Women and the Print Trade in Early America
Open Access Deposited“At Her Print Shop”
More than fifty women are documented to have worked as professional printers andpublishers between 1760 and 1820 in the northern American colonies and later United States. This project examines the lives, accomplishments, and contributions to early American society of many of these printing professionals to understand the world in which they existed and the lives they led. For many women printers, gender was both limiting and liberating, which should complicate how historians consider both women and print culture in early American society. Women were, perhaps counterintuitively, more welcome at the top of professional publishing hierarchies than at the bottom. And the familial networks granting women entrance into the early American print trade were the same routes utilized by many of their male contemporaries. Women printers seldom dwelled on their own sex in publications or private correspondence, but their publications regularly strengthened the socio-cultural tropes of domesticity, fragility, and virtue among white women that would seemingly contradict their carrying out of professional work. Similarly, women printers strengthened racial and class hierarchies, including notions of Black women as unfeminine and enslaved Black individuals as unhuman. Women printers’ complicated presence in the social order was mirrored by an uncertainty of their place before the law. Seditious libel cases before the American Revolution regularly drew upon the familial obligations of the accused in order to seek less severe punishments. And after the American Revolution, amid larger political debates about the limits of citizenship, free speech, and justice, women printers were briefly de facto exempt from the eager prosecutorial actions of the new nation. As society and the legal system came into closer alignment in the early nineteenth century, women printers were decreasingly able to access the positions of professional power they had in the long Revolutionary era. Growth of mechanized industrial production and professional, fraternal unions precluded women’s continued success in major print centers as they had been able to enjoy for several previous decades. Taken as a whole, early American women printers exemplify the nonlinear path of social evolution and the precarity of social positions of power and authority in the Revolutionary and Early American Republic eras.
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Borzilleri_gwu_0075A_17243.pdf | 2025-07-20 | Open Access |
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