1 00:00:03,150 --> 00:00:06,210 Well, thank you very much for that introduction, Liz. 2 00:00:06,210 --> 00:00:12,290 So great to be here and sharing some knowledge with you all about women in the history of cartography. 3 00:00:12,290 --> 00:00:20,190 So, as Liz said, my name is Jack Swann. I am a Peach D student at the University of Kentucky in the Department of Geography. 4 00:00:20,190 --> 00:00:27,090 And today I'll be talking to you about some work that I did during my master's project on the Sandborn Map Company. 5 00:00:27,090 --> 00:00:36,690 So the title of my project is Beyond Clerical Cartography, Gender and the production of Sam Fire turns maps in the 1920s. 6 00:00:36,690 --> 00:00:44,220 Until before I get into talking about the role of gender at the company, I wanted to explain a little bit about what Sandborn maps are. 7 00:00:44,220 --> 00:00:50,420 For those of you who may not be aware, so there's an example of a Sandborn map here. 8 00:00:50,420 --> 00:00:58,440 A Sandborn map is a type of map designed specifically for use in the fire insurance industry. 9 00:00:58,440 --> 00:01:04,950 And the whole point is that it allows underwriters to remotely assess risk. 10 00:01:04,950 --> 00:01:10,500 So instead of sending out an agent to look at a prospective building that they wanted to insure, 11 00:01:10,500 --> 00:01:14,970 they could stay in the comfort of their own offices and look at these maps. 12 00:01:14,970 --> 00:01:25,200 And so these sorts of maps not only depict kind of general information about the street grid and the buildings that that exists in any given town. 13 00:01:25,200 --> 00:01:31,290 But they also look at the various things that would influence the ability for a building to burn. 14 00:01:31,290 --> 00:01:38,340 So they will highlight industries that might use a lot of heat or might be working with flammable chemicals. 15 00:01:38,340 --> 00:01:41,680 They show all the different building materials. 16 00:01:41,680 --> 00:01:49,860 So here the pink colour refers to buildings that are made out of brick and thus are more fire resistant. 17 00:01:49,860 --> 00:01:56,650 So these maps are kind of chock full of information about the built environment, the United States. 18 00:01:56,650 --> 00:02:09,150 And so what makes it important? The same format company so prominent in the history of American cartography is really its its largesse, its huge size. 19 00:02:09,150 --> 00:02:17,700 So same were mapped about 12000 places from the during the years that it was active in producing these fire insurance maps. 20 00:02:17,700 --> 00:02:27,360 So roughly about 100 years from the late 1860 to the early 1970s, they mapped over 12000 towns and cities. 21 00:02:27,360 --> 00:02:32,530 At their height during the 1920s, they had about a thousand employees. 22 00:02:32,530 --> 00:02:36,380 And they produced over a million unique sheets. 23 00:02:36,380 --> 00:02:45,210 So this is not their total output, they produce many, many millions more, but purely in terms of sheets that are unique. 24 00:02:45,210 --> 00:02:54,330 Ready to be copyrighted. There are roughly about a million of those that that exist. 25 00:02:54,330 --> 00:03:00,750 So of this. Of the roughly 1000 employees that Sam board had during the 1920s. 26 00:03:00,750 --> 00:03:09,300 I estimate that roughly about one third of that, these 1000 employees were women. 27 00:03:09,300 --> 00:03:12,180 And so having a thousand employees places, 28 00:03:12,180 --> 00:03:21,680 same board as one of the largest companies or one of the largest assemblages of cartographers in the United States during the 20th century. 29 00:03:21,680 --> 00:03:33,160 And with three hundred women on on payroll, make them probably one of the largest employers of women cartographers as well. 30 00:03:33,160 --> 00:03:39,330 And so is Judith Tiner. Has Britain recently about the role of women in the history of cartography? 31 00:03:39,330 --> 00:03:42,720 There's been little on the day to day work of making maps. 32 00:03:42,720 --> 00:03:50,670 And there's been little about the role of individuals who work for government agencies, commercial companies, societies and institutions. 