Typesetters
A common job for women who were able to work in the printing trade
Miss Kitty Burke was lauded in The Morning Call in 1892 for her fast typesetting skills. Burke worked for C. W. Nevin & Co. near Sacramento. This illustration shows Burke standing in front of the case of type, composing stick in hand.
Read the full article on the Library of Congress' Chronicling America site.
Most printing shop jobs went to men—but if a woman was able to get through the door in California, one of the likelier roles was typesetter. “The idea of women typesetters is uniquely suited to California and the West — a result of the need to work and survive in a new land which demanded self-sufficiency and skills of women as well as men,” where women joined the wave of pioneers, learned from male family members, filled roles vacated by Civil War soldiers, and participated in the era’s increase in printed materials [1].
(A note on terms: definitions of printing jobs in 19th century primary sources are often unspecific or inaccurate. The generic term “printer” or “compositor” could be referring to a range of duties in the print shop.)
A typesetter is the person who arranges the metal letters, or “type,” to form the words, sentences, and pages of text to be printed on the page. Standing in front of the frame or “case” that holds all the different pieces of type, the typesetter chooses each letter and places it in their composing stick. They put the lines of type in the “forme,” which is then locked into place and sent to the printing press. The work was physically difficult, and required considerable skill. The metal type was made of lead, a health hazard, and typesetters had to keep their focus while standing long hours. Justifying lines required spatial calculations, good grammar, and quick thinking [2].
Women typesetters faced even more obstacles. The male-controlled Typographical Union in California severely limited women’s opportunities in the trade by holding apprenticeships (required for employment) out of reach, and threatening offices that hired women, since shops could pay women less than their male Union counterparts. Also, women more frequently found work in the book and job offices, which paid less than the newspaper offices [3]. I have yet to find names of woman typesetters in African American-run newspaper offices on the West Coast, but I have to assume there was some presence.
Prejudice, pay disparity, sexual harassment, and Union conflicts led to women establishing several women’s printing organizations in California in the latter part of the 19th century: The Women’s Cooperative Printing Union (WCPU) and The Woman’s Publishing Company, which both printed some Spiritualist texts; and the Female Typographical Union, established in 1864 but short-lived. Individual women also ran shops, including Spiritualists Julia Schlesinger and Amanda M. Slocum, who both employed women. See the printing/printing organizations page for more on these.
Gendered socializations around work and marriage also hindered the numbers of women dedicating themselves to printing careers. Amanda M. Slocum, who printed variously under The Woman’s Publishing Company and her own name, expresses this frustration in her journal Common Sense. Responding to a woman’s letter inquiring about typesetting prospects in her office, she writes:
“At present, I regret to tell you, we have no Beginners’ Department in the office of the Woman’s Publishing Company. Our work is such that it seems necessary, at present, to employ none but experienced compositors. Just us soon, however, as possible, it is my intention to make provision for apprentices, and to promote them from one branch of the business to another as circumstances may warrant, until they obtain a thorough knowledge of the business. I know of no good reason why a woman cannot make just as good a job printer as any man; but so far I have not found them equal to the men even in plain book work.”
This is not because of any intrinsic, womanly lack, but because:
“It appears to be the policy—a very bad one I think—in some offices, not conducted by women, to employ girls only so long as they are willing to work for little or no wages, and allow them to go as soon as they ascertain their own value… My plan is to pay women the same wages that men receive, and to employ none permanently who are incompetent. It is an undeniable fact that female type-setters are not generally as efficient as males. This, in my opinion, is not owing to their organization, but to education;—it is the effect naturally resulting from the idea of dependence which is instilled into woman by the very atmosphere in which she moves from her childhood. She is taught to look forward to marriage as the end to be attained…Her business is a mere make-shift, and she seeks less to perfect herself in her art than to make it the stepping stone to a different life.” [4]
An incomplete list of women typesetters for Spiritualist publications
I still have much work to do in identifying names of Spiritualist women, or women involved in Spiritualist printing endeavors, but here is a beginning list. The following names are drawn from Roger Levenson’s outstanding and meticulous Women in Printing: Northern California, 1857-1890 (1994). Please refer to his work for his “Roster of Women in Printing” [5].
Carrier Dove Printing and Publishing Co. (Julia Schlesinger):
Miss Nellie Gorman
Woman’s Publishing Company / Amanda M. Slocum:
Maggie Edgar
Clara Eldridge
Mrs. Florence Wellman Chaney, in unspecified assistant role
Slocum’s daughters, Clara Slocum and Eva T. Slocum, were also typesetters, and Eva worked on Common Sense.
Pacific Newspaper Publishing Company (perhaps during time of Dora Darmoore’s Spiritualist paper Golden Dawn?):
Miss Kate Cole
Miss Nellie Cole
And a number of women were employed at the WCPU, which occasionally printed Spiritualist materials.
Sources
Images:
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["A Very Fast Compositor"] and ["Miss Burke at the Case"] The Morning Call, October 20, 1892 (San Francisco, California), Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn94052989/1892-10-20/ed-1/seq-6/.
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[1] Patricia L. Keats, ”Women in Printing & Publishing in California, 1850-1940,” California History 77, no. 2 (1998): 93, JSTOR, doi:10.2307/25462474.
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[2] Roger Levenson, Women in Printing: Northern California, 1857-1890 (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1994), 21-24.
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[3] Levenson, Women in Printing: Northern California, 1857-1890, 7.
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[4] Common Sense, August 3, 1875 (San Francisco, California), page 551. The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (IAPSOP), http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/common_sense/.
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[5] Levenson, “Roster of Women in Printing,” Women in Printing: Northern California, 1857-1890, 202-238.