“You can’t really understand or take seriously an author’s body of work unless you understand the process in which it’s being made and the role that women are playing in the creation,” said Christine Jacobson, the Associate Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at Harvard’s Houghton Library.
During the late 19th and 20th centuries, female relatives, acquaintances and assistants typed numerous drafts of books, plays, and film scripts, but typically never received credit for their contributions to a work’s quality and continuity. The “Thanks for Typing: Women’s Type Labor in Literature and the Arts” exhibition at the Houghton Library notes this historic underrepresentation, and showcases the work of women typists.
Throughout the exhibition, edited and retyped manuscript pages reveal the significant role that typed labor played in shaping the works of Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov and other canonical writers. For example, the expansion of Henry James’ novel “Portrait of a Lady” is “one of the clearest examples … in the show of typed labor and how much [a typist’s] labor directly impacted that work,” Jacobson said.
After James sought to adapt his early works into his later, “more convoluted” writing style beginning in 1906, he dictated a one-page scene from the original novel to his typist, Theodora Bosanquet, which became six pages. While there were countless changes to the novel, the most notable were that “manuscript was considerably lengthened, with longer sentences and denser prose” and “the character of Madame Merle is much more fleshed out,” Jacobson said.
Jacobson and co-curator Dale Stinchcomb, the former associate curator of the Harvard Theatre Collection, were inspired by the 2021 essay collection “Thanks for Typing: Remembering Forgotten Women in History” (Bloomsbury). They searched the library’s archives for materials on typists and created a “more public platform” for them at the library, Jacobson said.
After two years of research, the free exhibition opened on Jan. 26 and will run through May 1.
Inside the dusty blue walls of the library’s Edison and Newman Room, eight tabletop cases display books, pictures, and pages of women’s typing contributions. Paired with an online audioguide, the displays cover a range of topics, including “A Woman’s Place is at the Typewriter,” “Typing as Skilled Labor,” “Secretary Wives” and even “The Dance Typewriter.”
Although dance isn’t typically associated with typewriting, the Dance Notation Bureau, which preserved ballets by creating diagrams recording dance movements and formations known as dance notation scores, partnered with typewriter manufacturer IBM to create a typeball with dance notation symbols. The typeball allowed the bureau to utilize more than a typewriter’s typical 88 symbols.
The typeball method turned out to be just as time-consuming as handwriting a dance notation score, but it led to the creation of the Macintosh software LabanWriter for digital notation scores in 1987, and is still used today.
In the back of the exhibition room, a pink Olympia SM3 typewriter from the 1950s sits on a desk with a placard of instructions, inviting exhibition-goers to try out the “vigorous, physical labor” of typewriting.
“There are fewer people around who remember what it was like to type on a typewriter [and] it’s really important that we create places where we can understand that labor better and record that labor,” Jacobson said.
The laborious element of typing is especially evident in the “Typing for Hollywood” display. A photo shows script supervisor Barbara Cole with a typewriter in her lap in the middle of the desert during the filming of the 1962 movie “Lawrence of Arabia.”
However, the challenges typists faced cannot always be seen in a draft. When typing a revised version of an untitled play by Oscar Wilde, typist Marian Sutton Marshall, who taught other typists and ran “Mrs. Marshall’s Typewriting Service,” could not see the page while she was typing on a “blind-type” Remington No. 2 that hid the text under the carriage.
Using a “blind-type” typewriter “means that you just have to hold a sentence in your mind while you’re typing it,” while also making sense of the author’s changes and handwriting on a “marked-up and edited” manuscript, Stinchcomb said.
The exhibition partnered with the Harvard Film Archive to show movies centered around “women who make their living at the typewriter.” Jacobson proposed the screenings of “His Girl Friday” (1940) and “Meet John Doe” (1941) to Haden Guest, Harvard Film Archive director, who called her selections “excellent choices in so many ways” in an email shared with Cambridge Day.
Guest suggested adding “The Hudsucker Proxy” (1994) to the series as it “pays direct post-modern homage to both the [other] film[s] and the figure of the smart-talking-and-typing reporter.”
“The Lady and The Typewriter” film series will show all three movies on 35 mm film between March 13 and 14 and March 20 and 21 at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at 24 Quincy St.
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