Women in Print 2

Figures

Figure 1.1. Fragment of a broadside on the Popish and Meal-Tub Plots and other events of the time; with eight of twelve scenes: Popish Damnable Plot against Our Religious and Liberties, Lively Delineated in Several of Its Branches, With an Account of the Manner of the Execution of William Viscount Stafford on Tower-Hill. London, 1680. Reproduced by permission from the British Museum.

Figure 1.2. In Congress, July 4, 1776. The Unanimous Declaration of The Thirteen United States of America, Baltimore, Maryland 1777. Printed by ‘M. K. Goddard’. Continental Congress & Constitutional Convention Broadsides Collection, Library of Congress. Reproduced by permission of the Library of Congress, Rare Books and Special Collections Division.

Figure 3.1. Psalm XCV, Susanna Beckwith’s Bible, reference 464.c.5(1). © The British Library Board.

Figure 3.2. Isaiah 66, Susanna Beckwith’s Bible, reference 464.c.5(1). © The British Library Board.

Figure 4.1. Darnton’s Communications Circuit. © Robert Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’, Daedalus 111/3 (1982), 68.

Figure 5.1. John Samuel Murray by Edward Francis Finden, published by Charles Tilt, after Henry William Pickersgill, engraving, 1833. Reproduced by permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London.←vii | viii→

Figure 5.2. Letter from Maria Edgeworth to John Murray, May 1841, National Library of Scotland, Archive of John Murray, publishers (MS.40358–9).

Figure 6.1. Left to right: Annie Besant, Millicent Garret Fawcett, and Carrie Kilgore. From a photograph album of contributors to Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, Second Edition, presented to its editor David Patrick, c.1892. Reproduced by kind permission of the Chambers family (National Library of Scotland, WRC Archives Dep.341/409a).

Figure 9.1. Covers of a selection of Ottoman women’s periodicals in chronological order from 1869 to 1926. Courtesy of National Library of Turkey.

Figure 9.2. Ottoman women’s print network during three generations from 1860 to 1920.

Figure 9.3. Young university student working as a typesetter. Ömer Durmaz collection.

Tables

Table 6.1. The 25 women contributors to Chambers’s Encyclopaedia uncovered in this study.

Table 6.2. Profiles of women who contributed multiple entries to Chambers’s Encyclopaedia. First edition known entries based on Cooney (1999) ‘A Catalogue of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, 1868.’←ix | x→

Acknowledgements

The editors of Women in Print 2 are indebted to several individuals and organizations for both contributing to and supporting the book. The chapters were originally a set of papers delivered at the University of Birmingham on 13 and 14 September 2018. Organized by the Centre for Printing History & Culture, the conference, ‘Women in Print’, was designed to review and reassess the contribution made by women to printing and print culture from its origins to the present day. We were convinced that the contributors deserved a wider audience and were pleased that Peter Lang Ltd were keen to publish an edited collection in two volumes on the subject as part of its ‘Printing History and Culture’ series. Our main thanks are due to the individual authors of the chapters in this volume who accepted advice, responded to requests for changes to their drafts and supplied the images to illustrate their chapters.

Lucy Melville, Global Publishing Director and Head of Editorial at Peter Lang, has been an enthusiastic, helpful and responsive guide and her team have efficiently and effectively guided the project through from manuscript to final product.

Dr Maureen Bell afforded valuable and detailed feedback on all the chapters; and Dr Helen Williams was involved in the early stages of the editing process.

Other individuals have assisted in the process. Dr Connie Wan, Dr Kate Croft and Rebecca Howson were responsible for the on-the-ground organization of the 2018 conference; without their dedication to the project the event would not have happened. The Bibliographical Society kindly supported the conference to allow the participation of postgraduate students as both speakers and audience, and Birmingham City University generously supported the production of the book.

Women in Print 2 reflects the efforts and expertise of many people. We hope that the publication justifies their commitment and not only provides ←xi | xii→a reflection of the importance of women in print but also encourages further research into the history of women in the printing trade.

