Technology Diary 4: The Typewriter

This week, instead of trying to come up with a piece of technology off the top of my head, I decided to scan my bedroom for inspiration and settled on a machine that I have a very positive relationship with, but that I realize has a problematic history in regards to gender: the typewriter. As a writer, and as someone who tries to refrain from using digital technology when a simpler tool can fulfill the function just as well, my typewriter has a great deal of value for me. It provides tangibility to both the work itself, as well as to the archiving process. For the same reason, when I write by hand I prefer pens to pencils, as they force me to grant my mistakes the same space I do precision. But after being sadly-not-surprised to learn last week about the historically hidden role women played in early computer programming, it’s difficult for me not to be critical of the typewriter as precursive machine that provided women with access to the modernizing public sphere, but only to a very limited, and limiting, extent.

Ernest Hemingway

Modernizing technological innovations like the typewriter were dually influential as they invited women into professional spaces for one of the first times in history, while at the same time effectively limiting their agency. By placing women in clerical positions, the pattern of menial labor being gendered as female was reaffirmed yet again, despite the new environment. Women’s work as typists was not unlike the work they fulfilled as seamstresses in factories; indeed, it’s no coincidence that many early typewriter models were produced by companies like the Domestic Sewing Machine Co., the Meteor Saxon Knitting-Machine Factory and the sewing subdivision of Remington & Son (Kittler 187).

William Faulkner

Moreover, the typewriter worked two-fold as a contribution to the construction of gendered machines. While it established routine, deskilled typewriting as women’s work, it simultaneously reserved the esteemed association with authorship solely to men (or women willing to take on male pseudonyms). Think of the great catalog of images we have of famous male authors sitting boldly at their typewriters: Faulkner, Hemingway, Kerouac, Bukowski, the list goes on. Portrayed as hardworking intellectual geniuses, these images add to the glorification of the male writer, whereas women have a much harder time claiming that title to begin with, let alone being honored within the field. It’s hard to even imagine an old picture of a female sitting at a desk in front of a typewriter not eliciting the idea of secretarial work.

Charles Bukowski

These historical imbalances are still at play today, especially in within the technology industry. In light of the Rosser reading back from the beginning of the semester, it makes sense that women’s subordinate/subordinating introductions to technology have led to a gender disparity that continues to persist today. In the first chapter of Women, Gender, and Technology she describes how technological designs and their practical uses have, throughout history, been disproportionately created both to satisfy patriarchal constructs, as well as to reinforce them. Indeed, it’s hard not to draw the connection between today’s lack of women inventors and engineers back to the early female programmers who got the short end of the credit stick, and also to the women who preceded them, who were constrained by their jobs taking boring dictations decades earlier.

Works Cited

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. Google Books.