Cockburn 1983

Cockburn, Cynthia. Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change. Pluto Press, 1983.

marxist approaches to labor of compositors can't account for the gender dynamics within the industry

apprenticeship in a chapel for a set number of years, male rituals

after industrialization: "Womena nd children, who had characteristically worked and earned within a family context, were increasingly drawn into employment in factories and mines. Here they came under the control of a rival authority -- the capitalist employer. Men felt their masculine familial identity, along with their class identity, threatened by the changes." (20)

new trade societies, the forerunners of trade unions

1793, London compositors formed a committee to represent their interests, the Union Society (Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 made such initiatives illegal -- repealed in 1824-5 and they began to develop into trade unions)

"In their own defence the compositors redoubled their efforts to control the labour supply, defining printing unambiguously as a craft, staking exclusive claim of members of the societies to practise it and limiting entry to the societies." (21)

"Histories of printing in the nineteenth century tend to group three separate activities within the term 'the printing trades': bookbinding, paper manufacture and printing itself. Women did establish, and have maintained, a substantial presence in the first two. But from printing they have been notably absent." (23)

in 1851, there were 3500 women in bookbinding, 7000 in 1871 and 14200 by 1891, with appalling pay

"Women filled distinct, segregated occupations within the binderies, mainly folding the printed sheets, collating the sections and doing the preparatory stitching. These tasks were tacitly acknowledge by the journeymen as 'women's work' and it was only after 1840, when a growing demand for books led to mass production and eventually to mechanisation, that demarcation problems arose betweeen men and women in the binderies." (23)

by contrast, no more than 1 in 100 in printing were women; in 1851, only 300 women, only 700 in 1871 and 4500 in 1891, and most not doing compositing but folding and stitching in shops that did that work too

women perceived as having more nimble fingers, doing work that can be picked up quickly (24)

"A number of mechanical inventions, none very successful in technical design. were introduced by employers in the latter half of the century in an attempt to bypass the craftsman's costly labour. Most of these machines separated the operation of setting type from that of distributing the used characters. The 'dissing' task. tedious and unskilled, had always been claimed by the craftsman. intent upon keeping common labourers out of the composing room. On the machines, girls were often set to work the disser. For a few years in the 1840s a number of firms operated the Young Delcambre machine, using female labour in this way. Later, in the 1860s, some newspaper owners introduced the Hattersley composing system, employing girl and boy labour on the dissing mechan-ism. The compositors of course 'blacked' firms that engaged in this practice, with more success in London than in the provinces." (25)

Victoria Press, Emily Faithfull, set up in 1859, supported by the Society for pRomoting the Employment of Women

The Caledonian Press in Scotland

Women's Printing Society Ltd., formed 1876, and by 1895 employed 40 women

London Society of Compositors, Typographical Association (in provinces), Scottish Typographical Association (in Scotland)

"The replacement of the flat press by the high-speed rotary press in the 1870s and 1880s greatly increased the output of the newspaper pressroom. Hand composition thus became a bottleneck and the productivity of the composing room a matter of renewed concern for the newspaper owners." (26)

Compositors "had been continually vigilant against any division of labour within their craft. They had vigorously opposed attempts to redefine parts of it as jobs for boys or girl. This vigilance was rewarded in the critical years of the 1890s when printing capitalists turned their modernising attention from the pressroom to the composing area." (27)

Mergenthaler's Linotype machine got rid of the problem of redistributing the type

"Linotype threw the compositors headlong into their first ever real crisis of craft control." (28)

male clerks less prepared to deal with women entering profession than compositors, and their unions, who waged a campaign against tomwen; "The composing room, now housing the mechanical typesetter, continued an all-male preserve and lost none of its traditional atmosphere of masculine cmaraderie. Indeed, as we shall see, to many of the men, the clatter and clunk of the linotype if anything enhanced the manly qualities of the occupation. In turn the craft has contributed something to out conceptions of masculinity." (31)

