Printers /
Printing Organizations
Master-printers, business owners, print shop managers
The California printing scene in the 19th century was very much a boys’ club. However, a number of women, including Spiritualists, joined the printing trade and by the 1870s/1880s ran their own printing shops or organizations. Some of these cooperatives aimed to be majority-women workplaces that trained female typesetters. They filled a need for the women’s labor force, as the male-controlled printing unions shut out women workers for decades. While these co-ops weren’t “Spiritualist,” they did take Spiritualist business.
The term “printer” often appears in primary sources from the period, but this word could refer to many different kinds of work. Here, I use it to mean “master-printers” or business-runners. (See the typesetters page for information on a print shop job that many women performed). In the 19th century, “two classes of printing firms appeared which were distinct in their organization, machinery, hours of labor and wages: newspaper and periodical establishments and the book and job offices” [1]. Job work referred to the printing of posters, broadside advertisements, receipts, reports, invitations, and other ephemera that usually made up the bulk of a shop’s revenue, as book printing and small journal subscriptions could not sustain the business alone. This is how a few of the women listed below sustained their own newspaper and magazine endeavors; see the newspaper editors page for more.
Printing technologies shaped the labor of these shop managers and their employees. This century saw new industrialization and automation inventions that sped up the rate and ease of printing. Letterpress printing, begun in Gutenberg’s era in the 15th century, involved a time-consuming and strenuous hand-powered process. But by around 1800, steam power and new papermaking machines had entered the scene, joined soon by cylinder press technology. The printing boom was on.
For more women printers’ locations beyond this list, please see Karen Hannah’s wonderful essay “Historical Locations of San Francisco Women Printers” on the FoundSF digital archive.
Some prominent printing individuals and organizations who were either Spiritualist or printed Spiritualist material are described below.
Amanda M. Slocum is credited as the "Book and Job Printer" on this title page for Mrs. E. P. Thorndyke's Spiritualist and suffragist book, Astrea, or Goddess of Justice, from 1881. See the digitized book here.
Amanda M. Slocum
Spiritualist and suffragist. She published variously under Common Sense Publishing Company, Woman’s Printing Association or Woman’s Publishing Company, and later her own name.
With her husband William N. Slocum, she published Common Sense (1874-1875), a Spiritualist and reform journal, at 236 Montgomery Street, San Francisco. Early in the run, they announced the formation of the Common Sense Publishing Company, a joint stock company for which Amanda is listed as Vice President:
“The cordial welcome extended by the public to ‘Common Sense,’ the only Free Thought journal on this Coast, and the numerous applications for job work made at the office by those who approve the principles the paper represents, have encouraged the company to enlarge the business, and lay the foundation for a Liberal Publishing House. To this end a joint stock company has been organized…The advertising in the weekly journal published by the Company can be made to yield sufficient for its current expenses, leaving other receipts as profit; and by the addition of a Book and Job Department, a lucrative and constantly increasing business can be built up.” [2]
--Common Sense, June 20, 1874
In 1875, the Slocums bought the Woman’s Publishing Company, which was formerly run by Emily Pitts Stevens, a formidable printer in her own right. Stevens had established the Woman’s Publishing Company to support women in the trade. Amanda, with the assistance of Mrs. Flora Wellman Chaney, aimed to keep this mission:
“Not only the management, but the book-keeping, soliciting and type-setting are all performed by women. In fact it is essentially a Woman’s Office; and all friends of woman’s right to equal pay for equal service are solicited to give the establishment their cordial support.” [3]
--Common Sense, February 13, 1875
By 1877, however, business troubles and marriage troubles led Amanda to continue printing only under her own name. Her daughters Eva and Clara both worked as typesetters for Amanda and for other journals. [4]
Women's Co-operative Printing Union (WCPU)
This women’s coop was not specifically Spiritualist, but it did occasionally work with Spiritualists and print their materials. Established in 1868 by Agnes E. Peterson, the WCPU “represented the first permanent foothold for woman printers in San Francisco” and also inspired other offices to train women in the trade [5]. Managed for a time by Emily Pitts Stevens, Lizzie G. Richmond took over by the early 1870s and ran the organization successfully for eighteen years. The WCPU was ended in 1901 by a fire.
