Typewritten - Early Social Effects

Early Social Effects

When Remington started marketing typewriters, the company assumed the machine would not be used for composing but for transcribing dictation, and that the person typing would be a woman. The 1800s Sholes and Glidden typewriter had floral ornamentation on the case. "Live by the typewriter, die by the typewriter!" is often attributed to this period.

Women's roles in the World Wars, both One and Two, put more women into the workforce replacing men. In the United States, women often started in the professional workplace as typists or "typewriters".. Questions about morals made a salacious businessman making sexual advances to a female typist into a cliché of office life, appearing in vaudeville and movies..

The "Tijuana bibles" — adult comic books produced in Mexico for the American market, starting in the 1930s — often featured women typists. In one panel, a businessman in a three-piece suit, ogling his secretary’s thigh, says, "Miss Higby, are you ready for—ahem!—er—dictation?"