"The self-definition of compositors as crafsmen, superior to and different from the remainder of the working class, was part and parcel of the conflict between capital and labour, not a sign of its absence." (32)

"Phase-one photocomposition had a forerunner. The first sign of things to come was the separation of keyboarding from casting. processes that had been combined in the linotype. In teletypeset-ting.* or TTS as it was known, a keyboard operator, usually working on a OWERTY keyboard, produced a punched paper tape. (Q-W-E-R-T-Y are the characters on the top row left-hand side of a conventional typewriter. The linotype's 90-key board had an entirely different lay.) The operator at this stage still made and tapped-in his own line-end decisions concerning hyphenation and justification (H-and-J). The tape could of course be used to drive a linecaster at any distance from the keyboard - in the next room or in another town, immediately or next year. One caster could be kept in operation to maximum capacity. fed by several keyboards. Tapes could be stored in a fraction of the space of hot-metal formes." (61)

"TTS was a very productive new division of labour but it was not yet photocomposition. The photo principle arrived when the tape-driven hot-metal linecaster was replaced by a tape-driven photosetter, using a film negative of the alphabet and a flash of light to produce not a slug of lead but a piece of bromide paper carrying black letters." (62)

1965, first book to be set in Europe by computerized photocomposition was proceedings of the Institute of Printing's Conference on Computerised Typesetting, by Rocappi Ltd.

1965, new daily paper using computerized photocomposition, The REading Evening Post

"We tend to think of technological revolutions as being expressed only in machinery. But they are also revolutions in management. It is not only the formal agreement over wages and hours of work that concerns the employer, ut how hard and well the employee works. The pace of work, the division of labour, who gives the orders, the quality of the product, safety, all may become subjects of struggle between the employer and the worker." (88)

its possible to create a linotype lay on the new keyboard for computerized photocomposition, Linotype Paul manufactured one, in fact "each operator to select his preferred board at the eginning of the shift" is possible, but "there appears to be a consensus among most manufacturers and most employers, that getting the linotype lay out of use is economically and politically important" (99)

"Men brought up in a mechanical era, used to cars as well as to linotype, feel helpless before computer technology. No-one would dare touch the circuitry or offer an opinion if it went wrong. They sit as passively as a woman machinist in a garmet factory while the male technician attends to a repair. In such ways the men have moved from an active and interactive relationship to a technology to a passive and subordinated one." (102)

loss of manhood: "Everything about the work, the keyboard lay, the styled plastic machine, the closeness of the keys, the smallness of the installation, the posture of the operator and the history of typing, all of these things make him feel that he is doing 'a woman's job'. He feels emasculated. Work that has been done by women, because women are relatively low-paid and low-status, is seen as unprestigious." (103-4)

shift from lead alloy and machinery to paper and glue, "these are the materials of the kingergarten. THey are everyone's thing." (107)

"The paper industry and paper-handling aspects of print, as well as clerical work, have long employed a large number of women. Paper therefore is a material attributed to women and to intellectual workers. (That double association is of course itself contradictory.)" (108)

"Hot metal was undeniably male. The comps undervalue the typing and paper-handling skills they are now being taught because they see them as female. The men are caught in a contradiction: they must either acknowledge themselves totally deskilled, or acknowledge that many women are as skilled as men. THe dilemma accounts for much of the bitterness they feel." (117)

"Computerised photocomposition is not only used to contest craft control; its very introduction was a gesture of capitalist authority. Though the owners used the persuasive theme of progress, the men for their part made it clear that they felt acted upon" (121)

"men have acquired, in the course of their history, a close and inter-active relationship with technology that has tended to exclude women. Technology also confers power on those groups of men that are close to it, relative to those other men who work with their bare hands or as mere slave operators of the machinery. Comps built their old craft stregth on the foundation of their control of a specific technology." (138)

