from Victorian Studies Volume 40, Number 3

The Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl

Christopher Keep

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While visiting San Francisco in 1887, Rudyard Kipling complained that he had been driven to distraction by a new species of woman, the Type-Writer Girl. She was "an institution of which the comic papers make much capital, but she is vastly convenient. She and a companion rent a room in a business quarter, and copy manuscript at the rate of six annas a page. . . . She can earn as much as a hundred dollars a month, and professes to regard this form of bread-winning as her natural destiny" (80). Unable to believe that any woman, even an American, could truly enjoy working for a living, Kipling questioned the other typists in the office and found one who confessed to the hope that she might be rescued from the drudgery of the keyboard by a husband. The admission seemed to confirm his suspicion that "American girls" are not much different "from English ones in instinct," but the woman then responded, "Isn't it Théophile Gautier who says that the only differences between country and country lie in the slang and the uniform of the police?" (81). The comment left Kipling at a loss for words. "Now in the name of all the Gods at once," he concluded, "what is one to say to a young lady . . . who earns her own bread, and very naturally hates the employ, and slings out-of-the-way quotations at your head. That one falls in love with her goes without saying; but that is not enough. A mission should be established" (81).

Kipling's is one of the earliest notices of the Type-Writer Girl, but in its manifest need to pierce to the heart of this seductive enigma and to discover there the secret of her desires, it accurately registers both the fear and the fascination that the prospect of women in the white-collar workplace evoked in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. When the New York branch of the Young Women's Christian Association introduced the first courses in typewriting in 1881, it did so amidst a public outcry that female office workers would lower working wages and displace the men who had previously held such posts. More dramatically, women typists were felt in many quarters to presage the collapse of the family: lured away by the promises of an exciting life in business, they would abandon the sacred responsibilities of raising the new generation. In the process, they would not only "unsex" themselves, but endanger that continuous transmission of cultural values from mother to children on which society depended. Even within the Association, there were fears that the female constitution was not equal to the rigors of an intensive six-month training program, let alone the pressures of full time employment:

The records show that the education committee of the Association discussed for a long time the physical danger of so arduous an undertaking. Finally the decision was made that there should be a thorough physical examination of all the applicants and that those who passed such an examination satisfactorily would be given a trial. The opinion was expressed, however, that the female mind and constitution would be certain to break under the strain. . . (Sims 84-85)

Out of the many applications for the first typewriting course, eight were deemed physically prepared to meet the challenge and the classes went ahead. The public backlash was immediate: the experiment was branded "an obvious error in judgement" on the part of "well-meaning but misguided ladies" (qtd. in Zellers 13). The Association was urged to abandon the courses in favor of training that would be more in keeping not only with the dictates of feminine propriety but with the limited physical resources of genteel women's bodies. Nonetheless, all eight students survived the course and were quickly placed in remunerative positions.

The resistance to the YWCA's initiatives is indicative of the ideological hurdles faced by women entering the white-collar workplace. Traditionally confined to the home, or to occupations, such as governess, teacher, or nurse, that were seen as extensions of nurturing domestic labor, middle-class women who sought work in the public sphere of business and commerce seemed to undermine the association with domesticity upon which conventional notions of class and feminine respectability were predicated. Working among men, machines, and money was felt to diminish a woman's innate sensitivity and moral superiority. Here she might not only form casual alliances with male coworkers that might have unfortunate consequences, but the very proximity to the movements of capital might undermine her ability to transcend the material and base demands of the cash nexus and to accede to the spiritual purity that was her proper realm. Examining the question of "The Business Woman" in 1903, Theodora Wadsworth-Baker writes, "Women are by nature idealists. They believe in an absolute standard of right. Their greatest contribution to civilization has been their constant insistence, in all ages, upon a high standard of living by all who sought their good will and approval." Thus, she concludes, women must be wary of entering into business, because it "tends to make a woman coarse and to rob her of those distinctly feminine characteristics which have constituted her chief charms in society" (1015). Women typists, in short, were felt in many quarters to be a danger not only to themselves, but to the moral integrity of the nation as a whole, for it was in women's hands that the superior values of "civilization" chiefly lay.

According to recent studies in the sociology of women's work, these ideological obstacles to the employment of women as clerks were overcome not so much by the willingness of women to enter the white-collar workplace, as by the exigencies of capital. Margery W. Davies, for example, argues that "it was the rapid expansion of capitalist firms and government agencies, accompanied by the growth of correspondence and record keeping, which led to a mounting demand for clerical labor. That demand was met, in part, by the availability of literate female labor" (31). With the rise of vertically-integrated corporations and the development of transnational markets, businesses required an ever larger body of clerks to transcribe, collate, and file the masses of paperwork upon which the company's operations depended.1 Middle-class women served as an ideal solution to this problem: not only were they an inexpensive source of educated labor, but they maintained, if not the masculinity of the office space, then at least its bourgeois respectability. The emergence of the female white-collar worker, by this argument, was simply a side effect of larger changes within the political economy.

In what follows, I will argue that the exigencies of capital were not, in and of themselves, enough to secure in the public mind the propriety of middle-class women working in the public space of the commercial office. It was only through a refiguring of the typewriter within the cultural imaginary of the late nineteenth century that the association of women with the new means of uniform inscription and duplication was secured. While critics such as Gregory Anderson and Meta Zimmeck have noted the appearance of typists in many novels of the period, they use these texts as an accurate reflection of, or a transparent window onto, the historical reality of women's lives as white-collar workers.2 In so doing they conflate the representation with that which is represented and efface the complex ways by which the cultural industries intercede in the processes of representation. My concern, by contrast, is with the mutually-constitutive relationship between what Roland Barthes describes as "the register, the dimension of all images, conscious or unconscious, perceived or imagined" (524) and the material conditions of labor. The cultural imaginary, in this sense, is that phantasmatic domain of recognizable figures, stereotypes, and clichés produced in part by the media and in relation to which individuals come to identify themselves as subjects within a social formation.3 While capital required the increasing deterritorialization of the domestic space in order to release women for work in the commercial sphere, it could not achieve this without attending to the disruptions that such a fundamental change would cause within the cultural imaginary. That is to say, the entrance of women into the white-collar workplace required not only the demand for labor that they would fill, but an image of such a worker that would make the identification of gentility with commerce possible. This was especially true, as I will show, in Great Britain, where the appearance of the female typist was not buttressed by the precedent of decades of women white-collar workers.4

