Unseen Hands: Women Printers Binders and Book Designers
Women have been involved in printing and the making of books ever
since these crafts were first developed. Even before the advent of
movable type, there was a strong tradition of women producing manuscripts
in western European religious houses. In the Convent of San Jacopo
di Ripoli in Florence, we find the first documented evidence, in
1476, of women working as printers. Girls and women were often trained
by
their fathers or husbands to assist in printing businesses, and there
are many instances from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries
of women taking over and managing these enterprises upon the early
demise
of their male relatives. We may be sure that women played many different
roles in these situations, although what exactly is not always easy
to verify. Many, certainly, only managed the business, while others
were more directly involved. Estellina, wife of the printer Abraham
Conant, proudly stated in a Hebrew book, Behinat `olam (Mantua, ca.
1477) that “she, together with one man, did the typesetting.”
By the nineteenth century, in both Europe and the United States,
male-only unions ruled the printing business. Women, where employed
at all, were
relegated to certain low-paying jobs considered best suited for the
weaker sex, such as dressing (polishing imperfections) from metal
type, folding printed sheets, and sewing bindings. Yet there were
exceptions.
Emily Faithfull, for example, founded the Victoria Press in London
specifically to teach women the trade. Agnes Peterson established
the Women's Co-Operative Printing Union in San Francisco in 1868.
Augusta
Lewis Troup, journalist and typesetter for Susan B. Anthony’s
newspaper The Revolution, was elected corresponding secretary of
the International Typographical Union in 1870, the first woman to
hold
any national union office. Women were notably successful at bookbinding,
both “on the line”-- producing factory bindings -- and
in the creation of splendid examples of hand binding, particularly
during the Arts and Crafts Revival of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. This same period also witnessed a renewed interest
in fine printing, and women such as Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth
Yeats founded private presses that produced handsome limited editions
of
the work of contemporary authors and artists.
Since the mid-twentieth century, women have moved into
every job in commercial printing, from running the paper (Katherine
Graham)
to running
the press. Examples of the fine printing of Bertha Goudy and Jane
Grabhorn also grace this exhibition, along with the work of such
notable designers
and illustrators as Elizabeth Shippen Green, Clare Leighton, and
Elizabeth Friedlander. This exhibition represents only one contribution
toward
a full history of the roles of women in printing and the arts of
the book. Much remains to be discovered, documented, and written,
though
it is likely that many women -- particularly those outside the mainstream
-- will remain forever unknown and “unseen.” Each woman
featured in this exhibition stands in for thousands of her sisters,
known
and unknown, who have loved books and printing, and gotten on with
the
work.