"There is no doubt that, in the last resort, the craft work of composition for print was men's work because men said it was. In the report of the proceedings of the Fair Wages Committee of 1907, Mr. Naylor, General Secretary of the London Society of Compositors, said in the opening remarks of his evidence, 'We regard the work of a compositor as work to be done by a man and not by a woman.' 'May I interrupt you for one moment?' asked one of his interlocutors. 'On what ground do you contend that composing work is work for men and not for women?' 'By the fact', replied Naylor, 'that it has always been regarded as men's work ... a large number of men are attracted to the trade because it is a man's employment.' The committee examiner did not let him off the hook so easily. 'You do not suggest that there is anything unsuitable in the work for women, do you?' he pursued. 'No', said Naylor, 'I do not.' 'It is merely on the ground that there are men already in it and that it is unfair to prejudice them by the introduction of women, is that it?' 'Yes.' Nor was it merely a problem of women getting lower pay: Naylor's Scottish colleague pointed out to the Committee that 'when a lady passed for the Bar, although she did not want to work for under-pay at all, she was not admitted, and the result is that she cannot practise. That is what happened in the legal profession and we say that what is good in one case is good in another. Self-protection is the first law of nature.* Since, with equal pay, no undercutting could occur, we must suppose he meant 'protection' from a flouting of patriarchal order." (152)

Edinburgh, 1872, strike among compositors, women "had been introduced by employers and trained to replace the men. In this way, women had gained a foothold in the city, while the local typographical association was in disarray." (153) -- by end of century 750 wome in Edinburgh "in direct competition with the journeymen"

December 1886, delegates from Scoettish Typographical Association, the Typographical ASsociation of England and the London Society of Compositors "discussed as an urgent matter: should women compositors be enrolled into the unions?" (153)

"The associations could rest assured that an employer would be very unlikely to employ a woman at the male craft rate. And so it proved. Though some hardy employers continued to use women at cheap rates and the societies to resist it, no women were admitted to the Typographical Association of England, and only one (a Mrs. Jane Payne) to the London Society of Compositors - and she resigned in 1898. The resolution likewise had little effect on the attitudes of men to women in Scotland. In towns other than Edinburgh the STA withdrew its labour from firms using women comps. But the Edinburgh branch, still on its knees, protested that it was unable to put such a decision into practice." (154)

dispute in Glasgow in 1904; men wanted higher wages but were refused on the grounds that by excluding women they were reducing competition; caused reaction against women in printing work

1909, Edinburgh compositors launched "the big crusade against women for which the trade had been wating. In the meantime, the monotype machine method of typesetting was spreading fast in the book trade. It seaparated the processes of setting and casting, making the typesetting occupation, on a typerwriter-style of keyboard, highly compatible with contemporary views of women's employment. The Edinburgh men were now in competition with women for both hand and machine composing." (155)

Scottish Typographial Journal,' 1910, has this memorial --

"A curious memorial was received by the masters individually and the Master Printers' Association, their trade body. A copy also reached the STA. It became known as the 'We Women' memorial and was signed by 300 women. It read:

That we, as representing a large number of the women compositors of Edinburgh, feel that a question affecting a considerable body of women should not be settled without these women having an opportunity of giving expression to their views.

That while recognising that the men have had a real grievance in that some firms have employed an unfair proportion of young girls at apprentice wages, or nearly so, we women regard it as a great injustice that one of the main skilled industries open to Edinburgh women should be closed against them.

That we women feel that the fact that women have been employed in Edinburgh as compositors for nearly forty years gives women a claim on the business.

That up to the time in Edinburgh the Monotype machines have been largely, if not chiefly, operated by women, and that women have proved themselves entirely competent to work these machines, so that it seems a great hardship that women should be debarred from working at them in future.

That since we have realised the position of women in the printing trade is seriously threatened, we women have been trying to organise ourselves with a view to securing justice for ourselves and for the women who may in future desire to practice the business of compositors or monotypists.

That in view of the foregoing considerations we ask you. to urge the Masters' Association to delay any decision hurtful to the interests of women compositors until the women's case has been given full consideration." (156)