There is a photograph, taken around 1920, of the Olivetti manager Domenico Burzio. Olivetti was the first Italian company to make a typewriter, and it went on, after World War II, to embody the spirit of Italy in the world, including a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1952). But let’s return to Domenico Burzio: in this photograph, Burzio is standing with two other men. He examines a piece of machinery, possibly giving orders to his colleagues about how to improve it. What I like about this photograph is that it accidentally includes something else: behind Burzio’s back, we can see four factory workers, all of them women.
It is symbolic of the way in which Olivetti history (and much of business history) has been written: as a succession of brilliant decisions taken by men like Burzio, the company founder Camillo Olivetti and his son Adriano Olivetti. But in this photograph, something has gone wrong: the manual labour, which is female labour, gives the lie to Burzio’s intellectual (male) productivity. The photograph tries to protect the story, but just as she is about to be excluded, the woman on the right stares back at the camera – at us – and exposes her presence.
The English word ‘typewriter’ can refer both to the machine and to the woman who uses it, while the Italian word ‘macchina’ is gender-feminine, blurring the boundaries between the technological and the biological. Olivetti represented these two modern ‘bodies’ in constant communication. The company’s advertising campaigns were famously artistic, involving the collaboration of painters like Giovanni Pintori and poets like Leonardo Sinisgalli. The machine-woman connection soon became a signature of Olivetti graphics, and since the intended audience was the businessman, the product became the ‘typewriter,’ in the double-sense of the word.
We must think of such marketing strategies within the contexts of two World Wars and international nuclear arms races, when the social consequences of technological development counselled suspicion, if not rejection. Despite the Futurists, Italian humanistic culture was by and large distrustful of modernity, and Olivetti was fighting an uphill battle to make machines friendly again. Representing them together with the female body was one way of attracting the attention of consumers while mobilizing associations of hospitality and care, but also liberation and experimentation.
As Olivetti’s advertising campaigns worked to humanize the machine, they also worked to dehumanize the typist. In a series of commercials broadcast on American television in the early 1970s, the company introduced a set of autocorrect features that made Olivetti ‘the typewriter with a brain inside.’ The co-star of these commercials was the ‘Olivetti girl,’ an American typist obsessed with the machine, and by ascribing the brain to the technology, the company boldly claimed to announce the end of female intelligence.
Until recently, we knew very little about how these representations were received. But the photographs of Bettye Lane (1930-2012), now housed at Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library, provide a glimpse of organized resistance. In response to the American commercials, and the English-language print advertisements that accompanied them, activists in New York City marched with posters that re-signified Olivetti’s own messages: ‘Attention women,’ the Olivetti girl now warned, ‘the male chauvinist pig wants you.’
The story of women at Olivetti – and at many other companies – remains to be told, but it is not at all clear that the documentation is available. When women were not being used as advertising material, they were unable to inscribe themselves in institutional history, and it is only in rare moments, like in the photograph of Domenico Burzio, that they stare across time. Any student of modern Italy would do well to stare back.
Ing. C. Olivetti & Co. c. 1920
StoriaOlivetti.com 1926
Harvard University 1972
