Vom Pianotyp zur Zeilensetzmaschine: Setzmaschinenentwicklung und Geschlechterverhaltnis 1840-1900

That the introduction of new technology is socially negotiated is part and parcel of basic knowledge within the history of technology as it is now taught in introductory seminars. Even so, at least in the German context, very few professors include social negotiations on gender relations. Instead, studies on the gendering of work and technology in the process of industrialization have emerged from historical studies on women and gender and the feminist sociology of industry and technology. Brigitte Robak’s new study on the introduction of machine typesetting and its interconnections to employee-employer organization and gender relations on the shop floor in the German printing industry is another example of this. Her determined historical approach makes the book an interesting contribution to the history of technology.

Robak seeks to identify the influence of different groups of actors on the introduction of typesetting machines. She focuses on two questions: first, how did work on linotype machines—those machines that finally succeeded in mechanizing typesetting—become a domain of skilled male typesetters even though the first, albeit less successful generation of machines, the so-called pianotypes, were operated by women, the entrepreneurs approved of women working as typesetters in the 1870s and the early 1880s, and inventors and machine manufacturing firms advertised the linotype as a machine that could be run by women? Second, why were memories of the women typesetters simply erased, so that the predominant story concerning the transformation from manual to machine work in typesetting, constructed in historical self-portrayals of the trade, is one of skilled male typesetters coping smoothly with the mechanization of typesetting?

She confronts evidence from the entrepreneurs’ trade press with other contemporary texts and historical descriptions, thereby contextualizing the entrepreneurs’ positions. As a result, a manifold picture emerges, describing the different interests of the manufacturers of the machines, the printing entrepreneurs, the unionized typesetters and the women typesetters, as well as the interests of the workers’ movement, the women’s movement, and the state, and explaining the strategies for gendering of a workplace. Robak determines that the option to feminize the typesetter’s job existed until a collective agreement excluding women regulated the employee-employer relationship and apprenticeships, the expanding German welfare state intervened into the gender relations at the work place by enforcing protection laws for workers, and bourgeois norms of femininity gained widespread acceptance.

This turning point was reached in the German Empire in the 1890s, with the introduction of linotypes. In Germany, the diffusion of the male-operated linotype technology was the result of a compromise between labor and capital in the interests of regulated employee-employer relationships, in which the exclusion of women was anchored. Decisively, the typesetter was placed in charge of machine minding and maintenance; hence, male typesetters could legitimize their claim on their workplace by their engineering competence.

Robak compares her findings with the printing industry in the United States, Great Britain, and France. She can prove, thereby, that the gendering of the new workplaces was a central matter of conflict in the diffusion of the new linotype technology everywhere, whereas the specific negotiations differed due to varying conditions in each country.

Robak’s polemics against the thesis that new technology is developed and designed in view of the gender of the potential user are not convincing, particularly since she uses arguments that confirm the thesis. She shows, for instance, that the pianotypes, which were to be operated by women, were designed for a domestic environment and thus for a space associated with femininity. Her argument is important, however, in that it is not just the intentions of designers and manufacturers of machines that determine the gendering of machine jobs, but also the negotiations upon introducing new machines and the organization of work, which she describes throughout her book. She elaborates on how engineering competence has been constructed as part of male gender identity, and she makes clear...