33 00:03:50,670 --> 00:04:00,420 And so what my work here is trying to do is specifically kind of plug to these or add a little bit of knowledge to plug some of these holes of talking 34 00:04:00,420 --> 00:04:09,790 a little bit of what it was like to work for the company in the day today and specifically around a company that was making maps to turn a profit. 35 00:04:09,790 --> 00:04:21,310 This work also is grounded in Matthew Nese idea of the processional turn the heat, as recently articulated in cartography, the ideal in its history. 36 00:04:21,310 --> 00:04:25,680 So traditionally a motive. 37 00:04:25,680 --> 00:04:31,450 Know history of cartography have kind of ratified the sole cartographer. 38 00:04:31,450 --> 00:04:35,890 What I like to call the capital C cartographer, typically a man, 39 00:04:35,890 --> 00:04:40,960 typically somebody who went out into the field and it was the first to map something 40 00:04:40,960 --> 00:04:48,130 or was the first to use this method or created a very dynamic series of matter. 41 00:04:48,130 --> 00:04:56,020 Who knows what it typically this work reifies one individual and says, I'll look at how great they are. 42 00:04:56,020 --> 00:05:03,520 And sometimes it talks about the support staff, not quite as often, or that support staff is is not mentioned at all. 43 00:05:03,520 --> 00:05:10,300 And so this is everyone else who helps with the production of the map, whether that be the printers, whether that be the people who finance it, 44 00:05:10,300 --> 00:05:16,830 whether that be the individuals who help outfit the cartographer's so that they can go out into the field. 45 00:05:16,830 --> 00:05:18,830 And so in the wood, 46 00:05:18,830 --> 00:05:29,480 the processional turn asks us to do is to kind of get rid of this idea of a soul capital C cartographer to what I like to call lower cartographer, 47 00:05:29,480 --> 00:05:34,130 where a cartographer is equal to anyone who touches the map. 48 00:05:34,130 --> 00:05:42,830 Anyone who somehow influences the creation in the development of it has a claim to call themselves cartographer. 49 00:05:42,830 --> 00:05:49,510 And so this is really quite important when we are talking about the role of women in the history of cartography, 50 00:05:49,510 --> 00:05:57,820 because oftentimes women were not the ones who are going out into the field collecting data or drawing up the maps out in the field. 51 00:05:57,820 --> 00:06:05,710 They were doing more. Claire, what we would probably see as clerical task, but as I am going to show, 52 00:06:05,710 --> 00:06:14,650 these clerical tasks are very much essential to the undergirding of the entire operation of taking a map from draught 53 00:06:14,650 --> 00:06:20,770 on a piece of paper to actually being able to publish it and sell and make money released in the case of same for maps. 54 00:06:20,770 --> 00:06:26,840 And I believe that this is this goes for other companies as well. 55 00:06:26,840 --> 00:06:35,720 So unfortunately, I don't have a ton of time to hop into what the steps of the creation of a Sambor map are into too much detail, 56 00:06:35,720 --> 00:06:39,470 but I will kind of roughly go through the process. 57 00:06:39,470 --> 00:06:49,790 As you can see here, any box that is outlined in red indicates that there were paid women workers who worked in these various departments at Sandborn. 58 00:06:49,790 --> 00:07:01,090 I would like to say, and I very much have examples of unpaid emotional labour that women had to do for in these other departments. 59 00:07:01,090 --> 00:07:09,560 Ones that don't have paid women workers. But speaking strictly in the sense of people who were on the payroll. 60 00:07:09,560 --> 00:07:15,290 Women were most prominent in these departments that are highlighted in red. 61 00:07:15,290 --> 00:07:21,800 So when the same board map was commissioned to be made the first step, a survey will go out to the field, 62 00:07:21,800 --> 00:07:27,770 create a draught map, and then send a draught map back to one of Sanborn's three factories. 63 00:07:27,770 --> 00:07:33,830 So they had a factory outside of New York City. They had one in Chicago and one in San Francisco. 