Well, thank you very much for that introduction, Liz.
So great to be here and sharing some knowledge with you all about women in the history of cartography.
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.
And today I'll be talking to you about some work that I did during my master's project on the Sandborn Map Company.
So the title of my project is Beyond Clerical Cartography, Gender and the production of Sam Fire turns maps in the 1920s.
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.
For those of you who may not be aware, so there's an example of a Sandborn map here.
A Sandborn map is a type of map designed specifically for use in the fire insurance industry.
And the whole point is that it allows underwriters to remotely assess risk.
So instead of sending out an agent to look at a prospective building that they wanted to insure,
they could stay in the comfort of their own offices and look at these maps.
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.
But they also look at the various things that would influence the ability for a building to burn.
So they will highlight industries that might use a lot of heat or might be working with flammable chemicals.
They show all the different building materials.
So here the pink colour refers to buildings that are made out of brick and thus are more fire resistant.
So these maps are kind of chock full of information about the built environment, the United States.
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.
So same were mapped about 12000 places from the during the years that it was active in producing these fire insurance maps.
So roughly about 100 years from the late 1860 to the early 1970s, they mapped over 12000 towns and cities.
At their height during the 1920s, they had about a thousand employees.
And they produced over a million unique sheets.
So this is not their total output, they produce many, many millions more, but purely in terms of sheets that are unique.
Ready to be copyrighted. There are roughly about a million of those that that exist.
So of this. Of the roughly 1000 employees that Sam board had during the 1920s.
I estimate that roughly about one third of that, these 1000 employees were women.
And so having a thousand employees places,
same board as one of the largest companies or one of the largest assemblages of cartographers in the United States during the 20th century.
And with three hundred women on on payroll, make them probably one of the largest employers of women cartographers as well.
And so is Judith Tiner. Has Britain recently about the role of women in the history of cartography?
There's been little on the day to day work of making maps.
And there's been little about the role of individuals who work for government agencies, commercial companies, societies and institutions.
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
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.
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.
So traditionally a motive.
Know history of cartography have kind of ratified the sole cartographer.
What I like to call the capital C cartographer, typically a man,
typically somebody who went out into the field and it was the first to map something
or was the first to use this method or created a very dynamic series of matter.
Who knows what it typically this work reifies one individual and says, I'll look at how great they are.
And sometimes it talks about the support staff, not quite as often, or that support staff is is not mentioned at all.
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,
whether that be the individuals who help outfit the cartographer's so that they can go out into the field.
And so in the wood,
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,
where a cartographer is equal to anyone who touches the map.
Anyone who somehow influences the creation in the development of it has a claim to call themselves cartographer.
And so this is really quite important when we are talking about the role of women in the history of cartography,
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.
They were doing more. Claire, what we would probably see as clerical task, but as I am going to show,
these clerical tasks are very much essential to the undergirding of the entire operation of taking a map from draught
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.
And I believe that this is this goes for other companies as well.
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,
but I will kind of roughly go through the process.
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.
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.
Ones that don't have paid women workers. But speaking strictly in the sense of people who were on the payroll.
Women were most prominent in these departments that are highlighted in red.
So when the same board map was commissioned to be made the first step, a survey will go out to the field,
create a draught map, and then send a draught map back to one of Sanborn's three factories.
So they had a factory outside of New York City. They had one in Chicago and one in San Francisco.
And women worked at all of those plants.
It would go through a through the examining and proofing departments, both of which have them and working for them in these departments.
Employees would make sure that basically the surveyor had actually surveyed everything that needed to be surveyed.
They had left anything out by accident in the street, names for corrective things like that.
Here they would corroborate with other data sources. Then it would get sent to the draughting and composing department where the draught maps
made by the surveyor would be redrawn so that they would take up the least number of pages.
Then after the composing department,
they would go down to be printed would be lithographer lithographic printed and then they after each individual sheet was printed,
they would be sent to the colouring department. The covering department was one of the largest at Sandborn, an employee.
The most number of women in the colouring department was so large because Seymour coloured everything by hand.
They found it cheaper to employ individuals to colour things by hand than it was to use lithography.
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.
It would get bound and then shipped out to insurance agents if these were
corrections to go onto an already existing map as a way to kind of save money.
They would go to the cutting department where the where women would individually cut out each correction and assemble them to be shipped off.
And then they would be shipped to women who worked out in major American cities whose
sole job was to go to individual insurance agents and pasted these corrections.
And so so as hopefully as you can gather from this process, women are an integral part of this work,
while their work in some ways was you could think of it as like a forced assembly line.
You know, they might just be colouring all day long or cutting cutting various corrections all day long.
What they were doing is fundamental to the this process.
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
the next couple of minutes from an internal newsletter called the Sandborn Survey.
This newsletter was not just a way for the company to spread out information about its policies,
but it was also a way to create a community out of a geographically dispersed workforce.
So with so many employees all over the United States, whether they were Sandborn surveyors on the move pastern,
you were going from insurance company to insurance company or people at the different plants.
They needed a way to create community into these surveys are not just corporate policies, but they're also updates about.
So until I got married and so and so, you know, is out sick.
And, you know, here's a fun trip that I went on and things like that.
So I'm going to look quickly at some employee examples, so the role of sexism in the workplace,
in some corporate policies that same word had that made this a unique working experience for women.
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.
Laura was hired by the founder of the company, Daniel Sam, born in 1933 1867 at the age of 26.
