CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Women’s Labor—Typists, Editors, and Amanuenses—Shaped Modern Literature

Photograph Source: George Eastman House – Public Domain

When inventor Christopher Latham Sholes debuted the typewriter in 1872, he declined to pose with his machine for press photographs. Instead, the first images of his invention depict his daughter, Lillian, operating an early prototype of the Remington No. 1 in a velvet bodice and full-skirted dress, her right hand hovering over the keys while her left hand grasps the carriage release lever. For the photograph’s 19th-century audience, the message would likely have been clear: this machine is so easy to operate that a woman can operate it.

The typewriter, from its birth, has been tied to a set of assumptions about gender and skill. These assumptions persist to the present and color our cultural understanding of typists’ labor. Take the pilot episode of “Mad Men,” for instance, in which office manager Joan Holloway shows new secretary Peggy Olson to her assigned typewriter and tells her not to be overwhelmed: “It looks complicated, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use.” And many women did: while they made up only 4 percent of clerical workers before 1880 (before the widespread adoption of the typewriter), women represented half by 1920, with the majority employed as stenographers or typists. Sholes was later celebrated for paving the way for women in the white-collar workforce and for liberating them from meager economic opportunities. The frontispiece of The Story of the Typewriter, a 1923 account of the machine’s invention, renders this idea in a literal fashion.

But contrary to assumptions, typists’ labor required advanced technical skills. Most women in the workforce were trained at secretarial or typing schools, a considerable investment of time and money. Office secretaries were also often required to move beyond the skills they were trained in—touch-typing, taking dictation—to other areas such as graphic design, research, and editing. Secretarial manuals from the first half of the 20th century, like John Gregg and Rupert SoRelle’s widely used Applied Secretarial Practice (1934), evince the immense range of duties demanded of the average secretary, with chapters covering the United States tax code for handling payroll contrasting sharply with chapters on personal grooming and cultivating a cheerful telephone persona.

As typing became professionalized, opportunities for typists proliferated outside the traditional office. Articles in the Gregg Writer, an early trade magazine for secretaries and stenographers, urged women to apply their skills in aiding “that romantic being, the author.” In magazines like the Author, Playwright and Composer, women such as “Mrs. A. M. Gill” and “Miss M. Fuller” advertised their services for “typing, preparation of MSS [manuscripts] … indexing and proofing.” For those interested, a position as an amanuensis—that is, one who copies or takes dictation of literary work—afforded more intellectually satisfying labor and a supporting role in producing literary culture.

Though their names and contributions are not often recognized, amanuenses had profound impacts on the careers and legacies of modern writers. Skilled typists could create manuscripts from dictation or clean up messy handwritten drafts, freeing authors to focus on developing a work rather than producing it. But like office secretaries, they did much more than just type. Amanuenses served as important first reаders, helpful editors, and champions of a writer’s work. While some women took on this labor in exchange for a salary, many others offered their hard-won typing skills at no cost, but rather, in their capacity as wives, mothers, or daughters. These women did their typing work in the home, often while juggling domestic and childcare duties.

Scholars and biographers have been slow to examine how these collaborations functioned. This is not surprising: as secretarial work became feminized, “type labor” became undervalued and misunderstood. Popular portrayals of typists have contributed to the lack of understanding. Adding to these hurdles, typists’ labor has not traditionally been credited in library catalogs or archives, making it more difficult for scholars to surface their contributions. But if one knows where to look, literary archives do contain paper trails of amanuenses and can reveal the depth of their impact on writers’ legacies.

In her memoir about her time working with Henry James, Theodora Bosanquet writes, “the business of acting as a medium between the spoken and the typewritten word was at first as alarming as it was fascinating.” Alarming, she explains, because James kept a new and rather complicated Remington model typewriter at his home in Rye, East Sussex, which she quickly had to master. But accounts from diaries, letters, and other archival materials kept by Bosanquet and her predecessor, Mary Weld, suggest the work of taking dictation from “the master,” as James was referred to in his time, could also make alarming demands.

In 1897, James found himself in need of an amanuensis after he began to........

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