64 00:07:33,830 --> 00:07:37,160 And women worked at all of those plants. 65 00:07:37,160 --> 00:07:45,710 It would go through a through the examining and proofing departments, both of which have them and working for them in these departments. 66 00:07:45,710 --> 00:07:51,990 Employees would make sure that basically the surveyor had actually surveyed everything that needed to be surveyed. 67 00:07:51,990 --> 00:07:57,200 They had left anything out by accident in the street, names for corrective things like that. 68 00:07:57,200 --> 00:08:04,940 Here they would corroborate with other data sources. Then it would get sent to the draughting and composing department where the draught maps 69 00:08:04,940 --> 00:08:10,970 made by the surveyor would be redrawn so that they would take up the least number of pages. 70 00:08:10,970 --> 00:08:12,680 Then after the composing department, 71 00:08:12,680 --> 00:08:21,920 they would go down to be printed would be lithographer lithographic printed and then they after each individual sheet was printed, 72 00:08:21,920 --> 00:08:27,890 they would be sent to the colouring department. The covering department was one of the largest at Sandborn, an employee. 73 00:08:27,890 --> 00:08:34,570 The most number of women in the colouring department was so large because Seymour coloured everything by hand. 74 00:08:34,570 --> 00:08:42,360 They found it cheaper to employ individuals to colour things by hand than it was to use lithography. 75 00:08:42,360 --> 00:08:50,660 And so after this, there are kind of like one of two ways a map will go through with a new map that was just being published. 76 00:08:50,660 --> 00:08:54,680 It would get bound and then shipped out to insurance agents if these were 77 00:08:54,680 --> 00:09:00,440 corrections to go onto an already existing map as a way to kind of save money. 78 00:09:00,440 --> 00:09:08,960 They would go to the cutting department where the where women would individually cut out each correction and assemble them to be shipped off. 79 00:09:08,960 --> 00:09:15,620 And then they would be shipped to women who worked out in major American cities whose 80 00:09:15,620 --> 00:09:22,520 sole job was to go to individual insurance agents and pasted these corrections. 81 00:09:22,520 --> 00:09:29,650 And so so as hopefully as you can gather from this process, women are an integral part of this work, 82 00:09:29,650 --> 00:09:34,930 while their work in some ways was you could think of it as like a forced assembly line. 83 00:09:34,930 --> 00:09:40,930 You know, they might just be colouring all day long or cutting cutting various corrections all day long. 84 00:09:40,930 --> 00:09:46,540 What they were doing is fundamental to the this process. 85 00:09:46,540 --> 00:09:51,730 So I'm pulling most of the information, some of the couple case studies that I'm going to go through here pretty quickly in 86 00:09:51,730 --> 00:09:56,740 the next couple of minutes from an internal newsletter called the Sandborn Survey. 87 00:09:56,740 --> 00:10:03,070 This newsletter was not just a way for the company to spread out information about its policies, 88 00:10:03,070 --> 00:10:08,110 but it was also a way to create a community out of a geographically dispersed workforce. 89 00:10:08,110 --> 00:10:14,460 So with so many employees all over the United States, whether they were Sandborn surveyors on the move pastern, 90 00:10:14,460 --> 00:10:21,160 you were going from insurance company to insurance company or people at the different plants. 91 00:10:21,160 --> 00:10:27,130 They needed a way to create community into these surveys are not just corporate policies, but they're also updates about. 92 00:10:27,130 --> 00:10:30,680 So until I got married and so and so, you know, is out sick. 93 00:10:30,680 --> 00:10:35,380 And, you know, here's a fun trip that I went on and things like that. 94 00:10:35,380 --> 00:10:39,940 So I'm going to look quickly at some employee examples, so the role of sexism in the workplace, 95 00:10:39,940 --> 00:10:48,130 in some corporate policies that same word had that made this a unique working experience for women. 