Twitter hashtags and individual tweets often make the leap from smartphone screens to print and cable news headlines. Some tweets even venture farther and land in unexpected territories.
Interview with Karen Christensen
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Email | Download
Born on a Saturday morning in 2017 at a Starbucks in Virginia, a Twitter hashtag eventually led to a conference in 2019 at the University of Oxford.
In 2017, University of Virginia professor Bruce Holsinger realized he had seen many an acknowledgment page where a male author thanked an anonymous wife for typing his book manuscript. On that Saturday at a Starbucks, Holsinger tweeted several screenshots and accompanying scornful wisecracks under the hashtag #ThanksForTyping. Immediately, the Twitter world responded in kind, finding myriad examples when otherwise invisible women – many of them authors themselves – had typed, translated, edited, and proofread.
At the Thanks for Typing Oxford conference in March 2019, American writer and publisher Karen Christensen presented a paper called “Jumped-Up Typists” concerning the lives of two secretaries who became two literary wives: Sophia Mumford, wife of the American historian and philosopher Lewis Mumford, and Valerie Eliot, second wife of T.S. Eliot. Founder and CEO of Berkshire Publishing Group, Christensen is currently writing a bio-memoir on the pair.
Until very recently, Christensen notes, authors needed typists to prepare clean copies of their manuscripts.
“We all [type] ourselves now. We have all sorts of apps and programs to help us. But even people who typed their own first drafts, they were very rough and ready, and they would hire professional typists to prepare whatever they were going to turn in to a journal or to a book publisher,” she explains.
“Some of the things that came up for the hashtag #ThanksForTyping were quite extraordinary. Men would thank their wives for the years they spent in the archives or translating old English texts for them. And then they said, ‘and thanks for typing the manuscript.’
“Of course, this started long before the typewriter, which only goes back about 100 years,” Christensen tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “Milton’s daughters transcribed Paradise Lost for their blind father. Leo Tolstoy’s wife Sophia made ‘fair copies’ – that is, handwritten copies – eight of them of different versions of War and Peace, as well as bearing 13 children. That’s a level of devotion I find almost impossible to imagine.”