Popular representations of the Type-Writer Girl provided such an image: they served to mediate between the multiple and often contradictory demands of the marketplace and received notions of what it meant to be a "proper" woman, providing a legible figure in which such contradictions could be provisionally contained. Appearing not only in novels but in plays, short stories, music hall routines, illustrated advertisements, and post cards of the periods, the Type-Writer Girl was the acceptable face of the "New Woman": she represented the desire for a career and independence in such a way as not to endanger those traditional feminine sensibilities that held matrimony and maternity as a woman's highest purpose in life. The Type-Writer Girl, then, was not a specific person, or even an aggregate of many persons, but a carefully conceived product: "What she wore," writes Marshall McLuhan, "every farmer's daughter wanted to wear, for the typist was a popular figure of enterprise and skill" (288). This figuring of the female typist as glamorous and adventurous, I argue, was necessary in order to overcome the anxieties occasioned by the prospect of the independent, middle-class working woman. At the same time, it also afforded those same women the possibility of an alternative subjectivity, one that would offer them at least the prospect of agency in the emergent information economy of the late nineteenth century.

The Twelve-Pound Look

The Type-Writer Girl, like the typewriter itself, was an American export. Machines for mechanical transcription had been devised as early as 1714 and were in limited circulation in Europe in the mid nineteenth century, but it was not until 1874 that they were first mass-produced. It was in that year that the American gun manufacturer, E. Remington & Sons, began marketing a product patented by an amateur inventor from Milwaukee named Christopher Latham Sholes.5 Early sales were disappointing and Remington sought to improve its profitability by marketing the machines to the daughters of middle-class businessmen. Early advertisements claimed: "No invention has opened for women so broad and easy an avenue to profitable and suitable employment as the 'Type-Writer,' and it merits the careful consideration of all thoughtful and charitable persons interested in the subject of work for women" (qtd. in Current 86). Subsequent ads, by both Remington and its rapidly proliferating competitors like Yost and Duplex, invariably showed a fashionably-dressed and attractive young woman posing alongside a new machine (see fig. 1). These advertising campaigns helped produce the cultural "fit" between the normative values of femininity and typing. As the author of one type-writing manual put it: "The type-writer is especially adapted to feminine fingers. They seem to be made for type-writing. The type-writing involves no hard labor, and no more skill than playing the piano" (Harrison 9). Other female-gendered machines were also cited as points of comparison. Kipling, for example, claimed that "[o]nly a woman can manage a type-writing machine, because she has served apprenticeship to the sewing machine" (80). Associating the machine with other instruments conventionally defined as "female" served to domesticate the typewriter, to draw it from the "masculine" world of commerce and business into the "feminine" domain of the family parlor and the sewing room. In this way, the previously inexplicable success of women typists was made transparent, and even obvious, through a retroactive gendering of the machine at the level of its popular representations.

While the typewriter was soon integrated into American business practices, its commercial success overseas was hampered by the lack of trained operators in the new markets. In a remarkable campaign of corporate colonization, Remington sought to correct this shortage by opening its own schools throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, Southern Africa, and South America in order to train young men and women in the new sciences of typing and stenography. In many locales, a trained operator was furnished with each machine purchased, along with a dust cover and the requisite supplies. In Great Britain, women were not, as in the United States, quickly conscripted to fulfil this need within corporations, but instead began to open type-writing agencies of their own. Profiting from the overflow of documents from lawyers, authors, and other professionals, such agencies proved highly successful. As early as 1885, the Westminster Gazette reported a flourishing typing office established by the Society for the Employment of Women in London. According to Mrs. Marshall, the office manager, "The number of ladies at present actually employed in type-writing is very small, but there is every reason to hope that in future a large number of educated women will be able to make a living by this occupation" ("The New Convenience" 6). Her hopes were well-founded: the total number of female clerks rose from 2,000 in 1851 to 166,000 by the end of the century, by which time they accounted for twenty percent of all white-collar workers in Great Britain (Zimmeck 154).

The Type-Writer Girl quickly became a recognizable figure, not only in the streets of London, but in the pages of magazines and novels, where she tended to appear as an alternative to the genteel woman, who was characterized by passive humility. Juliet Appleton, the protagonist of Grant Allen's The Type-Writer Girl (1894), for example, openly adopts a male-identified model of narrative self-fashioning. "I have always been grateful to Mr. Samuel Butler," she writes, "for his eccentric theory that a woman wrote the Odyssey" (11). And though she finds the poem too "masculine" for Butler's theory to be true, she nonetheless adapts its motifs to her life as a typist: "I mean to sail away on my Odyssey, unabashed, touching at such shores as may chance to beckon, yet hopeful of reaching at last the realms of Alcinous" (17). The shores that beckon to her lie on the very edges of late-nineteenth-century femininity: Juliet, a graduate of Girton College, quickly finds a job as a typist, takes an apartment of her own in the city, learns to wear "rational" dress and ride a bicycle, takes up smoking, and even spends time with a group of anarchists in the English countryside. This spirit of recklessness and adventure is characteristic of the novels and stories featuring Type-Writer Girls: they threatened, as Elaine Showalter says of the New Woman, "to turn the world upside down and to be on top in a wild carnival of social and sexual misrule" (38).6