96 00:10:48,130 --> 00:10:59,320 So my first example of a female employee at, say, a board is actually the longest serving Sandborn employee by the name of Laura Sturdevant. 97 00:10:59,320 --> 00:11:07,900 Laura was hired by the founder of the company, Daniel Sam, born in 1933 1867 at the age of 26. 98 00:11:07,900 --> 00:11:14,740 She was hired to colour maps and traced them. Quite good at the job. 99 00:11:14,740 --> 00:11:20,490 So much so that she was promoted over the years to actually become a manager, 100 00:11:20,490 --> 00:11:28,600 informed woman of the of the colouring force at at the New York factory to 101 00:11:28,600 --> 00:11:35,020 these various census recordings of her occupation show kind of the surprise, 102 00:11:35,020 --> 00:11:45,640 perhaps at the census taker of a woman manager of trying to figure out what her job, occupation or what to call her job. 103 00:11:45,640 --> 00:11:49,390 She did retire in 1918, which is before the 1920s, 104 00:11:49,390 --> 00:12:04,390 but she was able to she often wrote in to the same war survey about her time working as an employee with same work and shared some stories that, 105 00:12:04,390 --> 00:12:12,130 while she didn't call them sexist, were are quite, quite a period today to be issues related to sexism. 106 00:12:12,130 --> 00:12:23,030 So, for example, when she was first hired, there were men and women working on working as Matt colours, the men all took smoke breaks. 107 00:12:23,030 --> 00:12:27,610 So Laura was one of the more efficient of the map colours. 108 00:12:27,610 --> 00:12:37,870 And Daniel Sandborn, the company founder, asked her to keep track of how long it took on average to complete each sheet every every day. 109 00:12:37,870 --> 00:12:48,940 So he at the end of the week, he tallied all that up and her her average became the new time limit for an individual to spend on creating a sheet. 110 00:12:48,940 --> 00:12:54,160 And this made the men very angry because now they could no longer take their smoke breaks. 111 00:12:54,160 --> 00:12:59,920 And it actually ended up forcing the men to leave the company because they didn't like it. 112 00:12:59,920 --> 00:13:05,920 And it forced more women to work to step into these roles because they work more efficient. 113 00:13:05,920 --> 00:13:11,120 Similarly, there were times where the company didn't quite have as much work, 114 00:13:11,120 --> 00:13:16,630 so they would move employees around to kind of use use labour the most efficiently. 115 00:13:16,630 --> 00:13:23,140 And so Laura had real issues dealing and managing men because the women were paid piecemeal for their 116 00:13:23,140 --> 00:13:29,800 work and could actually make more than some of the lower paid men who were just paid strict wages. 117 00:13:29,800 --> 00:13:34,450 So the men were refused to do more work than they thought. 118 00:13:34,450 --> 00:13:39,170 Boys reasonable because they weren't being paid as much as the women were. 119 00:13:39,170 --> 00:13:46,280 So those are just two interesting examples of sexism in the workplace. 120 00:13:46,280 --> 00:13:50,930 Other sexism came out in the sea. Important survey about current employees. 121 00:13:50,930 --> 00:14:00,800 So, as I mentioned, there was plenty of talk about personal updates, you know, children being born, marriages, deaths, things like that. 122 00:14:00,800 --> 00:14:06,950 So this this one personal start out fairly innocently talking about someone 123 00:14:06,950 --> 00:14:11,780 about two co-workers who got married and then ends with this very disgusting, 124 00:14:11,780 --> 00:14:19,340 misogynistic, just frankly, gross discussion of, 125 00:14:19,340 --> 00:14:22,730 you know, the other female employees that are still in the office, that are unmarried, 126 00:14:22,730 --> 00:14:32,390 that a sample or a male same board employee should come and see if he wants to date and marry one of them into this. 127 00:14:32,390 --> 00:14:38,360 This is kind of rapid across these these documents. 128 00:14:38,360 --> 00:14:48,230 But intermarriage within Sandborn was actually quite, quite common because there were just so many young women and men working in these roles. 