Taking Dictation: The Emergence of Writing Programs and the Cultural Contradictions of Composition Teaching

Abstract

1907 advertisement for the Edison dictating machine provides a striking illustration of the arrangement of writing labor in the emergent corporate workplace.1 On the left, a suited man reclines in his office chair, one hand leisurely dropped to his side, the other holding a dictating machine's speaking tube in front of his mouth. On the right, a demurely dressed woman outfitted with earphones sits up straight at her desk, her hands on the typewriter before her, transcribing the dictated words. The copy, set off in a circle between the two figures, reads: FROM BRAIN TO TYPE. Physically separating the man and the woman in the advertisement, the large, bold-faced words offer a telling representation and interpretation of the corporate workplace as it was developing around the turn of the century. The written word was-and continues to be--deployed in this setting to coordinate and manage the work of the various parts of the hierarchically organized corporate body.2 So voluminous and essential was the production of writing in the modern corporation that this work itself necessitated a division between conceptual and mechanical labor. Already in the early years of the last century, as the Edison advertisement suggests, white, native-born men assumed control over the mental work of producing words, while white, native-born women were rapidly becoming the workers of choice to fix the words of the masculine brain into print. By 1930, in fact, one quarter of all white women workers were employed in clerical work, and (primarily white) women constituted 95.4 percent of all stenographers and typists (Amott and Matthaei 127; Davies 178-79). As secretarial work was becoming increasingly associated with white women in the first half of the twentieth century, so was the work of teaching required writing in American universities.3 By 1929, women taught 42 percent of all courses in first-year English offered at midwestern and western colleges-where, in contrast to eastern and