The anarchic aspect of the Type-Writer Girl was seen to be especially threatening to the institution of marriage. In his one-act play, "The Twelve-Pound Look" (1910), J.M. Barrie tells the story of Harry Sims, an overbearing but highly successful man who waits for a woman to arrive from the Flora Type-Writing Agency. He receives a shock, however, when the typist who arrives at his door is none other than his first wife, Kate, who had "bolted" some years ago (19). Her reappearance has for him a delicious irony: she, who could have been Lady Sims, is now her typist instead. Harry gloats over the little victory. "I tell you I am worth a quarter of a million," he says. To which she responds, "That is what you are worth to yourself. I'll tell you what you are worth to me: exactly twelve pounds. For I made up my mind that I could launch myself on the world alone if I first proved my mettle by earning twelve pounds; and as soon as I had earned it I left you" (29). Like Kipling before him, Harry cannot believe that his wife prefers working for a living—the twelve pounds being the price of the machine by which she now earns thirty-six shillings a week. He dismisses his former wife contemptuously, but she leaves with this bit of advice: "If I was a husband—it is my advice to all of them—I would often watch my wife quietly to see whether the twelve-pound look was not coming into her eyes" (35). And, indeed, as the play closes, Harry's second wife, the soon-to-be Lady Sims, asks her husband, "Are they very expensive. . . .[t]hose machines?" (40). The revolution, in short, was spreading from woman to woman, presaging a mass exodus of women from the bonds of matrimony and delivering them to the promised land of the Type-Writing Agency.

Such a revolution, however, was not entirely unwelcome. As the Victorian era gave way to the Edwardian, the increasing fascination with all that was "new" and "modern" included women as well. Barrie's play, for example, is far more sympathetic to the desires of Kate and the harried Lady Sims than to the social ambitions of the boorish Harry. Similarly, Henry Knight, the protagonist of Arnold Bennett's A Great Man (1904), is positively enamored of the typist he meets in the office of his literary agent:

Geraldine at once furnished him with a new ideal of the feminine and satisfied it. He saw the women of Munster Park were not real women; they were afraid to be real women, afraid to be joyous, afraid to be pretty, afraid to attract; they held themselves in instead of letting themselves go; they assumed that every pleasure was guilty until it was proved innocent. . . . Now Geraldine reversed all that. . . . She openly reveled in her charms; she openly made the most of them. . . . But what chiefly enchanted Henry was her intellectual courage and her freedom from cant. In conversing with her you hadn't got to tread lightly and warily, lest at any moment you might put your foot through the thin crust of a false modesty. (175-76)

By comparison to his "dowdy" mother and aunt, Geraldine comes as a kind of revelation: she "seemed to challenge the whole system of his ideas, all his philosophy, self-satisfaction, seriousness, smugness and general invincibility" (130). The type-Writer Girl is represented here as willing to break with decorum and to take the initiative, to be bold where her forerunners would only be demure. It is Geraldine, for example, who first asks Henry to tea, and it is she who questions his business judgment and arranges for him to receive a much higher royalty for his novels. This readiness to play a more active role in the professional life of her husband is shown to be enormously beneficial to Henry, whose slight literary talents would not, in and of themselves, lead to any measure of success.

While the "modern" lifestyle of Juliet and Geraldine implicitly challenges the Victorian belief in women's innate passivity and domesticity, its more overtly political dimension is forcefully dramatized in George Gissing's The Odd Women (1893). This novel tells the story of Mary Barfoot and her efforts to help the "odd women," those who were unable "to [make] a pair" through marriage, and who had not received the kind of education that would prepare them for a job outside the home or schoolroom (37). To this end, she opens an establishment that is part type-writing school and part suffragette recruiting center. The two activities, in fact, go hand in hand: feminism is the theory and typing the practice. As Mary tells the small group of typing students gathered for her talk on "Woman As An Invader":

"I don't care whether we crowd out the [male clerks who complain about the rising numbers of women office workers] or not. I don't care what results, if only women are made strong and self-reliant and nobly independent. . . . Most likely we shall have a revolution in the social order greater than any that yet seems possible. Let it come, and let us help its coming. . . . Let the world perish in tumult rather than things go on in this way!" (136)

The revolution Mary envisions can only come about if women shrug off the manacles of humility and servility and train themselves to participate as equals in the traditionally male-defined spheres of activity, business, commerce, and politics: "The old types of womanly perfection are no longer helpful to us. . . . They are no longer educational. We have to ask ourselves, What course of training will wake women up, make them conscious of their souls, startle them into healthy activity?" (136). Typing, for Mary, is such a course of training because it is "something new, something free from the reproach of womanliness" (136). More than simply providing for their "daily bread" (135), white-collar office work allows women the opportunity to redefine the very premises of womanhood. The keyboard will startle them from the torpor of domesticity and awaken them to the new possibilities of intellectual and financial independence.

An Individual Wage

The "twelve-pound look" was radical not simply for its connotations of a life beyond the bounds of matrimony, but for its suggestion that such autonomy was now within the scope of any mildly industrious woman. For the price of a new Remington, women could abandon not only their husbands, but the whole edifice of feminine modesty that had held them in check. As Kate tells her former husband, "I got some work through a friend, and with my first twelve pounds I paid for my machine. Then I considered that I was free to go, and I went" (31). This emphasis on the easily-won independence of the Type-Writer Girl, however, masks the economic and social reality of the average typist in late-nineteenth-century Britain. Most of the literary representations of female typists show them living either alone, like Juliet Appleton, or in comfortable shared lodgings. Bennett's Geraldine, for example, shares a London flat both large and sumptuous enough for her and her roommate to hold a regular Sunday salon attended by many prominent literary figures. And both Geraldine and Juliet seem to be able to afford fairly lavish evening gowns in which they are able to accompany their male suitors to expensive restaurants and evening shows.7