She was hired to colour maps and traced them. Quite good at the job.
So much so that she was promoted over the years to actually become a manager,
informed woman of the of the colouring force at at the New York factory to
these various census recordings of her occupation show kind of the surprise,
perhaps at the census taker of a woman manager of trying to figure out what her job, occupation or what to call her job.
She did retire in 1918, which is before the 1920s,
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,
while she didn't call them sexist, were are quite, quite a period today to be issues related to sexism.
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.
So Laura was one of the more efficient of the map colours.
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.
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.
And this made the men very angry because now they could no longer take their smoke breaks.
And it actually ended up forcing the men to leave the company because they didn't like it.
And it forced more women to work to step into these roles because they work more efficient.
Similarly, there were times where the company didn't quite have as much work,
so they would move employees around to kind of use use labour the most efficiently.
And so Laura had real issues dealing and managing men because the women were paid piecemeal for their
work and could actually make more than some of the lower paid men who were just paid strict wages.
So the men were refused to do more work than they thought.
Boys reasonable because they weren't being paid as much as the women were.
So those are just two interesting examples of sexism in the workplace.
Other sexism came out in the sea. Important survey about current employees.
So, as I mentioned, there was plenty of talk about personal updates, you know, children being born, marriages, deaths, things like that.
So this this one personal start out fairly innocently talking about someone
about two co-workers who got married and then ends with this very disgusting,
misogynistic, just frankly, gross discussion of,
you know, the other female employees that are still in the office, that are unmarried,
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.
This is kind of rapid across these these documents.
But intermarriage within Sandborn was actually quite, quite common because there were just so many young women and men working in these roles.
And it led to what we would today call flex work opportunities.
So flexible working opportunities and to be flex work was really designed as a way to
essentially allow women to continue to work while balancing their traditional gender roles.
So women would be working full time. They would get engaged to somebody in the company.
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.
And then after a year or so, they could come back full time if they were felt like they were ready to.
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.
So there were ways that even though they were reinforcing the sex norms,
women were still allowed to work and get out of the house and do other sorts of work.
The company also started to implement benefits during the 1920s,
including an employee stockholder plan and life insurance into these provided additional
benefits for women workers who had worked for the company for a decent amount of time.
And so this allowed them to have some measure of financial security that they might not otherwise have been so similar to today.
However, it better it disadvantages the individuals who haven't quite been with the company as well,
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.
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?
Out of the six hundred seventy possible occupations listed by the Census Bureau, only thirty 33 have not yet been invaded by women.
Of course, Sailboard serving was one of these Sandpoint serving.
There was never a woman here, as far as I can tell.
But women were so fundamental to this process that they were the ones who
undergirded it and who helped maintain these back and make the company efficient.
And so telling this store, telling the story of them is telling the story of the same board company as well.
So with that, I'd like to thank you very much for tuning in and listening to me and opening up to any questions.
Thank you. Thanks very much indeed, Jack.
I really enjoyed that very much indeed. We've got time, I think, just for a brief set of questions.
So I'd like to just probe a little bit some of the attitudes to women.
Obviously, lots of contradictions. You're the caption beneath your image showed the Sambong girls.
So obviously a sort of, you know, sort of the use of the diminutive, the young.
But despite the fact that, as you say, some some of them were older,
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,
expensive technology of colour lithography, which was always held to be a big, big breakthrough in cartographic circles.
But we had the deliberate decision not to use this expensive technology when you can get cheap female labour.
But on the other hand, the women are setting, setting the pace with production and being paid.
So there's lots of different kind of contradictory things going on there.
And if you could prove them a bit a bit more. Yes.
These contradictions are really actually quite fascinating,
and they add such an additional dimension to the study of the maps because so often
times are just kind of used to glean information about historical built environments.
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.
So when they implemented, for example, the the life insurance policy,
you basically belong or you were employed the more payout that you got if you were to die unexpectedly.
And in terms of workers who would get their full payout based upon how long they were working,
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.
And so it really speaks to the ways in which even though women labour was often devalued in such ways,
there were women who felt like that this was a good job,
that this was something outside of kind of the traditional gender roles of the 1920s in terms of
jobs that typically had women either end as a stenographer or teachers or like bank tellers,
things like that. It was a different type of work.
And it's also clear to from these from these articles that because there were so many women who worked for the company,
there was a certain sense of camaraderie that different departments would,
you know, at lunchtime, they would all kind of like get together and, you know,
like have book clubs or they would have field day during the summer and things like that.
So there was definitely a social element to that, I think probably kept women well kept kept, kept women more employed there,
because there was there was a network much in the way that, you know, anybody who feels kind of more appreciated their job.
It has been going to a probably doesn't want to leave. Thank you.
We have just had another question come through, so I just ask you that,
if I may really quickly, which is that about you mentioned collective social life,
about collective union activity, whether the workforce was unionised and if so, was there a male female difference in that?
So as far as I can tell, they were not unionised.
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.
The actual composition of the survey itself, I'm not sure how much editorial control was held by the companies.
So, you know, there were attempts to unionise it. You know, they may have been completely cut out to keep Labour cheaper and whatnot.
But as far as I can tell, there were not there.
It's not kind of like a union dimensioned that could have worked to to improve those sorts of conditions.
Excellent. Thank you so much. I really very much enjoyed that was just fascinating.
Thank you.