Women in Print

Happy International Women’s Day! This short blog is dedicated to women in print. Even though we only highlighted two women, scholars have been continuing to recover and assess the contributions of women in the history of printing. Recent publications include the two-volume series Women in Print (2022) and Female Printmakers, Printsellers, and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century (2023).

The standard works of printing literature and trade journals carry few accounts of women employed in the printing trades. Those accounts that do exist are confined to the menial work done by female employees on the factory floor. Nor do these reports make heartening reading. What young woman would want to become a printer after encountering the nineteenth-century view that the printing trades generally did not attract the most ‘genteel’ girls, and that being employed in a printing shop was looked upon as being almost as bad as walking the streets? If young single women in the printing trade were badly regarded, worse was to come once they found a husband. Some printing shops had rules against employing married women, regarding it as immoral to do so as it meant that the husband spent the extra money on beer. The ethical objection to married women seems to have been widespread and there were many male employers who disliked the way married women talked to the unmarried girls. Not only were women regarded as subversive influences in the printing shop, they were also seen as cheap labour, only capable of simple processes such as folding that needed little skill and no apprenticeship, no heavy labour, and no responsibility. There was little to encourage the aspiring female printer. Nonetheless, women from different times made indispensable contributions to the production, culture, and trade of print, and below are the stories of two such women.

Charlotte Guillard

It might not surprise you that there are few female typographic icons. However, Charlotte Guillard (1480-1557), a mover and shaker in sixteenth-century French printing, was held up as an exemplary female figurehead. Guillard’s first husband was the printer Berthold Rembolt and on his death she inherited his printing office. Normally women were not allowed to have a business, however, they were allowed to take over the business of their husbands after their death.

Her associates were artists and scholars, and her bookstore and printing office were frequented by the learned. Printing historians have called her ‘femina illustrissima’. 

In the enlightened present the fact that a woman of 70 was carrying on so important an enterprise would probably excite editorial comment. Charlotte lived in exciting times when great changes were affecting every branch of human thought; she devoted her life to printing and lived to see the craft honoured as it has never been since.

Beatrice Warde

The first job of Beatrice Warde (1900-69) was as assistant librarian with the American Type Founders Company, where she developed an interest in typographic history. She came to Europe in 1925 where her reputation as an academic was established with the publication of her research into ‘Garamond’ types, which was first published in The Fleuron.

Although she was an original and superlative scholar, she published under the nom de plume of 'Paul Beaujon' when writing for both The Fleuron and The Monotype Recorder, as no one would believe a woman capable of such typographic insights.

In addition, Beatrice was a practicing typographer of sure taste and for over 30 years she was editor of the Recorder and the Monotype Newsletter, as part of her devoted service to The Monotype Corporation as its publicity manager. She was Stanley Morison's assistant in the great work of Britain’s typographical renaissance; she was beyond peer as a public expositor of and propagandist for good typography.

This blog has been adapted from articles in Print Week, as part of its Prints Past series, which ran for ten years from 2011. We’re grateful for authors of these articles and Dr Caroline Archer at Birmingham City University for the permission to use the articles in this blog.