The College, the Market, and the Court: or, Woman's relation to education, labor and lawDall, Caroline Wells Healey
History
The College, the Market, and the Court: or, Woman's relation to education, labor and law
Dall, Caroline Wells Healey
Women -- Education; Women -- Employment; Women -- Legal status, laws, etc.
Nail-cutting and hook-and-eye making employ others; and, if we take a
book into our hand, women follow us through all the stages of its
manufacture. A woman cut and cleaned the rags, counted the sheets of
paper, and set off the reams; a woman may have set the types; perhaps
some worn-out seamstress wrote the verses, or a female physician
composed the thesis: a woman _may_ print, a woman certainly _will_ fold
it down and stitch it for the binder. A woman will engrave on wood its
illustrations, or color in her own home its fine photographs or
drawings: at the very last, her white hand will touch with gleams of
gold its tinted edges or many-hued envelope.
It is women who pack cards and throw off damaged paper. I have not
obtained any reliable account of English female card-makers; but there
must be many. In an old Nuremberg rate-book are the names of "Elizabeth
and Margaret," _Karten-mächerin_, reported in 1436 and 1438. Cards were
invented in 1361. In about seventy years, therefore, the manufacture had
passed into woman's hand. In my notes from the census, I find no mention
of wood-engravers: but, in 1839, Charlotte Nesbit, Marianne Williams,
Mary Byfield, Mary and Elizabeth Clint, held honorable positions among
English wood-engravers; while, at the close of the last century,
Elizabeth Blackwell executed botanical plates, and Angelica Kauffman
engraved on steel, to the satisfaction of Sir Joshua Reynolds. In
London, recently, one accomplished female engraver has turned her steel
plates into a pleasant country-house, which she means to furnish with
the proceeds of her delicate painting on glass.
A whole volume might be written concerning English female printers.
Turning over some old books the other day in the Antiquarian Rooms at
Worcester, I came upon Elizabeth Bathurst's "Truth Vindicated," printed
and sold by Mary Hinde, at No. 2 in George's Yard, Lombard Street, 1774.
A little farther along, I found Sophia Hume's "Letters to South
Carolina," printed and sold by Luke Hinde, at the Bible in George's
Yard, Lombard Street, 1752. Good Quaker books, both of them; and the
titlepages told a pleasant story. Here, at the sign of the Bible, Luke
Hinde carried on his work in 1752. When he died, his widow kept the
establishment open, and taught her girls to stand at the forms; so,
twenty-two years after (in 1774), the place goes on in her name. No
change; only some dissenting wind has blown down the Old Bible, and a
gilded number two shines in its stead. It is the history of half the
business-women in England, and a very creditable history for Mary Hinde.
On those dishes of Liverpool ware are pretty pictures in gray ink. Women
took them wet from the copperplate, and, laying them along the biscuit,
carried it to the furnace; there the paper burns away: while others
paint and gild, or, with hideous clatter of blood-stones, polish off the
finer ware.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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