In the preface to The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (Signet Classic, New York, 1962, p. xvi) Eric Hobsbawm writes:
Miss P. Ralph helped considerably as secretary and research assistant Miss E. Mason compiled the index.
In the preface to the new edition (1969) of Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (University of Stanford Press, Cultural Memory in the Present Series, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, p. xi, 2002) Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer write:
No one who was not involved in the writing could easily understand to what extent we feel responsible for every sentence. We dictated long stretches together; the Dialectic derives its vital energy from the tension between the two intellectual temperaments which came together in writing it. [emphasis added]
In the preface to The Morality of Law (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1964, p. vi), Lon Fuller writes:
In closing I want to express an appreciation for the contribution made to this book (and to my peace of mind) by Martha Anne Ellis, my secretary….[her] dedication and perception have largely lifted from my concern the time-consuming and anxiety-producing details that always accompany the conversion of a manuscript into final printed form.
If you’ve looked long enough at the prefaces and acknowledgements of academic books written in the past century you will often find notes thanking secretaries for typing up the manuscript of the book. Presumably the secretaries in question took a pile of handwritten pages and painstakingly converted them into typed form before sending them off to the publisher for reviewing, typesetting, and then finally printing. (My guess is that the secretaries of Messrs Hobsbawm and Fuller typed their ‘bosses’ manuscripts as part of the ‘help’ and ‘contributions’ they provided.) Matters might be thought considerably different these days when sophisticated desktop publishing software sits on everyone’s desk, and publishers demand camera-ready copies of manuscripts and articles. But you would not lose too much money on betting that where academics can afford it–mostly at private universities–they will draw upon the assistance of their department secretaries in preparing their manuscripts. Most of whom, if not all, will still be women.
Intellectual work is always facilitated by the work of others. Back in the good old days, when most academics were men, they could count on the faithful support of their wives at home who would cook, clean, and bring up their children, and of their secretaries at work, who would type up manuscripts, prepare indices, make coffee and copies, and perhaps place calls to publishers in addition to typing up letters to them. Those with grace acknowledge such assistance in their prefaces and acknowledgments; others carry on blithely, secure in the comfort of knowing they live in a world which traffics in the myth of the ‘solitary genius,’ the ‘lone artist,’ the ‘brilliant individual.’ They imagine their reputation is constructed by their mental labors alone; they do not notice that it is propped up by the labors of others too. Theirs was the glamorous bit; the unglamorous bit is easily forgotten.
It takes a village to raise a child; it took an entire departmental office to write a book.
Samir Chopra 