Ordinatrices: About the Negative Spaces of Early Computing

The history of computing is notoriously incomplete when it comes to the women who have shaped it as engineers, scientists, and theorists. This video essay hypothesizes that this invisibility originated well before that, in the age of computing as manual labor, a profession once known as secretarial work. Two images support this view. The opening shot of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, showing a colossal New York building full of rows of busy secretaries as far as the eye can see, might seem like a computer tower to the 21st-century eye that has since contemplated the humanoid programs that populate the mainframes of Tron. In the same city and diegetic period (although the series was not created until almost half a century after Wilder’s film), Mad Men is also partly set in one of those open spaces where dozens of secretaries operate. Typing on their keyboards, formatting notes, receiving and transferring phone calls, carrying messages, updating diaries, and consulting rolodexes, they perform a myriad of tasks that have eventually evolved into the work contemporary employees do alone at their computers. In the seventh and final season, an IBM 360 computer enters the office, terrifying the creatives and secretaries alike. Yet it is these women who have the most to fear from this machine employment-wise. In French, ordinatrice (computress) could have been the name of the ordinateur (computer, with a masculine suffix). This video essay sets out to demonstrate the existence of ordinatrices in the plural, in the interval between the post-war years and the computer age.