Thanks for Typing: Remembering Forgotten Women in History

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This collection uncovers the wives, daughters, mothers, companions and female assistants who laboured in the shadows of famous men. Revealing the reality of uncredited female contributions throughout history, this book highlights the work of neglected and forgotten women associated with celebrated male writers, scholars, activists and politicians. As the #ThanksforTyping movement has shown, anonymous women working to support the work of their male relations and colleagues has been, and often still is, a universal phenomenon. These essays show just how long intelligent and determined women have been sidelined, ignored or forgotten throughout history. From a well-connected Roman matrician to the mother of the poet Philip Larkin, these women have their voices returned to them in twenty engaging chapters. Spanning ancient times to the modern day, they return agency to women who occupied crucial roles behind the scenes, but were always restricted to the supporting role they were obliged to play. The universal importance of these women take on new meaning in our modern era where womens voices are becoming ever-louder and increasingly recognised - including through such a movement as #ThanksforTyping.

Reviews

There are very few books that can claim to address genuinely universal phenomena, and Thanks for Typing is one of this small class. Its canvas stretches from the classical world, via the medieval and early modern, to our own, and from Japan and Korea and North Africa, via the Russian Empire and Western Europe, to the United States because in all these times and places the visible work of men was made possible by the invisible labour of women. Thanks for Typing makes such engagement possible for a range of readerships, and on a truly impressive scale. * Dr Anna Vaninskaya, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Edinburgh, UK *
Juliana Dresvinas proposed collection of essays is imaginative, novel, wide-ranging and timely. It brings together scholars from very diverse fields of history, art history and literature, who share an interest in the too-long neglected stories of wives, daughters, companions and female assistants of celebrated male figures. The subjects range from a learned and saintly 5th-century Byzantine empress to the devoted daughter of a murdered 20th-century German Communist leader. These were women of courage, determination and brilliance, who were compelled to subordinate their own talents to a husband, partner, father or employer. Taken together, these fascinating studies exemplify the long-term paradox of energetic and charismatic women, who might have occupied crucial roles behind the scenes yet were always regarded as secondary figures because they were overshadowed by more powerful men. * Paul Monod, Hepburn Professor of History Chair, Department of History Middlebury College, USA *

Author Bio

Juliana Dresvina is a member of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford, UK. Educated in Moscow, Oxford and Cambridge in history, theology and English she has worked at Cambridge and Kings College London as a medievalist historian, taught English at Queen Mary University London, Reading, Oxford and Winchester, and has held postdoctoral positions in art history in London and Paris.