129 00:14:48,230 --> 00:14:53,480 And it led to what we would today call flex work opportunities. 130 00:14:53,480 --> 00:15:00,920 So flexible working opportunities and to be flex work was really designed as a way to 131 00:15:00,920 --> 00:15:06,860 essentially allow women to continue to work while balancing their traditional gender roles. 132 00:15:06,860 --> 00:15:11,190 So women would be working full time. They would get engaged to somebody in the company. 133 00:15:11,190 --> 00:15:22,220 They would get married. They would be expected to, you know, set up home and do all sorts of other, you know, the gender dynamics of becoming a wife. 134 00:15:22,220 --> 00:15:28,940 And then after a year or so, they could come back full time if they were felt like they were ready to. 135 00:15:28,940 --> 00:15:37,850 There were also other there are also other examples of women who would come back during the school year when their children were were at work. 136 00:15:37,850 --> 00:15:42,950 So there were ways that even though they were reinforcing the sex norms, 137 00:15:42,950 --> 00:15:49,040 women were still allowed to work and get out of the house and do other sorts of work. 138 00:15:49,040 --> 00:15:53,120 The company also started to implement benefits during the 1920s, 139 00:15:53,120 --> 00:15:59,900 including an employee stockholder plan and life insurance into these provided additional 140 00:15:59,900 --> 00:16:04,960 benefits for women workers who had worked for the company for a decent amount of time. 141 00:16:04,960 --> 00:16:14,630 And so this allowed them to have some measure of financial security that they might not otherwise have been so similar to today. 142 00:16:14,630 --> 00:16:22,010 However, it better it disadvantages the individuals who haven't quite been with the company as well, 143 00:16:22,010 --> 00:16:31,480 which oftentimes is women and other minority workers. So it's not it's not flawless, but it was some sort of work during the 1920s. 144 00:16:31,480 --> 00:16:40,070 So to wrap up, I want to just show this little screen grab from one of the newsletters that says, Is Sandborn serving one of these? 145 00:16:40,070 --> 00:16:48,520 Out of the six hundred seventy possible occupations listed by the Census Bureau, only thirty 33 have not yet been invaded by women. 146 00:16:48,520 --> 00:16:53,200 Of course, Sailboard serving was one of these Sandpoint serving. 147 00:16:53,200 --> 00:16:56,800 There was never a woman here, as far as I can tell. 148 00:16:56,800 --> 00:17:01,720 But women were so fundamental to this process that they were the ones who 149 00:17:01,720 --> 00:17:07,080 undergirded it and who helped maintain these back and make the company efficient. 150 00:17:07,080 --> 00:17:14,290 And so telling this store, telling the story of them is telling the story of the same board company as well. 151 00:17:14,290 --> 00:17:20,740 So with that, I'd like to thank you very much for tuning in and listening to me and opening up to any questions. 152 00:17:20,740 --> 00:17:25,580 Thank you. Thanks very much indeed, Jack. 153 00:17:25,580 --> 00:17:35,220 I really enjoyed that very much indeed. We've got time, I think, just for a brief set of questions. 154 00:17:35,220 --> 00:17:43,010 So I'd like to just probe a little bit some of the attitudes to women. 155 00:17:43,010 --> 00:17:49,400 Obviously, lots of contradictions. You're the caption beneath your image showed the Sambong girls. 156 00:17:49,400 --> 00:17:53,330 So obviously a sort of, you know, sort of the use of the diminutive, the young. 157 00:17:53,330 --> 00:17:57,590 But despite the fact that, as you say, some some of them were older, 158 00:17:57,590 --> 00:18:06,560 married women and the sort of interesting dynamic that you said that it was cheaper to employ women than to upgrade to the more modern, 159 00:18:06,560 --> 00:18:15,590 expensive technology of colour lithography, which was always held to be a big, big breakthrough in cartographic circles. 160 00:18:15,590 --> 00:18:22,010 But we had the deliberate decision not to use this expensive technology when you can get cheap female labour. 