flat imposing stone and organized into the paragraphs and columns of a page. Compositors were skilled workers, whose craft required manual dexterity, a high level of literacy, and the ability to read and spell backwards.
Nineteenth-century labor advocates argued that typesetting was a trade uniquely well suited to women, who were often used to working with their hands. American economist and social reformer Virginia Penny writes in The Employments of Women (1863) that “women’s fineness of touch and quickness of motion will fit them for type setting,” noting that “bending over the stone to correct is not more tiresome than bending over cloth when sewing.”2 Women eager to work as typesetters also received support from British politician William Gladstone, who remarked in a speech on monopolies that “women are admirably suited for that trade [printing], having a niceness of touch which would enable them to handle type better than men.”3
While Gladstone’s comments here seem positive, they belie another form of prejudice that many aspiring women typesetters faced. Unlike Penny, who argues that women will make effective compositors due to skillsets developed through domestic work, Gladstone suggests that women will succeed as typesetters due to innate feminine qualities such as gentleness—not, that is, through their ability to learn.
The Typesetting Glass Ceiling
Over the course of the nineteenth century, framing typesetting as feminized labor became a way to prevent women from entering other arenas of printing. An editor of the Day Book, a New York daily newspaper, argued that women should stick to typesetting because they lacked the “judgment and self-reliance” required to become job printers, who typically produced a greater variety of materials and often ran their own shops.4 In a May 1899 hearing before the US Industrial Commission, Samuel B. Donnelly, then-President of the International Typographical Union, admitted that while most printshops did not “exclude” women, “the tendency is to classify the work and keep a woman on straight composition, to make as much as possible an automaton of her, and she is not permitted in their establishments to learn and reach higher standards as a printer.”5 It’s a frightening yet persistent fantasy: woman transformed into compliant machine, her desires and aspirations limited to a narrow domain.
Even women who confined themselves to typesetting work could find obtaining employment difficult. Some male printers argued that the print shop environment was “too arduous” for women, even as women labored in dangerous mills, while others professed moral concern that women compositors would be exposed to “improper” medical and scientific works while setting type.6 Still others claimed that typesetting just wasn’t intrinsic to women’s nature. In a 1871 letter to the St. Louis Labor Congress, Theodore Tilton writes: “in my own trade, which is printing, I know of bearded and brawny compositors who…will redden in the face and shatter the fourth commandment in emphasizing the proposition that women have no natural right to set types.”7 Printing: it’s a Mens Rights issue, baby.
Tilton himself was an advocate for women in printing, however, and concludes his letter by noting “And yet the swiftest type-setter I ever saw was a woman.” This final aside gives the lie to claims that women lacked the skill to enter the printing trade. What truly angers the irate, red-faced compositor, Tilton implies, is the possibility of new—and better—competition.
Typesetting Unions and the Gender Wage Gap
In the nineteenth-century United States, women who worked as typesetters were often perceived as threats to men’s earning potential, in part because women were less expensive to employ. A 1885-86 Bureau of Labor report for California states that women earned at most $9 per week working as compositors, while men earned up to $15 per week.8 Prior to the establishment of the International Typographical Union (ITU) in 1852, some men feared that the presence of women in print shops would lead to lower wages all around. “Wherever the skill of the typesetter has been imparted to woman in abundance,” August McCraith laments in The Inland Printer, “low wages [have] followed.”9
This was not, strictly speaking, true. By the time McCraith was writing, the existence of the ITU protected men’s wages from falling below a certain threshold. However, because union branches initially restricted membership to men (and later made it difficult for women to join), women could—and did—work as strikebreakers.
The labor threat that women working as compositors posed was thus potent, particularly in western and midwestern states with smaller populations of skilled printing workers. In 1864, a Chicago newspaper publisher had merely to seed rumors that he was training women typesetters in “secret rooms” around the city to prevent unionized workers from going on strike.10
Unsurprisingly, women in printing soon tired of being treated as strikebreaking pawns. In 1868, Agnes B. Peterson of San Francisco established the Women’s Co-operative Printing Union, which held major contracts with businesses including Wells Fargo and expanded opportunities for women across the California printing trades. Early advertisements told it straight, declaring “WOMEN SET TYPE! WOMEN RUN PRESSES!”
The WCPU’s success eventually forced the ITU to invite women into their ranks. Yet theirs was not exactly a happy ending. As ITU President Donnelly’s comment about transforming women into typesetting “automatons” indicates, the union extended some privileges to women while withholding others. In time the ITU also restricted membership to workers who had completed apprenticeships, which were infamously difficult for women to secure.11
Still, there were other options for women interested in typesetting—particularly for those who sought work outside the large-scale capitalist system that was nineteenth-century newspaper publishing. The women who founded the Bohemian Women’s Publishing Company in 1895, for example, proudly declared that “not so much as the shadow of a man darken[ed] the premises” of their print shop. Based in Chicago, the BWPC operated as a fifty women stock company and published a weekly magazine, programs, tickets, pamphlets, and other materials for the Czech American community.12 Back on the East Coast, meanwhile, Emily Faithfull reports seeing “men and women…working side by side” to compose type while touring the Riverside Press in Cambridge, MA in the 1880s. During her visit Riverside owner Henry Houghton “declared it was impossible to overrate the good achieved, adding, that in the mere interests of business nothing would induce him…to let men and women work in separate rooms.” For Faithfull, Riverside was an exemplar printing establishment, belonging to the “good old days when the printer was always a scholar.”13 Here, women working as compositors were not automatons but human beings recognized for their skill and intellect—a fate this printer, for one, prefers.
Yours in type,
Ms. Printer’s Devil
“Pranks of the Printer,” The Inland Printer: A Technical Journal Devoted to the Art of Printing 21, no. 1 (1898): 35.
Virginia Penny, The Employments of Women: A Cyclopedia of Women’s Work (Boston: Walker, Wise, and Co., 1863), 381.
Speech quoted in Emily Faithfull, Three Visits to America (Edinburgh, Douglas, 1884), 24.
Editor quoted in Penny, The Employments of Women, 383.
Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. 7 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1901), 277.
Mary Biggs, “Neither Printer's Wife nor Widow: American Women in Typesetting, 1830-1950,” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 50, no. 4 (1980): 433.
“Shall Women Have a Chance to Learn a Trade?” New York Herald, August 11, 1871, page 7.
Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of California for the Years 1885 and 1886 (Sacramento: State Office, 1887), 618.
The Inland Printer, 201.
Biggs, “Neither Printer’s Wife nor Widow,” 441.
Biggs, “Neither Printer’s Wife nor Widow,” 448.
Biggs, “Neither Printer’s Wife nor Widow,” 435.
Faithfull, Three Visits to America, 22-23.