You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March, 2008.
A couple of engaging historical pieces:
Katherine Stubbs’ article “Mechanizing the Female: Discourse and Control in the Industrial Economy” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7.3 (1995): 141-164.
M. Norton Wise’s chapter “The Gender of Automata in Victorian Britain” in Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, edited by Jessica Riskin, University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Material.Culture.Now is outlined on the Society for the History of Technology site.
The histories of five nineteenth century women, who were telegraph operators.
Distant Writing, which is a website detailing a history of the telegraph companies in Britain between 1838 and 1868, webmastered by Steven Roberts. Looks to be incredibly comprehensive.
Also Thomas Jepsen’s site, which has lots of links to contemporary books and articles, as well as his own papers, including:
Many thanks to Pypr for working through this thorny issue.
The Royal Ontario Museum, Canada, recently held an exhibition on Early Typewriters which was a display of the typewriter collection of Martin Howard. Although I did not (will not) manage to make it to the exhibition, here is a flickr search results for the show, and here is the exhibition webpage.
There is also a transcript and podcast of the talk Martin Howard gave on the machines in July 2007 on the webpage.
By happenstance, I sometimes come across references to my family whilst working on my research project – my ancestors are a family that seem to have had rather feisty women in their midst, particularly in the nineteenth century. I post this because they have appeared again – it appears one of them coined the phrase ‘A fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’. (Not one of the worst phrases to have coined – he was an arbitrator by trade.)
I can only hope that of the 80,000-odd words I will submit as my thesis, I can write nine words which have a ninth of the meaning and resonance of this aphorism. {Yes, I am in the midst of chapter writing …}
Re-looking at one of the of the first advertisements for the Type-Writer, which appeared in The Nation on 16 December 1875, the phrase which appears on the machine illustrated in the advert is (set out as it appears):
“There is a tide in the
affairs of men which
taken at the flood leads”
It is by Brutus from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3. The full speech is:
“There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
As one of the first publicised typewritten phrases, the advertising copywriter was astute, as it is a call to not miss your opportunities.
I am writing a section on female stereotypes for one of my chapters and on re-reading some texts on recapitulation, found the following about how higher suicide rates in women demonstrated their lower position on the evolutionary ladder [than that of men]. It is by G. Stanley Hall, one of America’s leading psychologists on the early twentieth century:
“This is one expression of a profound psychic difference between the sexes. Woman’s body and soul is phylectically older and more primitive, while man is more modern, variable, and less conservative. Women are always inclined to preserve old customs and ways of thinking. Women prefer passive methods; to give themselves up to the power of elemental forces, as gravity, when they throw themselves from heights or take poison, in which methods of suicide they surpass man. Havelock Ellis thinks drowning is becoming more frequent, and that therein woman are becoming more womanly.”
Quoted from Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man. (W V Norton, 1996)
Amazing.
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