Women, Labor and Technology in the Late Victorian Age: Typewriting in George Gissing’s The Odd Women and Grant Allen’s The Type-writer Girl

Abstract

十九世紀末發明的打字機，被認爲是電腦發明之前辦公室科技的最重要創新，打字機自始即由女性操作，也促成了十九世紀末中產階級女性離開家庭走向城市公共商業空間，更是當時女性和科技產生互動的最早科技發明之一。作爲一種中產階級職業，打字需要一定教育和理解程度，也是十九世紀特有的需要機器輔助、身心訓練及不斷重複的勞動的一種。同時它又和當時的電報、留聲機、電影機和速記機的發明一樣，屬於十九世紀末強調速度和展延人體功能的系列通訊和紀錄科技的一種。而打字機由女性操作，又將身體／自然和科技／機器的互動帶上額外的性別層面。此議題在二十世紀數位文化中的展現多有討論，但十九世紀的機器時代可謂是女性和科技互動的早期階段，此其中牽涉的錯綜議題至今仍餘音迴盪，值得深入探討。本文以十九世紀末吉辛的小說《落單女人》和格藍艾倫小說《打字女》爲主要文本，輔以其他報刊文獻資料，試圖釐清相關議題。

This paper examines typewriting as represented in two late Victorian novels-George Gissing`s The Odd Women (1893) and Grant Allen`s The Type-Writer Girl (1897). Touted as the most visible and crucial technological innovation in office work before computerization, the typewriter was primarily operated by women and contributed significantly to middle-class women`s entrance from domesticity into the urban public sphere of business and commerce. As such, the typewriter is among the earliest 19th century technologies closely associated with women, thus visibly crystallizing the complicated relationship between women and technology in the late 19th century. Typewriting as a genteel profession that demands a certain level of education and intelligence involves the dimension of labor, particularly as disciplined, repetitive machine-aided mass labor that is a distinctly 19th century phenomenon. But it also involves the dimension of technology, as the typewriter sits along with the telephone, telegraph, phonograph, cinematograph and stenograph as part of the late 19th century technologies of communication and recording that emphasize speed and the prosthetic extension of human faculties. This paper examines the different presentations of the typewriter girl in order to unearth 19th century views on the body-machine complex, views that point to links between the 19th century Machine Age and today`s Digital Age.