Augusta Lewis Troup, typesetter & labor leader

In honour of women in technology for Ada Lovelace Day, I decided to look back in history and see if I could find out about women who worked in the publishing industry. There were very few names to work from, and eventually, I looked into the life of Augusta Lewis Troup — with what limited information I could find online — because she was an example of someone who used her talents and crafts for social change.

Augusta Lewis Troup (1848-1920) is perhaps best remembered for her labor leadership as a vice-president of the Working Women’s Association as well as the Women’s Typographical Union, where she was elected president in 1870. She then became the first woman to hold a national union office as a corresponding secretary of the International Typographical Union. She was a reporter on the New York Sun, then worked as a typesetter on the New York Era and the New York World.

To better understand the context of how she became a feminist labor leader, it’s necessary to be aware of the working conditions of female typesetters in the newspaper industry at the time:

A survey of New York city working women indicated that female typesetters earned more than any other group, except professionals and the self-employed. Much like the profession of medicine in this same period, the trade of printing had a strong attraction for women who aspired to a more profitable and honorable field for their labor. Moreover, typesetting was a skill. Unlike most other jobs that women could hold, typesetting permitted them a certain degree of the craft-pride that was the nineteenth-century male worker’s primary source of dignity. Like the pioneering factory operatives at Lowell in the 1830’s female typesetters took from their work a sense of dignity and autonomy distinctive in a society that praised dependence in women.

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As early as 1853, New York City newspaper owners tried to break the union’s power during a strike by hiring women and training them to set type. Over the years, most women entered the industry in this fashion.

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The National Typographical Union’s response to the use of women as strikebreakers was to try to keep them out of the printing industry altogether. The union refused to organize women, hoping that this policy would drive them, if not back to their kitchens, at least out of the composing room. 

In December 1867, the local union called a strike against the New York World, which moved to hire women and trained over a hundred women during the strike. When a settlement was reached 10 months later, the women typesetters were dismissed, despite protests. 

Curiously, there is very little information online on the professional side of her life, apart from mention that she was, for a time, an “experimental machine typesetter”. She began in the newspaper industry as a writer, and was quoted to say she sought work as a printer to enrich her education in writing. 

After she was fired, Augusta Lewis found a job demonstrating the new Alden typesetting machine. She was already a journalist and typesetter for The Revolution, a publication she helped to launch with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  Within weeks after the strike, the Working Women’s Association was formed at the offices of The Revolution in 1868. In 1875, she married Alexander Troup, an officer and an important figure in the National Typographical Union. They moved to New Haven, Conneticut, and founded The New Haven Union, a newspaper dedicated to labor and union issues. She was later also known as a benefactor of Italian immigrants.

From an article at the Yale-New Haven Teachers’ Institute:

Throughout her later life, Augusta Troup encouraged education among immigrant families in New Haven and spent her days involved in socially conscious projects for the poor. The [Troup Middle School] was restructured in 1989 as the Troup Magnet Academy of Sciences. The magnet school model was developed with the expressed purpose of reducing racial, ethnic and economic isolation [—] all notions that Augusta Lewis Troup would have promoted.

The irony is, relatively little information is available about her achievements as a typesetter, writer and journalist. But if  that were all that she had accomplished, she would have faded into history like many other working women of the time.

Sources and further reading:

• “The Women of Paris & Their French Revolution” by Dominique Godineau & Katherine Streip
• Feminism & Suffrage by Ellen Carol DuBois
• History of the Labor Movement in the United States by Philip Sheldon Foner
• The Swifts: Printers in the Age of Typesetting Races by Walker Rumble
• Unseen Hands: Augusta Lewis Troup
• Loose in Research Libraries
• 75 Suffragists
• Building Historidal Understanding by Exploring American Landscapes