Although various types of writing machines had been invented in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the earlier models being intended for the use of blind persons, the extensive use of the typewriter machine in Britain dates only from the 1880s. Only when the Remington Company started manufacturing typewriters on a large scale in 1873 (after Christopher Latham Sholes's model) was the typewriter more widely adopted. Many changes were made to the machine – for example, in terms of keyboard layout, visibility and type bar mechanism – and different manufacturers had different models, but from the 1880s onward the typewriter had a firm place both in office and popular culture (Derry and Willams 1960: 642). Writing in 1897, C. L. Stevens claimed that there were then nearly one hundred different types of machines on the market, and out of these a finished Remington typewriter ‘is being produced for every five minutes of the working day’ (1897: 650–1). Importantly, the typewriter proved one of the most significant means for women to enter the office space – that previously male-coded domain – at the Victorian fin de siècle. In fact, Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell state that ‘[t]urn-of- the- century feminists associated standing up for one's rights with sitting down at one's desk; the history of the typewriter (human operator and machine) is bound to a history of the contestation and re-installation of gender roles’ (2005: 4). Gender and technology are joined together in the female typist, and as the typewriter came into widespread use in the late nineteenth century, the New Woman typist became a recurrent literary motif.

Because of its role in opening up possibilities for female employment, thus contesting late nineteenth-century notions of gender, the typewriter has been read as a technology of emancipation. Indeed, media historian Friedrich Kittler claims that ‘[a]part from Freud, it was Remington who “granted the female sex access to the office”’ (1992: 352), placing the act of changing gender roles in the machine itself. However, as Rosalind Williams asserts, there is a fundamental ‘dissonance between technological determinism and a feminist understanding of history’ (1994: 232); technologies cannot be seen as revolutionary in themselves. Reading the New Woman as a figure of early feminism requires an account of agency, in order to acknowledge the possibility of political change.