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. Flowers were printed on the casing of early models to make the machine seem more comfortable for women to use.
In the United States, women often started in the professional workforce as typists (called "typewriters" then); in fact, according to the 1910 U.S. census, 81 percent of typists were female. With more women coming out of the home and into offices, there was some concern about the effects this would have on the morals of society. The "typewriter girl" became part of the iconography of the early-20th-century office. The salacious businessman making sexual advances to the female typist became 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?"
In spite of these jokes, becoming a typist was one of the few "respectable" jobs an unmarried woman could hold outside the home; the few other choices included teaching, and possibly retail salesgirl.
The famous quote by Marcus Glenn, "Live by the typewriter, die by the typewriter!" also dates from this period.
Read more about this topic: Typewriter
Famous quotes containing the words early, social and/or effects:
“In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth bones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“If one judges love according to the greatest part of the effects it produces, it would appear to resemble rather hatred than kindness.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)