“Girls increase your salary and lessen your work.”

In 1915, Emma Belle Dearborn, a seasoned shorthand and typing teacher in the United States’ high schools, observed her students’ difficulties in mastering traditional shorthand methods. That’s when she set about developing her own shorthand method. Initially called the Short-Type System, then Brief English and finally Speedwriting, this new rapid writing system revolutionized the United States’ shorthand.

Unlike conventional systems based on arbitrary signs that require extensive learning, Emma Belle Dearborn has chosen to base her method solely on alphabetical characters. This decision makes her system more accessible and quicker to master. It also enabled Speedwriting to become the first shorthand system adaptable to both handwriting and type on typewriters of the era. As Emma Belle Dearborn pointed out when she published her method in 1925: without the improved performance of typewriters, Speedwriting would have been much less successful.

At a time when “nimble fingers” were increasingly in demand as shorthand typists, Emma Belle Dearborn’s invention was a decisive step forward. Thanks to her, shorthand opened up new professional opportunities for many people. Her method was taught in many schools and exported internationally, with adaptations in French, Italian and Spanish. Over the years, several revisions of Speedwriting were developed, erasing all traces of its creator’s original work.

Emma Dearborn’s work in shorthand is directly connected with the insatiable quest for speed observed from the beginnings of writing to the rise of 21st-century technologies. Between a digitization of Speedwriting and an analysis of its various revisions, this research project aims to explore shorthand from a new angle, moving away from traditional methods, through a study of a method designed by a woman for women.