Most typists, however, neither lived alone nor could afford to indulge in sartorial extravagance. Even the thirty-six shillings a week that Mary Sims earns would have put her at the upper end of typists' salaries at the turn of the century. In a 1906 survey for The Economic Journal, B. L. Hutchins found that the entry level for a typist was ten shillings a week and that the average wage was between twenty-five and thirty shillings; only 7.6 percent of those surveyed earned more than forty shillings and all of these had at least four years of experience and usually much more (447). Such wages absolutely prohibited anything like an "independent" lifestyle: an unfurnished "bachelor" apartment in London let for more than most typists earned in a week, and they had not only to feed and board themselves from their wages, but to dress to a standard appropriate for a "genteel" office. Indeed, the typical typist working in the City, according to Clara Collet's 1902 study, Educated Working Women, lived at home and commuted to work on the cheaper working-men's trains that left before 8 am. For those who could not live with their parents, or had none to live with, the choice was between the semi-charitable "Home for Business Ladies," a furnished room without board or attendance, or a third-rate boarding house, the expense of which still left the woman without the money for any kind of emergency (Collet 74). As Janet Courtney, one of the first female clerks to be hired by the Bank of England, recorded in her memoirs:

Thirty shillings after several years' experience was considered a good rate of pay. Yet, allowing for her expenses in fares and food out, it barely sufficed to keep a girl of good middle-class origin and decent standard of living in one of the smaller hostels or boarding houses. Hardly any of these asked less for room and "partial board" than 25 shillings. Nothing to speak of was left for clothes, less than nothing for recreation. In fact, though it might mean comfortable pocket-money for daughters living at home, even when they contributed to home expenses, it was bare subsistence and nothing more to a girl on her own. (147-48)

Low wages, it was argued, were not intended as a measure of the value of a woman's work, but as a kind of moral imperative designed to safeguard the family as the cornerstone of the social order. As the National Joint Committee of Post Office Unions put it:

If you pay women who are unmarried the same wage as you pay to the men the majority of whom are married and have to maintain a family, you will really be paying the woman what is an individual wage at the same time as you are paying the man what is a family wage . . . you are giving her a much higher standard of comfort than you are giving [the men]. (qtd. in Zimmeck 163)

This distinction between an "individual wage" and a "family wage" was widely accepted at the time. It presumed that a woman only earned money for herself, while men earned in order to support a wife and children. Thus if female clerks did not want to injure either those women who were already wives and mothers, or to impair their own chances of finding a husband who could support them, they must accept the justness of an "individual wage." Earning between twenty-five and fifty percent lower wages than her male counterparts was, by this logic, in a woman's own interest.

The need to provide disincentives for working women also subtended the structuring of corporate hierarchies in such a way that the position of "typist (female)" did not lead to managerial positions. The increasing number of clerks in the 1880s, both male and female, meant that only a few would ever rise to management, let alone become partners in the firm. Businesses were restructured in such a way that the once inclusive category of clerk was increasingly subdivided between those tasks which required "decision-making" skills and those, like typing, which were merely "mechanical" in nature. This distinction masked what was in reality a division of labor along gender lines: men, who were felt to possess superior intellectual abilities and greater strength of character, continued to be placed in positions which allowed them to rise in the administrative ranks, while women were confined to jobs which were in effect occupational dead ends. As Jane E. Lewis notes, "By confining women to strictly segregated employment as telegraphists, typists, shorthand writers and routine clerks, employers certainly sidestepped the resistance of male clerks . . . but they also acted in accordance with the idea that fundamental sexual differences existed which made men and women suitable for different kinds of activities" (38). Adopting the accepted distinction between the sexes was distinctly beneficial to government offices and corporations alike. It allowed them to present themselves before the public as protectors of the family while maintaining a large, efficient and extremely cost-effective supply of clerical labor. Such conditions conspired to insure that women never fully left the fold of domesticity. Most female typists, in short, lived a life very different from that of the Type-Writer Girl of the novels and plays. They did not, like Juliet or Geraldine, work for enlightened literary agents or accommodating publishers, but for insurance companies, accounting firms, or large manufactories. Nor could they afford, as Juliet does, trips to the continent to chase down prospective suitors. They were young women, usually between fourteen and eighteen years of age, who lived at home, or in the barest of shared lodgings, and worked either to contribute to the family income or to sustain themselves in the meanest of fashions. The typewriter, for these women, was less an avenue to economic self-sufficiency than a momentary detour on the way to dependence, more a guarantor of the gendered division of labor than a threat to it.8

An Unfamiliar Sexual Type

The disparity between the Type-Writer Girl of the popular novels and plays of the period and the lived reality of the average typist throws into relief the specifically cultural work that the former performed. These novels do not so much document or mirror the life of the woman typist as produce her as the site of erotic attraction for the men who might otherwise be threatened by this sudden invasion of the spheres of masculine privilege. Thus they exaggerate the financial and emotional independence of women in white-collar jobs, but only insofar as they simultaneously demonstrate women's lingering need for male attention; indeed, the former will be shown only to accelerate the desire for the latter. The Type-Writer Girl thus becomes an object of a particularly intense form of male scrutiny that, in the very process of discovering her secret desires, effectively inscribes upon her figurative body the tell-tale signs of an essential femininity that are required if she is to remain legible within the gendered semiotics of the cultural imaginary of the fin de siècle.

In Gissing's The Odd Women, for example, the male point of view is represented by Everard Barfoot, a free-thinker who comes to his cousin's typing school as a self-styled "connoisseur" of women (20). There he is enchanted by Rhoda Nunn, Mary's partner in the organization and a pronounced gender radical. Rhoda is particularly vehement about the institution of marriage. She tells Everard, "I would have girls taught that marriage is a thing to be avoided rather than hoped for. I would teach them that for the majority of women marriage means disgrace" (99). As we have seen in Kipling's encounter with the American woman "who earns her own bread, and . . . slings out-of-the way quotations at your head," such a figure poses a distinct problem for the male gaze. Indeed, it is Rhoda's very elusiveness, the ways in which she is both a woman and somehow not a woman, that seems to galvanize the text's authorial consciousness:

At first view the countenance seemed masculine, its expression somewhat aggressive—eyes shrewdly observant and lips consciously impregnable. But the connoisseur delayed his verdict. It was a face that invited, that compelled study. . . . [W]hen the eyelids drooped a little in meditation, one became aware of a suggestiveness directed not solely to the intellect, of something like an unfamiliar sexual type, remote indeed from the voluptuous, but hinting a possibility of subtle feminine forces that might be released by circumstance. (20-21)