Introduction

The contributions included in this volume are arranged in a chronological order and cover the whole of the ‘letterpress era’ from the early fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. They address three themes: the role of women in the production of print; in its distribution; in addition to some neglected areas of women’s consumption of print. This volume is focused mainly on European printing, and the authors explore the often-overlooked contribution to the business aspects of the printing and publishing industries, particularly female involvement in roles that were seen as male preserves. Several recent studies have focused on the place of women in print culture, for example, the volume edited by James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand.¹ However, while there have been a number of monographs covering aspects of women’s roles ‘in print’ in North America,² less attention has been paid to their role in the European context.

The sample of women whose activities are examined here is small, and it is well known that the number of women involved in print production, distribution and consumption is skewed towards those for whom some ←1 | 2→kind of written record exists. The challenges of rescuing these lives from obscurity have been met in a range of ways: using imprint data from bibliographic records, wills and genealogical sources, personal and company archives, memoirs and reminiscences of participants. The variety of approaches covered by this volume demonstrates that women’s involvement in the printing trades, including its practical functions, is both broader and deeper than it appears at first sight.

Interest in women and their involvement in printing dates from the 1970s, when Alison Adburgham’s study of Women in Print: Writing Women and Women’s Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria was published.³ The subject of ‘“Second Wave” Feminist Printers in Britain’, the final contribution to this volume, is contemporary with Adburgham’s 1972 study. In it Jess Baines surveys the feminist printing workshops in Britain established in the 1970s, and their progress into the early twenty-first century. The ‘do-it-yourself’ ethos of the feminist movement was allied to a desire to reclaim the conventionally male-dominated spaces of print production processes. Using interviews with participants, and archival material related to the printshops in London, Manchester and Sheffield, Baines explores the social and political landscape in which these screen-printing and offset-lithography printshops were established and run.

The hostility faced by twentieth-century feminists wishing to learn techniques of printing from trade operatives was part of a long-established pattern of behaviour. In the mid-nineteenth century, Britain’s emerging printing trades unions regarded women, particularly in the composing room, as ‘dangerous intruders’ and trade discussion of women’s work in commercial printshops was both hostile and patronizing. In ‘“Dangerous Intruders”: Women Compositors and Nineteenth-Century Print Trade Unionists – the Case of Perth’, Helen S. Williams explores the employment of women in so-called ‘skilled’ roles in a regional printing centre, Perth in Scotland. Most of the available sources were written from perspectives of male operative printers who were, almost uniformly, opposed to the introduction of women into printing workshops. However, Williams was able, ←2 | 3→using census data and vital records, to reconstruct the social background and careers of some of the women involved.

The informal recruitment networks used by the Woolfs to find assistants at the Hogarth Press highlight an important thread that runs through this volume: the scale of women’s involvement in the personal, familial and trade networks of print production and distribution. Joseph Saunders’s chapter, ‘Female Agency in the Social Network of the Early Modern English Print Trade, c.1623–41’, examines the place of women in the London printing trade in the seventeenth century, and analyses social networks to discuss familial and trade connections among print producers. He uncovers the importance of women both within the patriarchal community of the Stationers’ Company and in the wider familial connections of print producers. His study demonstrates the interrelationships between families and across generations which formed crucial links in the print trade of the period. Saunders uses extant wills to reconstruct the place of women – usually as wealthy printshop owners –within these businesses. In ‘From Print to Process: Gender, Creative-Adjacent Labour and the Women’s Print History Project’ Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt take a different approach to examining the networks of print production and distribution in the eighteenth century. Having examined the theoretical understanding of the place of print production through the lens of Bourdieu’s ‘field of cultural production’, they explore the ways in which bibliographical databases can illuminate the place of women as producers of print, despite the obscurity of the traces they left. Through the lives of a few specific individuals, they ←3 | 4→examine the opportunities and limitations of the data available, as recorded in the Women’s Print History Project, 1750–1836.

Michelle Levy explores the contribution of women to the success of the John Murray publishing firm in her chapter, ‘John Murray’s Principal ←4 | 5→Women of Letters’, which considers the business transactions between John Murray II and well-known female authors in the nineteenth century. The contributions of these women were a significant element in the firm’s financial well-being. Levy provides examples from the correspondence between Murray and authors including Jane Austen, Felicia Hemans, Maria Rundell and Mary Somerville, and explores the business decisions, financial arrangements and personal relationships involved. Although it is not the main focus of this contribution, the importance to the publishing industry of informal networks is emphasized in Levy’s consideration of Maria Edgeworth, only one of whose works he published, and her correspondence with John Murray on behalf of other authors.