McLuhan’s Women (book project)

“God bless the telephone and Margaret Stewart.” So wrote philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) in a letter to a friend. Or rather, so spoke McLuhan, for he did not “write” this letter. Rather, he dictated it to his secretary, who typed not only his correspondence but also several of his books, essays, lectures, and class notes. McLuhan’s reliance on dictation helps explain why his prose often sparkles in single sentences but falters in coherence, as John Durham Peters has observed. To Stewart’s dismay, McLuhan often trusted her to revise, sign, and send out “his” letters without his having picked up a pen. Like many women around McLuhan, Stewart shaped his intellectual output in ways long overlooked.

McLuhan’s Women is the first focused study of this hidden network—secretaries, editors, publishers, anthropologists, urban planners, nuns, students, and family members—whose intellectual and practical contributions remain largely unacknowledged. McLuhan’s key concepts—“the global village,” “the medium is the message”—are globally familiar, yet the archives reveal how often his ideas developed in dialogue with women. His annotated library of six thousand volumes and fifty meters of manuscripts at North American archives contain untapped evidence of these collaborations.

Trained as a scholar of eighteenth-century literature, I came to McLuhan through his ideas of “print culture” and his use of literary texts in advancing his arguments. After publishing The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain, I traveled to the site of the McLuhan papers to pursue related research, and since then, my expertise in literary history, bibliography, and paleography have allowed me to decipher, contextualize, and recognize the importance of McLuhan’s letters and diaries which record his extraordinary reading habits. I have published work such as “Elsie McLuhan’s Vocal Science” (PMLA) and my edited collection Reading McLuhan Reading (Routledge).

McLuhan’s Women demonstrates how figures such as anthropologists Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Dorothy Lee, urban planners and architects Jane Jacobs and Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, and literary historians such as Q. D. Leavis, M.C. Bradbrook, Marjorie Hope Nicholson informed McLuhan’s ideas, and how publishers such as Ruth Nanda Anshen shaped his books and promoted his fame. It examines overlooked correspondence between McLuhan and his former students, from nuns to feminists to major interlocutors such as Kamala Bhatia and Sheila Watson. It foregrounds the roles played by his mother Elsie, a professional elocutionist; his wife Corinne, and his four daughters, Stephanie, Teresa, Mary, and Elizabeth. Just as “Marg” Stewart functioned as McLuhan’s “extended mind,” so all of these women shaped “his” ideas still debated worldwide.

Just as my books The Women of Grub Street and The Invention of the Oral drew on archival research to tell new stories and redirect scholarly inquiry, so McLuhan’s Women at once reveals and suggests the implications of a web of female voices absent from standard biographies. McLuhan’s theories of media were themselves media events—spoken words transformed by the women who preserved, shaped, and extended them. Whether or not we agree with him, his globally influential theories and concepts -- such as “print culture,” “the global village,” and “extensions of man” emerge here not as the work of a solitary genius but as a collaborative intellectual project shaped by women’s scholarship, labor, and critique.