The typist is an "unfamiliar sexual type"; indeed, on first sight, she seems more male than female. "[Rhoda] is quite like a man in energy and resources. I never imagined that one of our sex could resolve and plan and act as she does," exclaims the spinster Virginia Madden (30). But it is precisely this obdurately non-feminine aspect, with its distinct overtones of lesbianism, which excites the text's scopic epistemophilia, to borrow Laura Mulvey's terms, and produces her as an object of fetishistic fascination.9 Everard subjects Rhoda to the most exhaustive of studies, seeking always to discern some trace element of femininity. He "examines" (79), "scrutinizes" (101), "observes" (126), and otherwise inspects the typist, and, little by little, he seemingly wills such signs into being: "Rhoda was beginning to class with women who are attractive both physically and mentally. Strange how her face had altered to his perception since the first meeting" (142). Everard, it might be said, seems to impose on the figure of Rhoda the visible marks of heterosexuality; he determines to "see her in complete subjugation to him, to inspire her with unreflecting passion" (261). "Unreflecting passion"—that is, complete submission to the male will—would be the proof, the empirically-verifiable evidence, that Rhoda is in fact of the genus of conventional woman, and not a new species brought about by the evolutionary effects of environmental pressures.

The progress of Gissing's novel is largely marked by its efforts to reconfigure the "masculine" typist as a stereotypical female yearning for the love of a good man. Despite her pronounced antipathy to romance, Rhoda gradually succumbs to the pressure exerted by Everard's gaze. In the end, she falls passionately in love with Everard, "allowing herself to indulge the luxurious emotion as never yet" (264). The dangerous homosocial union of Rhoda and Mary is, if only for a time, disturbed by the presence of a male (Rhoda and Mary fall to quarrelling amongst themselves in part because the older woman is jealous of her partner's new romance) and Rhoda's heterosexuality is determinedly affirmed. Moreover, in a dramatic reversal of her earlier position on the matter, the typist insists on the importance of marriage, "that old, idle form" (266), to secure the union. Everard consents, but neither is wholly satisfied with their various concessions. The relationship subsequently sours, not because Rhoda is incapable of responding to the love of a man, but because, in Gissing's resolute scepticism concerning the relations between the sexes, the gap between men and women, even enlightened ones, is still too wide to admit of a happy union. Even so, the text has at least partially accomplished its purpose: the division between sexuality and gender opened by Mary Barfoot's distinction between "womanly" and "womanish" is effectively foreclosed by the scopophilic force of Everard's gaze, and a fixed bond is reestablished between ontology and biology (135). The masculine "newness" of the Type-Writer Girl is revealed to be merely cosmetic, concealing a conventionally heterosexual woman within.

Grant Allen is no less concerned than Gissing to reassure his readers of the essential femininity of the Type-Writer Girl. But where The Odd Women represents the need to discern Rhoda's heterosexuality as a systemic function of the male gaze, The Type-Writer Girl is somewhat more duplicitous. Written under the pseudonym "Olive Pratt Rayner," the novel is told from a first-person point of view that allows the reader to believe that the female narrator's opinions and beliefs are an accurate representation of women's experience. Thus when Juliet claims that, "pretend as we will, the plain truth is this: woman is plastic till the predestined man appears; then she takes the mould he chooses to impose upon her. Men make their own lives, women's are made for them" (138), the statement appears not as the wishful thinking of the male consciousness behind the text, but as a sentiment actually shared by even the most advanced of suffragettes. Allen's ventriloquism allows him to subvert effectively the gender radicalism of his character from within. Allowing the reader access to the deepest recesses of the enigmatic Type-Writer Girl, we discover, in an apparently unmediated fashion, a woman yearning to be rescued from her newness by the love of a heroic male. "Ten thousand type-writer girls crowd into London to-day," confesses Juliet, "and 'tis precisely in this that their life is deficient—love interest" (114). Such a claim, in light of the extremely poor wages and opportunities for advancement which most typists faced, is patently absurd, but the novel strives to prove its veracity. Juliet's initial encounters with lewd employers, poverty, and hypocritical anarchists gradually give way to a conventional romance plotinvolvingg a sensitive publisher for whom she works. In hiscompanyy, Juliet does not so much return the male gaze that we have seen at work in Gissing's novel, as simply enjoy being its object: "I was aware that he was unobtrusively observing my dress and appearance . . . like a gentlemen of keen insight, accustomed to take things in at a glance without disconcerting the object of his scrutiny" (119-20). Under this benevolent "scrutiny," Juliet becomes once again the "lady" she was before the necessity of working for a living had made her into a mere type-writer. When "Romeo," as she refers to her employer, invites her to dinner, she dons an evening gown and is transformed:

I was conscious that Romeo liked my dress and felt some mild surprise to see how well I looked in it. He had hitherto known me in my black office gown alone. I forgot my poverty and was once more a lady. It suits me better. I blossom under it. (196)

This admission, that Juliet's personality is able to find a fuller avenue of expression as a "lady" than as a "type-writer," facilitates her reinscription within the normative bonds of late-Victorian gender ideology. The ventriloquised narrative thus resolves the contradiction implicit in the Type-Writer Girl being both radically new and reassuringly conventional by ascribing it to the confused and confusing vicissitudes of modern womanhood itself.

In constructing the Type-Writer Girl as the object of a scopophilic desire, Gissing and Allen were adapting to literary means what was by the turn of the century a widespread fascination in her erotic potential. Following their success in using young women models to advertise their products in magazine ads, a number of typewriter manufacturers hired similar women to show their wares in their showrooms. These women were dressed in the latest fashions and taught just enough of Pitman's "touch" method so as to demonstrate the machine to effect. Rival firms each employed their own professional Type-Writer Girls in the hopes of attracting customers to their public lectures and exhibitions. In some cases, both the woman and the machine were made available to interested parties for a trial period (Carnaffan 81-82). The success of such marketing techniques can be measured by the fact that the image of the Type-Writer Girl soon was not only appearing in advertisements for Remington and its competitors, but had gained a life of its own. Postcard manufacturers produced entire series of cards featuring attractively dressed and elaborately posed young women standing next to dimly-lit machines: the woman, in becoming a product herself, superseded the very machine she was originally intended to promote. Indeed, the typewriter was now but an adjunct to the woman, a symbol not of the advantages of uniform transcription, but of a kind of eroticised womanhood.

