Olivetti Typewriter Ad “As She Recalled It”

So pleased to see that Margaret Talbot, a 22-year veteran staff writer for The New Yorker, has taken the trouble to check the facts laid out in my ozTypewriter blog posts of September 2020. Talbot devoted a lengthy "A Critic at Large" article to Shere Hite in the March 9 issue of The New Yorker. Fittingly, Talbot's piece appeared under the headline "Doing It Right", for that is exactly what Talbot did. She checked and she worded things correctly.

Following Hite’s death in London in September 2020, I corrected the story about the Olivetti typewriter advertisement which allegedly propelled Hite toward the women’s movement. In obituaries for Hite that were published around the world, a false claim was repeated ad nauseam, unchecked and unsubstantiated. A few minutes’ research would have confirmed the truth. Surprisingly, the supposed fact-checking New York Times was among the many guilty parties.

Hite appeared in "Olivetti Girls" ads in 1971 to help her pay college fees while at Columbia University. Her recollection of the wording of the ads, some 10 years after they appeared, was faulty. Talbot doesn’t fall for the same trap as Hite’s obituary writers did – not quite, anyway. She wrote that the words contained in an “advertising campaign for Olivetti electric typewriters, in which she was cast as a fetching secretary” were those “as she recalled it” and "something like". These six words are critical, for the issue I had raised back in 2020 was about accuracy in reporting. What Hite said in 1982 was not what the ad said. A few people said it didn’t matter. They were wrong. It did matter. Accuracy is everything. Accuracy is the truth.

Most if not all of the ads were sexist in the extreme. But that wasn’t the point. The point was what they actually said, not what anyone thought they said

Richard Polt commented on my 2020 posts: “This topic has stirred up a bit of friendly controversy in the typosphere. It's always good for us to keep thinking both about the documented facts of history, and about the more elusive question of the meaning of those facts … In any case, this is fascinating material for cultural interpretation, and it's a very successful advertising campaign inasmuch as we are still paying close attention to it, decades later.”