Blog post by Lori Dedeyan, CFPRT Scholar

Within the European tradition, women have been participants in the printing trade since its inception. The nature of their participation was shaped by a collective structure meant to enforce the general ascendancy of men, who, in the words of Virginia Woolf, “with the exception of the fog seemed to control everything.” Still, the number and distribution across Europe of presses run by women speaks to their abilities as printers and businesspeople. Though navigating complex legal and social restrictions, they managed to leave their mark (in this case, their colophons) on the cultural production of their times.

The Library Special Collections houses the work of a variety of women printers, of which this exhibit was intended to be a small survey, broadly covering the period between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. After doing research and compiling a list of titles, finding the corresponding physical copies in our collections brought with it, each time, a little thrill. These volumes would arrive at my desk in their protective casings, often custom made, and often strangely complementary to the items in their aesthetic, utilitarian appeal. Each had a different story to tell.

Women often entered the trade through marriage, as either a printer’s wife or daughter. Due to the common age disparities between printers and their wives, women would often inherit a shop after the death of their husbands, continuing the business until remarrying or being supplanted, at least in title, by their sons. Indexes of women printers from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries are populated by widows. Elisabetta Rusconi and Girolama Cartolari, in Italy, and Marguerite Van Anderat, in France, were products of this culture. This exhibit sought to separate them from these conditional associations and provide a glimpse, through their work, of their own professional practice.

The Woman Question, or the Querelle Des Femmes, which occupied the discourse of their contemporaries, continued through the ages and found another manifestation on Langham Place in London, where a group of women took it up within the context of their own experience. They came from positions of relative economic privilege and advocated for the ‘elevation’ of the status of women in society, though the amendment of employment and marriage laws. One of this group, Emily Faithfull, founded a printing press for the training and employment of women, the Victoria Press. The Victoria Press had good business and prospered for a time, with Faithfull being named “Printer and Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty.” The Victoria Regia, included here, was printed in dedication to Queen Victoria, in 1861.

In 1917, at Hogarth House in Richmond, Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard took up the tools of the trade in order to establish a small, independent publishing house. The tasks of typesetting and composition fell to Virginia, who absorbed the lessons of the press and whose own productive process was informed by her role in this transmutation of thought to the printed word. Included in the exhibit, and a source of particular excitement to me, was an original printer’s proof of Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway, complete with the author’s annotations and revisions (in purple ink, no less).

The exhibit also included a copy of the first publication issued by the press in 1917, Two Stories, which includes woodcut illustrations by the artist Dora Carrington.

The issues of roles in cultural production occupied Woolf, who wrote in A Room of One’s Own that “it seemed a pure waste of time to consult all those gentlemen who specialize in woman and her effect on whatever it may be- politics, children, wages, morality- numerous and learned as they are.  One might as well leave their books unopened.”  By instead opening these particular books, this exhibit invited the viewer to look at them and, by extension, at the women printers of whose labor they are the product.