ABSTRACT
Feminine writing replaces masculine stenography as that which displaces masculine "writing" in turn. Now, the "lightness" of Gregg characters promised to rub off onto the female stenographer's figure - and, in the process, onto the moral seriousness of reformed writing. The gender politics of fin-de-siècle stenography, however, make any such distinction between productive and escapist reading untenable. For it's male clerks - not their growing number of female competitors - who took on a central role in tum-of-the-century debates about the status of leisure reading in a society where literacy was becoming a widespread vocational skill. Victorian radicals' insistence on communication as an end in itself helps make sense of the place that stenography shared with telepathy and postal reform among Pitman's successive campaigns against everything from vivisection to vaccination by way of smoking, meat-eating, the Com Laws, and imperial measures. Shorthand conspired with the early-Victorian campaign for untaxed paper to displace radicalism from message to medium.