Not surprisingly, then, the Type-Writer Girl soon acquired a reputation for sexual misadventures. Rumors abounded of women typists who married their employers, so much so that the scenario became a standing joke in music halls and, in America, in vaudeville routines. Bruce Bliven writes that "it was impossible to mention the [type-writer] in a leering tone of voice without getting a laugh" (72). Much of this amusement turned on the possibilities for innuendo that arose from the fact that "type-writer" could refer as much to the woman as to the machine (see fig. 2). An entire industry in pornographic novelettes and photos soon emerged in which "type-writer" became a code word for titillating tales of moral misdeeds between employers and their female employees. Clara Del Rio's Confessions of a Type-Writer (1893), for example, is a licentious tale of one woman's fall from innocence at the hands of a corrupt boss: "I found that the man had the idea that the type-writer of today should take the place of the European mistress that we read about. . . . He almost made me understand that we poor girls who by necessity work for a living have to submit to our employers if we desire to keep our positions" (43). Like Allen's The Type-Writer Girl, Del Rio's novelette allows the reader the voyeuristic thrill of experiencing its narrator's sexual dalliances first-hand, providing, in its epistolary form, a quasi-documentary account of her life in the typing offices of the big city.

Texts such as Confessions of a Type-Writer were less aberrations of the representation of the Type-Writer Girl in the more respectable press than participants in the very same process.10 The excessive, almost obsessional fascination they exhibit with the assumed promiscuity of the female typist must be read as a compensatory effort to reestablish the failing lines between man and woman, human and machine, culture and nature. The eroticised image of the Type-Writer Girl was a way of "making sense" of her newness, of her distance from the more familiar images of working women as governesses or teachers. Here what was once enigmatic and puzzling gradually came into focus as a woman who, far from being "independent" of male attention, was always dependent on it—indeed, was tailor-made for its pleasure.

Looking Back

The epistemophilia which sought to "know" the Type-Writer Girl through its eroticisation of her could not, however, fully efface or contain her manifest contradictions, precisely because such contradictions were of its own making. Assigning the female typist either an essential femininity, or, conversely, an excessive sexuality, only increased the amplitude of the oscillations between the alien and the familiar, the radical and the mundane, the manly and the womanly. And it was in the very fissures created by the manifest contradictions of the media representations of the Type-Writer Girl that a female spectatorship was able to discover a certain purchase. This paradox of the fetish object, which is both the means of subjection and of a resistance to that subjection, is not unique to this particular image, but is a potential latent in the very structure of the commodity form. As John Fiske has argued, "[t]he commodity fetish is deeply conflicted: it bears the forces of both the power bloc and the people. It produces and reproduces the economic system, yet simultaneously can serve the symbolic interests of those subordinated by it" (157). In the multivalency of the image of the Type-Writer Girl, women were able to parse elements which spoke more directly to their own needs and experiences and, in so doing, to use that image to their own ends.

Whatever snickers and knowing glances the word might elicit in music halls, the representation of the Type-Writer Girl as an attractive and modern young woman had natural attractions for many women seeking alternatives to the traditional "feminine" occupations. In contrast to the down-trodden factory-girls and the brow-beaten shop assistants, the Type-Writer girl, as Sally Mitchell has argued of "girl's culture" in general, "suggested new ways of being, new modes of behaviour, and new attitudes that were not yet acceptable for adult women" (3). The impact of the popular image of the Type-Writer Girl is graphically illustrated in Susanne Dohrn's account of one woman's decision to become a typist:

Her brother encouraged her to go into teaching, but that meant three years as a pupil teacher and two years at college which would cost him far too much money she thought. When he asked her what she would like to do she told him about the girls in the Yost typewriting showroom on Holborn and that she would like to learn typewriting like those girls in the Yost Typewriter Office. (56)

A position as a typist could be had with a minimum of special training and expense, and thus allowed a girl to move more quickly into the working world than other occupations. But it also offered her a kind of visibility, that is, a way of asserting herself, that other professions could not. The models in the Yost showroom were attractive to women not simply for the clothes they wore, but for their apparent professionalism, for their opportunity to move, if only in a limited fashion, in the world of commerce. If, for men, this visibility signified new opportunities for sexual conquest, for women it offered the prospect not only of earning an income, but of moving beyond the cloister of the home and school without sacrificing their aspirations to "womanliness" or their class standing.

More importantly, the "deeply conflicted" image of the female typist, its internal tensions and unresolved contradictions, resulted in a sense of an identity in constant flux. Midway between "girlish" innocence and "womanly" experience, the subject position signified by the Type-Writer Girl was not an end in itself, an ontological telos like marriage or motherhood; it was, rather, a moment of transition, a way of becoming as opposed to a mode of being. Just as both Geraldine and Juliet dream of becoming authors themselves, so too the autobiographies of female white-collar workers consistently figure work as a typist as a means to a higher end. In The Long Day (1905), Dorothy Richardson details her descent into the urban underworld of sweat shops, prostitution, and cheap boarding houses at the turn of the century. An "unskilled, friendless, almost penniless girl of eighteen" (5), Richardson arrives in New York with ambitions "to do only what I chose to esteem 'lady-like' employment" (16). She soon discovers that such work is impossible without the necessary qualifications and experience, and is forced to accept whatever work she can get. The book details her experiences in a bewildering number of temporary positions: she is, variously a box-maker, an artificial flower-maker, a shaker in a laundry, a seamstress in an underwear factory, a finisher at a costume jeweller, and a demonstrator of a new brand of tea and coffee at a large emporium. She finally escapes this perdition by taking night-school lessons in stenography five nights a week for sixty weeks, and securing a position as a typist in a small office. At six dollars a week, the job actually pays less than what she was making as a demonstrator, but its short hours allow her further time to improve her skills and, most importantly, to read:

