Beyond ‘Clerical Cartography’: Gender and the (Re)Production of Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

Building on recent scholarship, this paper examines the gendered divisions of labour in the production of fire insurance maps for the Sanborn Map Company. As a major producer of map titles in the United States during the twentieth century, Sanborn employed one of the largest groups of women cartographers (between 200 and 350). The paper focuses on three aspects of women's lives at Sanborn: their daily work, their role in the social fabric of the company, and how discrimination was (and sometimes was not) reproduced within the company. Through these aspects, the paper dispels the notion that women's contributions at Sanborn were simply ‘clerical cartographic' work and argues that they undergirded the success of the entire company’s operations. In the process, this paper aims to show how a processual approach to the history of cartography allows attention to be paid to marginalized actors.