Only in one phase do the new developments of the present give a clear indication of what the future has in store. The rapid growth in the personal and home use of the typewriter, following the advent of the portable machines, is revealing to many thousands a quality of the machine, long known but never before aggressively exploited, namely, its incomparable value as an educational implement. We do not mean commercial education, for in this field the typewriter established its reign many years ago. We mean the education of the child in reading, writing, spelling, and, as he grows older, in all the fundamentals of language composition. There are two reasons for this value. One is the delight of the child in the machine itself, the use of which provides a vehicle for his creative instinct. The other is the perfection of form in the typed words and sentences, which present attainable standards to the child from the very outset of his efforts. The extraordinary results obtained by the typewriter in this field are attested by educators and by parents without number, and the progress of such recent “wonder children” as Winifred Stoner and Willmore Kendall is directly attributed to their early and continuous use of the writing machine.
It is interesting to know that, among the founders of the business, that man of vision, William O. Wyckoff, foresaw these results, and his letters to Earle, written in the late seventies, to which we have already referred, urge strongly the sale of machines in the home for educational use. Wyckoff was fifty years ahead of his time, and it has remained for the portable machine of our day to spread this great message. It may be a long time yet before the use of the typewriter is established in the elementary schools, as an educational implement as necessary as charts and blackboards, but in the home this service has already begun and will be extended with every passing year.
CHAPTER VIII.
HOW WOMEN ACHIEVED ECONOMIC EMANCIPATION THROUGH THE WRITING MACHINE
The greatest of all the triumphs of the typewriter, greater even than its influence on business or education or language, is the transformation it has wrought in our whole social order.
This is a phase of typewriter influence which even today is far too little understood. The fact that the writing machine has freed the world from pen slavery is itself a triumph so vast and palpable that it rivets attention, almost to the exclusion of anything else. This is not because the facts are obscure concerning other phases of typewriter influence. That it was the writing machine which opened to women the doors of business life is so well known that the mere mention of it sounds like a commonplace. But few indeed have considered the real importance of this fact in its relation to human society.
The movement that we know by the name of “feminism” is undoubtedly the most significant and important social evolution of our time. The aims and aspirations behind this great movement need not detain us. Suffice it is to say that, like all great social movements, its cause and its aim have been primarily economic. What is known as “sex-emancipation” might almost be translated to read “economic emancipation”; at any rate it could only be attained through one means, namely, equal economic opportunity, and such opportunity could never have been won by mere statute or enactment. Before the aims of “feminism” could be achieved it was necessary that women should find and make this opportunity, and they found it in the writing machine.
We have described the transformation of the whole business world since the invention of the writing machine. Equally revolutionary, and facilitated by the same agency, has been the transformation in the economic status of women during the same period. The business office of 1873 seems no more remote from the present than the economic restrictions imposed on the women of fifty years ago. It might almost be said that no real career was possible for her outside of the home. Such opportunities for gainful occupation as did exist were usually for the untrained and uneducated, in shops, factories, domestic service and the like. In only two other callings had they made themselves indispensable, that of school teaching and nursing, and all the openings in this and a few minor occupations could do little more than utilize a fraction of intelligent womanhood. They furnished no adequate basis for true and general economic freedom.