I went back to night-school and took a three months' "speed course," and at the same time continued to add to my general education and stock of knowledge by a systematic reading of popular books of science and economics. I became tremendously interested in myself as an economic factor, and I became tremendously interested in other workinggirlss from a similar point of view. (271-72)

Much moved by Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (1901), Richardson comes to understand the role of gender and race in the economics of capitalism and to openly identify herself with the oppressed. When she finally secures a job with a publishing firm, she uses her contacts there to begin writing articles on the plight of working girls. "And, somehow," she concludes, "with the appearance of those two articles . . . part of the horror and loathing of that unhappy period of servitude fell away from me; the sordid suffering, the hurt to pride, the ineffaceable scar on heart and soul I felt had not been in vain" (273). Richardson is thus able to use her training not simply to get a job as a typist, but to reflect on her experiences and to theorize them within the structure of exploitation. This intellectual labor, in turn, provides her with the cultural capital she requires to become an author in her own right and a voice of resistance to that exploitation.

Elizabeth L. Banks's The Autobiography of a Newspaper Girl (1902) charts a very similar trajectory from Type-Writer Girl to self-awareness and authorship. Like Richardson, Banks was raised in the country, but her family is able to send her to a women's seminary/college. She determines to become a newspaper reporter, and teaches herself typewriting and stenography. After graduating, she sends out letters of enquiry to dozens of editors. This plan fails to secure her a job in journalism, but she does receive one offer to work as a typist for a grocer in a large city. Earning eight dollars a week, Banks is able to avoid the harrowing life of the sweat shop, but, with room and board at five dollars a week, she lives only the most modest and restricted of lives. Moreover, her job, like that of the models in the Yost showroom a continent away in London, makes of her an exhibit for the general public:

People stopped and looked at me, with the specimen goods in the window, till my face would grow red, tears of embarrassment would roll down my cheeks and my fingers trembled as they flew over the typewriter keys. I knew the grocer had no intention of making an advertisement of me, yet nevertheless I said to him rather bitterly on day: "Mr. Sampson, don't you think you had better mark me 'Exhibit A,' so these people out there will know just where to place me among your goods?" (4)

Complaining about her working conditions, as opposed to, say, her wages, Banks forcefully illustrates the premium that women put on the respectability and gentility of their employment. But more importantly, she demonstrates both the possibility and the political efficacy of looking back: she points "to the pavement, where half a dozen men stood looking into the window" (4) and exposes the voyeurism which protects and formally constitutes the power of objectification. Thus caught in the act of looking, the pleasure of scopophilia dissolves into embarrassment: "The grocer pulled down the curtain with a bang" (4). In returning the male gaze, the Type-Writer Girl corrects her position in the spectrum of visibility. She demands the right to be seen, that is, to be acknowledged as an active participant in the world of social relations, but resists becoming, in the process, a spectacle.

Banks's successful bid to improve her working conditions is not only a defining moment in her growing political consciousness, but, as with Richardson, it provides her with the lived experience, the cultural capital, she requires to realize her journalistic ambitions. She writes an article entitled, "All About Type-Writer Girls," and sends it to the local paper, which publishes it in their Sunday supplement. This leads to a position as a "sort of private secretary and confidential typist to the proprietor of the Daily Hustler" (8) and, in time, to a position as a reporter. Once again, the public fascination with the lives of female typists, the apparent thirst not only for information about exterior details of their work, but for access to their interiority, to their secret thoughts and desires,providess the means by which a woman is able to transcend that very state.

* * *

The media image of the Type-Writer Girl, I have argued, performed several functions. While changes in the internal organization of corporations and a general shift toward service industries in both Britain and America created a greater demand for clerks, the introduction of women to the white-collar workplace severely disturbed the already volatile gender economy of the late-nineteenth century. Just as the low wages and prohibition from management positions kept women within the gravitational pull of matrimony and motherhood at the institutional level, so too the novels, plays, short stories, post cards, and advertisements showing women at the keyboard helped harmonize this employment with received notions of femininity. These cultural forms were, in effect, the "mission" which Kipling called for, a means of domesticating the uneasy association of women with the new machines of uniform transcription. Despite her "coldly clerkly aspect" (Kipling 80), the Type-Writer Girl, it was shown, was not all that different from her more conventional counterparts. She still enjoyed wearing fine clothes and arraying herself as an erotic object for the male gaze. Such reassurances served not only to calm the sometimes apocalyptic fears she occasioned, but to increase both the sales of typewriters and the number of women hired as clerks in the commercial sector and in the civil service. The Type-Writer Girl was, in these ways, as necessary to the emergence of a female white-collar workforce as the economic exigencies of capital.

But in assessing the cultural work of the Type-Writer Girl, it is important to underscore the image's use value not only to capitalism, but to the young, middle-class women seeking a way of being both active agents in the public sphere and yet still women in the accepted sense. If working girls were attracted to the tales of Geraldine Foster and Juliet Appleton, or to the fashionable models in the Yost showroom on Holborn, they were nonetheless aware of the reality behind the glamorous ideal of adventure and romance. As Meta Zimmeck argues, women clerks "were knowledgeable about the pay and conditions on offer through the secretarial colleges where they trained, the agencies from which they got work, the professional associations to which they belonged, the social clubs where they met their friends, the newspapers and journals which they read" (166). As reluctant as many women were to accept the low wages offered them, the media image of the Type-Writer Girl at least secured for them the class standing that they so valued. Moreover, as the autobiographies of women clerks show, the commodification of the Type-Writer Girl could be turned to women's own ends; in the interstices of the debates concerning the ontological makeup of middle-class working women, they could write their own stories. And, in so doing, they represented the Type-Writer Girl not as a specific identity but as a trajectory: the fluidity, the very unknowability of her place between masculinity andfemininityy, could be strategically adopted in the pursuit of a life beyond the keyboard. The Type-Writer Girl, then, was a site of cultural contestation and resistance, a focal point for the conflicts and desires which subtended the rise of the information economy of the turn of the century.
University of Victoria


NOTES

I would like to thank James Eli Adams, Ted Bishop, Krista Lysack, Jed Rasula, and the two anonymous readers for Victorian Studies, all of whom read early drafts of this article and contributed much to my thinking on its topic. Many of the literary texts featuring female typists were suggested to me by members of the "Victoria" electronic discussion group. I am especially indebted to Darryl Rehr for the illustrations. This research was supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Izaak Walton Killam Trust.