161 00:18:22,010 --> 00:18:27,030 But on the other hand, the women are setting, setting the pace with production and being paid. 162 00:18:27,030 --> 00:18:30,500 So there's lots of different kind of contradictory things going on there. 163 00:18:30,500 --> 00:18:34,850 And if you could prove them a bit a bit more. Yes. 164 00:18:34,850 --> 00:18:39,340 These contradictions are really actually quite fascinating, 165 00:18:39,340 --> 00:18:45,270 and they add such an additional dimension to the study of the maps because so often 166 00:18:45,270 --> 00:18:51,500 times are just kind of used to glean information about historical built environments. 167 00:18:51,500 --> 00:19:03,620 And so I think what is kind of the best way to approach this is to think about this is about the tenure that many employees had with the company. 168 00:19:03,620 --> 00:19:09,860 So when they implemented, for example, the the life insurance policy, 169 00:19:09,860 --> 00:19:16,700 you basically belong or you were employed the more payout that you got if you were to die unexpectedly. 170 00:19:16,700 --> 00:19:23,540 And in terms of workers who would get their full payout based upon how long they were working, 171 00:19:23,540 --> 00:19:34,470 I think as soon as the issues that policy went into effect, something like 70 percent of the workforce was eligible for full their full salary. 172 00:19:34,470 --> 00:19:42,380 And so it really speaks to the ways in which even though women labour was often devalued in such ways, 173 00:19:42,380 --> 00:19:45,580 there were women who felt like that this was a good job, 174 00:19:45,580 --> 00:19:50,930 that this was something outside of kind of the traditional gender roles of the 1920s in terms of 175 00:19:50,930 --> 00:19:59,210 jobs that typically had women either end as a stenographer or teachers or like bank tellers, 176 00:19:59,210 --> 00:20:02,540 things like that. It was a different type of work. 177 00:20:02,540 --> 00:20:10,910 And it's also clear to from these from these articles that because there were so many women who worked for the company, 178 00:20:10,910 --> 00:20:16,360 there was a certain sense of camaraderie that different departments would, 179 00:20:16,360 --> 00:20:20,800 you know, at lunchtime, they would all kind of like get together and, you know, 180 00:20:20,800 --> 00:20:25,340 like have book clubs or they would have field day during the summer and things like that. 181 00:20:25,340 --> 00:20:33,560 So there was definitely a social element to that, I think probably kept women well kept kept, kept women more employed there, 182 00:20:33,560 --> 00:20:38,750 because there was there was a network much in the way that, you know, anybody who feels kind of more appreciated their job. 183 00:20:38,750 --> 00:20:42,970 It has been going to a probably doesn't want to leave. Thank you. 184 00:20:42,970 --> 00:20:45,870 We have just had another question come through, so I just ask you that, 185 00:20:45,870 --> 00:20:50,790 if I may really quickly, which is that about you mentioned collective social life, 186 00:20:50,790 --> 00:20:59,670 about collective union activity, whether the workforce was unionised and if so, was there a male female difference in that? 187 00:20:59,670 --> 00:21:03,750 So as far as I can tell, they were not unionised. 188 00:21:03,750 --> 00:21:14,010 I have not seen anything that seems to indicate that there was a potential for them to become unionising, you know, got shut down or whatnot. 189 00:21:14,010 --> 00:21:22,710 The actual composition of the survey itself, I'm not sure how much editorial control was held by the companies. 190 00:21:22,710 --> 00:21:32,850 So, you know, there were attempts to unionise it. You know, they may have been completely cut out to keep Labour cheaper and whatnot. 191 00:21:32,850 --> 00:21:35,550 But as far as I can tell, there were not there. 192 00:21:35,550 --> 00:21:44,200 It's not kind of like a union dimensioned that could have worked to to improve those sorts of conditions. 193 00:21:44,200 --> 00:21:49,000 Excellent. Thank you so much. I really very much enjoyed that was just fascinating. 194 00:21:49,000 --> 00:21:52,862 Thank you.