Working Women
Women’s employment in the nineteenth-century printing world depended on the region. During the French Revolution, a school for women typesetters was briefly established in Paris. In England, Emily Faithfull founded the Victoria Press in 1860, specifically to employ women typesetters. Around the same time, possibly by coincidence, the issue of women working as typesetters became controversial in France. Men complained that women typesetters drove down male typesetters’ pay by accepting compensation that was half to one-third that paid to men. Women were frequently hired to operate the new typesetting machines, putting further pressure on men’s wages. In the United States, however, women seem to have been employed more broadly in machine pressrooms, especially as the operators of the Adams Power Press, the leading American printing machine for book printing throughout the nineteenth century.
[C. Deltufo]. Petition à la Convention National pour L’École Typographique des Femmes. Paris, 1794.
The first press known to employ women was the press at the monastery of San Jacopo di Ripoli, which employed nuns from its convent as typesetters in the later fifteenth century. From that date to the eighteenth century, the record of women working in book production is most often tied to the men with whom they associated, either owning or inheriting printing shops from brothers or husbands. The first eighteenth-century record we have of women working as typesetters or printers is Deltufo’s seven-page petition to the National Convention of the French Revolution promoting the École Typographique des Femmes. This pamphlet was printed in 1794 by women students at the school.
[Alphonse Alkan] Les Femmes Compositrices d’Imprimerie. Paris, 1862.
Whether women should work as typesetters became controversial in France and England during the 1860s. Printers in both countries were motivated to train and hire women typesetters because they could pay women half to one-third of what they paid men. Many women, especially unmarried women who did not have husbands to support them, sought the work. Male typesetters, who were typically responsible for supporting families, objected to women’s lower wages, which they believed depressed their own incomes. Alphonse Alkan’s pamphlet on women typesetters reprinted Deltusso’s petition on the subject, originally published in 1794.
Olivia de Rocourt. Lettre d’une Femme aux Ouvriers Typographes. Paris, 1862.
In 1862, female activist Olivia de Rocourt published a pamphlet supportive of women typesetters.
Emmanuel Rivière. Le Travail de la Femme dans L’Industrie Typographique. Blois, 1898.
This study was critical of women working as typesetters in France because they were paid less than their male counterparts, suppressing wages for everyone.
J.-G. Barthe. Le Canada Recquis par La France. Paris, 1855.
Showing women operators, as this advertisement for the Young & Delcambre typesetting machine (right) and type distribution machine (left) does, was controversial. A co-inventor of the Young & Delcambre equipment, Adrien Delcambre may have been the only nineteenth-century typesetter and printer who advertised his mechanical typesetting system within some of the books that were typeset by his machines. Hiring women saved money, since women were typically paid half to one-third the wages of male manual typesetters. Their lower salaries also induced printers to install the machinery, since the cost savings helped offset the cost of the typesetting machines.
L’Univers Illustre. Vol. 8, No. 485. Paris, 15 November 1865.
This woodcut, published on the first page of L’Univers Illustre, shows women typesetting and making up pages at Emily Faithfull’s Victoria Press in London, a press specifically founded to employ women. This illustration was originally published in the 15 June 1861 issue of The Illustrated London News, and the French magazine does not take a stand on the issue of women typesetters in France. L’Univers Illustre does not credit the source and presumably used the illustration without paying a royalty, since copyrights did not transfer across national boundaries at this time.
Stereoscopic Co. Photograph of Emily Faithfull. London, c. 1860.
This carte-de-visite photograph is signed by Emily Faithfull in the lower margin. A labor activist and reformer, Emily Faithful founded the Victoria Press specifically to create jobs for women, chiefly as typesetters, since the tasks of carrying the heavy forme to the press and pulling the press were considered beyond the physical capacity of women. Though no contemporaneous press was founded in France for the same purpose, it is possible that the fame of the Victoria Press contributed to the controversy over women typesetters in France during the 1860s.
Adelaide A. Procter, Ed. The Victoria Regia. London, 1861.
The Victoria Press edition of the poetry collection titled The Victoria Regia was issued in an elaborate binding as a gift book. Copies with similar tooling were available in several cloth colors and in leather. The imprint on the title page reads, “Printed and Published by Emily Faithfull and Co., Victoria Press (for the Employment of Women).”
Postage stamp. 1991.
This postage stamp, issued by Deutsche Bundespost in 1991, shows women working in a printing shop at the Lette-Verein trade school for women, founded by Wilhelm Adolf Lette in Berlin in 1866.
Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion. n.d.
This undated page of Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion shows women operating a steam-powered Taylor Cylinder Press. Alva Burr Taylor, a blacksmith by trade, worked with R. Hoe & Company of New York from 1822 until 1842, when he formed his own company. Taylor produced cylinder presses, Washington handpresses, and a few jobbing presses, as well as steam engines. From images like this we can tentatively conclude that women were frequent operators of power bed and platen presses in nineteenth-century America.
Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, Vol. 2. No. 22. 29 May 1852.
From published images, it appears that women in the United States were frequently hired to operate Adams Power Presses, the American printing machines most widely used for printing books in the nineteenth century. This image shows women operating steam-powered bed-and-platen printing presses at the facility for Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion. Only outlines of the presses, which appear to be of the Adams type, are seen in the image.
J. Ramsay Macdonald, Ed. Women in the Printing Trades: A Sociological Study. London, 1904.
This relatively comprehensive survey of women’s work in the printing trades credits five women on the title page for conducting the research. The book’s summary of the situation for women as it evolved during the second half of the nineteenth century suggests women had made little progress in the British printing trades. Despite the pioneering work of Emily Faithfull, printing unions in Great Britain resisted hiring women, though women continued to be employed in the trade, especially as typesetters and in bookbinderies, usually at lower salaries than men. By accepting less pay for equal work, women typesetters were sometimes regarded as union busters, used to break strikes or to defeat the goals of the unions representing male typesetters.