Handwriting in America Written by: Tamara Thornton Presentation by: Jordan Canzonetta
The Author TAMARA PLAKINS THORNTON American History Professor at the University at Buffalo Studied at Harvard and Yale for her A.B and PhD, respectively Research interests according to her faculty page: American cultural and intellectual history; early republic and antebellum America; capitalist culture; American elites; history of reading and writing; the structure of intellectual life. Wrote Handwriting in America in 1996. http://www.history.buffalo.edu/people/thornton.shtml
Summary In HiA, Thornton traces the social, cultural, and economic factors that influenced handwriting/were influenced by handwriting in 18th century America to the present. Goals of her book: To show that handwriting has been understood as a mercantile tool, a female accomplishment, or a craft; as an inherently male practice or a gender-neutral one; as a manual skill or an intellectual, even moral, endeavor; and as a form of social discipline or individual self-expression (xiii). To contextualize handwriting in America as it relates to cultural factors: A history of handwriting... must be set in the context of such broad social and economic phenomena as the shift from a rankordered society to one that was nominally egalitarian and pluralistic and the rise of market, industrial, and corporate capitalism. It must also be set in the context of such closely linked cultural phenomena as the homogenizing and standardizing effects of new economic realities, the changing definitions of manhood and womanhood, and the growing authority of scientific expertise. (xiii)
Arguments Thornton claims the following: I argue that the issues [about the contextual, cultural aspects of handwriting] engage the nature of the self, the purpose of its definition, and the relation between script and self-should not be separated from one another. When people defined the self, regulated and controlled it, expressed and released it, they did so not as an abstract intellectual exercise but in the very ways they lived. We should not study handwriting as a phenomenon that reflects changing conceptions of the self but as one of the places where the self happened (xiii). the skill of handwriting involves both mental and physical processes; it sits astride the cusp of mind and body. Second, as handwriting is the work of an individual writer but executed in imitation of a standard model, it straddles the cusp of individuality and conformity. These sets of oppositions, between mind and body and between individuality and conformity, define the continua along which representations and practices of handwriting have lain, and these axes in turn define the conceptual space in which the self has been delineated (xiv).
Handwriting in Context -Domestic, happened in women's spaces. ( 4) -Writing and reading were taught separately (5) - Who needed to write? Doctors, merchants, clerks, etc (i.e., white men with vocations) (6) -Shift to writing masters because they could teach nuanced and coded forms of handwriting (7) -Women were allowed to hire writing masters, but not for vocational purposes. Instead, they were to learn writing to make them more appealing on the husband-market. (8) -To learn writing, one used copybooks that were often inscribed with vocational content (9) -Handwriting and literacy was significantly influenced by the economy and growing need for written proof of business/ mercantile transactions (12) -Handwriting is considered a craft, not a fine art, both because of its relation to the body and because of the material conditions that necessitate it (i.e., treating paper, making ink, crafting quills) (15) - Certain types of writing became coded: they were indicative of vocation, social class, and cultural statues (19).
Literacy and In(ex)clusion Withholding literacy was the most direct way of regulating the social and cultural weight attached to it...thus, literacy skills, like information, would be imparted on a "need-to- know" basis, and some people, it was believed-african-americans, Native Americans, humble whites, women-did not need to know how to write." (17) "Given the understanding of learning as motor learning, it stood to reason that instruction would focus on the body. In the concrete setting of the school, that interpretation made particular sense in the case of those pupils perceived as intellectually undistinguished and therefore destined for manual labor (156) Print was public, openly available to all with the money to buy it; furthermore, in an age of government censorship it was regulated by the state. In other words, there was no controlling the readership but there was plenty of control over the authors. In contrast, handwritten texts circulated among an exclusive, handpicked audience, most usually a circle of social equals with similar tastes and interests. And because the texts were privately distributed, they were uncensored (25).
Handwriting and the Body
Handwriting and the Body For if print was defined by its dissociation from the hand, the body, and the corporeal individual that created it, then handwritten matter necessarily referred back to the hand, the body, and the individual in new ways. Handwritten texts could be read for both substance and form. Words transmitted their authors' ideas; scripts, the authors themselves (29-30). Human bodies executed letters that in turn resembled the human body (33). Because handwriting revealed the self, what made handwriting important was the impression of self it left with readers, and what made it good was the degree to which it faithfully represented the writer (35).
Pedagogy & Discipline Educators now called for bodies to be disciplined, nowhere more so than in handwriting instruction. Thus educators claimed that the penmanship regimen, in asserting control over the "student body," would yield important social benefits. It would reform delinquents, assimilate foreigners, and shape a workforce (144). Learning to write, they explained, involved developing efficient neural pathways to the appropriate muscles, an evolutionary process achieved by the unconscious selection of efficient motions and the weeding out of inefficient motions. There could be no shortcuts to this process, for selection necessarily involved repetition, but once it had taken place, writing became an unconscious motor habit, a muscular automatism (146). a wide variety of academics, professionals, and policy makers reconceptualized the human being as a human body, rather than as a human mind... in disciplining bodies, experts from many fields could draw on the prestige of the biological, physical, and social sciences. The doctrine of evolution underpinned an understanding of the individual as an organism; the laws of thermodynamics, as a human motor (156).
Just cuz
Discussion Questions 1) What issues, re: standardization and mind/body split, do you see that echo concerns in our field? 2) Do typefaces have implications about cultural values these days? I.e, comic sans 3) How do our readings from Ong relate to handwriting processes?