Included in the many books, legal briefs, and job work produced by the WCPU, an incomplete list of Spiritualist materials include:
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- Banner of Progress, San Francisco newspaper (read it on IAPSOP here)
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Carrier Dove, California journal (read it on IAPSOP here)
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Cora Linn Victoria Scott Richmond, The nature of spiritual existence, and spiritual gifts, given through the mediumship of Mrs. Cora L.V. Richmond. Reported and published by G. H. Hawes. San Francisco: Women’s Co-operative Printing Office, 1884. (Read it on Hathitrust here)
Julia Schlesinger eventually printed Carrier Dove in her own printing office, but for a time, it was printed by the WCPU. In 1887, the Dove announced its move to the WCPU:
“The Dove comes out in a new dress, and in our opinion, a finer one than heretofore. It will now be printed by the Woman’s Co-operative Printing Company, under the management of Mrs. Richmond & Son, who are so well known on this Coast as to require no praise from us. The work speaks for itself.” [6]
The WCPU also printed Mrs. J. W. Likins’ 1874 Six Years Experience as a Book Agent in California: Including My Trip From New York to San Francisco via Nicaragua (read it on the Internet Archive here). Likins, while not a Spiritualist, is discussed on the agents page as an example of a woman selling subscriptions.
Julia Schlesinger.
Julia Schlesinger
Spiritualist, author, and speaker. She ran The Carrier Dove (1883-1893) and its successor The Pacific Coast Spiritualist (1893-1895), Spiritualist and reform journals.
The Carrier Dove was printed by the Woman’s Co-operative Printing Union (WCPU) for a time (see above), but by 1888 Schlesinger had established her own Carrier Dove Printing Office at 841 Market Street, San Francisco: “We have facilities for doing all kinds of job work, and hope to receive the patronage of our friends in this department; as it has been so generously bestowed upon the Dove, we feel confident of receiving it now in our new enterprise” [7].
The office soon acquired a large cylinder press to add to their smaller presses, allowing them to add more pages to The Carrier Dove [8]. Schlesinger was proud of her office’s accomplishment: “This number of the Dove has been printed upon our own machine, and this is the first spiritual journal that we know of, that can say the same throughout the United States” [9].
Sources
Images:
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[Astrea title page] Mrs. E. P. Thorndyke, Astrea, or Goddess of Justice (San Francisco: Amanda M. Slocum, 1881), HathiTrust Digital Library, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007092308.
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[Ad for the Women's Cooperative Printing Union] From the West Coast Journal, May 18, 1870. Sourced from Bancroft Library, in Mae Silver and Sue Cazaly, The Sixth Star (San Francisco: Ord Street Press, 2000), FoundSF. https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Women%E2%80%99s_Co-operative_Printing_Union.
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[Julia Schlesinger portrait] From Julia Schlesinger, Workers in the Vineyard: A Review of the Progress of Spiritualism, Biographical Sketches, Lectures, Essays and Poems (San Francisco, California, 1896), 16, HathiTrust Digital Library, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100128052.
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[1] Roger Levenson, Women in Printing: Northern California, 1857-1890 (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1994), 7.
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[2] Common Sense, June 20, 1874 (San Francisco, California), page 68. The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (IAPSOP), http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/common_sense/.
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[3] Common Sense, February 13, 1875 (San Francisco, California), page 464. The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (IAPSOP), http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/common_sense/.
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[4] Levenson, Women in Printing: Northern California, 1857-1890, 146-147.
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[5] Levenson, Women in Printing: Northern California, 1857-1890, 77.
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[6] Carrier Dove, April 1887 (San Francisco, California), page 147. The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (IAPSOP), http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/carrier_dove/.
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[7] Carrier Dove, February 25, 1888 (San Francisco, California), page 139. The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (IAPSOP), http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/carrier_dove/.
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[8] Carrier Dove, August 11, 1888 (San Francisco, California), page 520. The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (IAPSOP), http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/carrier_dove/.
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[9] Carrier Dove, August 18, 1888 (San Francisco, California), page 535. The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (IAPSOP), http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/carrier_dove/.