1 With the exception of the depression of 1893-97, American businesses experienced a period of substantial growth in the closing decades of the late nineteenth century. In industries such as steel, copper, and rail transport, this growth was made possible through "horizontal combination," in which larger firms bought out their smaller competitors in the same field. These increasingly monopolistic corporations benefited from centralized planning, control, and capitalization. The corollary of horizontal combination was "vertical integration." A particular characteristic of business expansions at the turn of the century, vertical integration allowed companies to gain greater control of the market for their goods by acquiring and/or entering into competition with their suppliers and their customers. By owning, for example, the manufactory for a consumer product, the principal supplier of raw materials for that product, and the retail outlets which would subsequently sell the product, corporations were able to regulate costs and thereby drive out smaller competitors. On the effects of horizontal and vertical integration on office management, see Whalen.

2 See Anderson, 7, 10; Zimmeck 164-65. It is worth noting, in this regard, that both Anderson and Zimmeck attribute The Type-Writer Girl to the pseudonym "Olive Pratt Rayner." In so doing they mistakenly use the novel as emblematic of women's experience when, in fact, it was written by Grant Allen, a professional author whose notoriously problematic gender politics would be more openly revealed in the following year with the publication of The Woman Who Did (1895). A fuller discussion of Allen's ventriloquism appears below.

3 The cultural imaginary is an extension to the social realm of Jacques Lacan's theories of the psychic development of the infant. The imaginary, in this schema, is that illusory sense of wholeness to which the child accedes through the image of itself that it glimpses in a mirror. This image allows the infant to distinguish itself for the first time from the body of the mother and to recognize itself as an autonomous, self-identical being. This moment of recognition, however, is also a form of misrecognition: for all that the image in the mirror is the child, indeed, serves to constitute its identity as such, it is also fundamentally alien to the child. The self that is produced in this relation to the image is always "other," always divided within itself. The imaginary thus inscribes lack at the very heart of subjectivity: the imaginary can only signify one's identity by showing us what we are not but long to be. On the significance of this theory for media theorists, see both Penley and Olkowski.

4 American women first entered white-collar office work in significant numbers in 1862. Faced with a severe labor shortage caused by the Civil War, the Treasurer-General, Francis Elias Spinner, hired female clerks to handle the sorting of bonds and currency. The women proved themselves equal to the task and the Treasury continued to employ women after the war. Following the introduction of the typewriter in the mid-eighties, their numbers began to soar. By the early 1890s, women held nearly 5,600 of the 17,600 positions in the executive departments in the nations' capital, and by the turn of the century their numbers had increased to 104,000, or 29 percent of all the clerical workers in the United States (Aron 836).

5 On the history and development of the typewriter, see Adler, Beeching, and Bliven.

6 Tom Gallon's The Girl Behind the Keys (1903) is another example of the adventurousness that characterizes Type-Writer Girl narratives. As in Allen's novel, the initial interest in the material hardships of the typist's life quickly gives way to a tale of intrigue in which the heroine helps foil the criminal activities of her good-looking but crooked boss at the type-writing agency at which she works.

7 Mary Sutherland, the typist who seeks the help of Sherlock Holmes in "A Case of Identity" (1892), is a particularly extreme example of the tendency to cast the Type-Writer Girl as a slave to fashion. She is described as wearing "a heavy fur boa around her neck, and a large curling red feather in a broad-brimmed hat which was tilted in a coquettish Duchess-of-Devonshire fashion over her ear" (Conan Doyle 40).

8 Mary Cholmondeley's Red Pottage (1899) provides an exception to the romanticized image of the life of the female typist offered by Allen and Bennett. Rachel West is an educated, genteel young woman who, when her parents die leaving unexpected debts, is saved from absolute destitution only by securing work as a typist. She lives in a single, sparsely furnished room in a "great rabbit warren" of a lodging house (33). Here she earns her living, but only because her youth has allowed her to win the work from another woman in the same building. Typing, far from being glamorous, leads to an awareness of the economic source of upper-class privilege: "The rich grind the poor for their luxuries with their eyes shut, and we grind each other for our daily bread with our eyes open. I have got that woman's work. I have struggled hard enough to get it, but though I did not realize it, I might have known that I had only got on to the raft by pushing someone else off" (35).

9 In her influential article, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey identifies active scopophilia as that "structure of looking" that "arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight" (61). Though both men and women engage in scopophilia, she argues, western culture tends to identify the active form with masculinity and the passive with femininity: "The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness" (62).

10 The assumed promiscuity of the Type-Writer Girl persisted not only in the sub-culture of pornographic postcards and novelettes, but in the pages of "respectable" novelists and poets. Take, for example, "the typist home at teatime" in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). A distillation of three decades of cultural coding of female office workers, the "typist" is, for Eliot, the logical emblem of what has become of women in the age of mechanical reproduction. Amidst the "stockings, slippers, camisoles and stays" (227) that she can't be bothered to put away, and the remains of a dinner prepared from "food in tins" (223), she meets her lover, "the young man carbuncular" (231). Their sexual liaison is an empty affair, brought on not by her active desire but through sheer boredom. "[H]e assaults at once; / Exploring hands encounter no defence; / His vanity requires no response, / And makes a welcome of indifference" (239-42). Libidinal energy passes through her just as easily as the words she types at work: "'Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over'" (252).


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