In October 1986, James Murray was looking for a new assistant for the OED.
The search for an assistant involved writing many letters, asking his contacts for any recommendations.
One of Murray's correspondence on this occasion was Charles Herford, professor of English at Victoria University, Manchester.
And his reply to Murray provides me with the quotation of my title, Must It Be a Man?
The kind of work you require is, I should say, such as women of good linguistic and literary training are particularly well qualified for.
Harvard was neither the first nor the last to suggest that women be engaged to work on the first edition of the dictionary.
And in fact, women made a significant contribution to the project from its earliest days.
This shouldn't be surprising when we remember that one of the many passions of Frederick Furnivall,
arguably the key figure in the conception of the dictionary and one of its most energetic supporters
and contributors throughout his life was his passionate advocacy of equality of opportunity for women.
It's therefore to be expected that even in the very first public communication about the proposed dictionary project,
a circular issued in 1857 by Furnivall and two other members of the Philological Society appealing for volunteers to help collect quotations.
The list of people who'd already undertaken to read particular books for this purpose included a lily,
a lady or other lady, as you can see, since she was not listed by name.
By the time another list of books to read was issued the following year, six works were listed as being read by women,
including one who is named explicitly Harriet's too good,
a Yorkshire rector's wife and minor author and another who can be identified as Safire Easdale,
the daughter of a Colchester Tanner who continued to read texts for the dictionary well into
the eighteen eighties and who was credited in 1884 with having supplied 5000 quotations.
By 1861, over a dozen women were reading the dictionary.
The number would grow and grow within five years of James Murray's taking over as editor in 1879.
He could count nearly 240 of them. And reading for the dictionary is the first in a sequence of tasks I'd like to look at,
considering in each case some of the women who carried them out,
women made a particularly significant contribution to reading, making up something like a third of the lists of named readers for the first edition.
Of course, some readers contributed very little in terms of actual numbers of quotations,
but there are plenty of women whose contribution is numerically significant.
For example, by 1888, Janet Humphreys, the author of a number of books for children,
had contributed nearly 19000 quotations, making her the 11th most prolific contributor of all at that point.
There were clearly many well-educated women who found a fulfilment in contributing
in this way to a great scholarly project that was perhaps harder to come by.
Elsewhere. In the later history of the dictionary, too, we have benefited from some exceptionally impressive contributions of quotations by women.
None more so than the journalist and literary Lioness Marghani to Laski, who over 30 years, starting in the 1950s,
contributed a quarter of a million quotations mainly to the OED supplement, edited by Robert Birchfield.
I should add that the group of paid freelancers who currently make up we are EDI's
directed general reading programme and the person who runs it are all women.
And in fact, have been for some years. Now, reading during the compilation of the first edition of the OED was generally unpaid,
voluntary work, and so at least one can say that the women readers were paid no less than the men.
A few readers did receive payment for reading during the early years, and Murry's added editorship, including at least two women.
However, the only one about whom I know anything wasn't a great success.
Eleanor Marx, daughter of the more famous Carl. And a personal friend of Furnivall.
She sent James Murray a claim for 100 hours,
a hundred and ten hours work spent collecting evidence for just 144 words work which he thought he could have done in 12 hours.
Although he undertook to pay her in full, she wasn't asked to do any further reading.
Now, the collection of quotations was it was only the first stage in the process of compiling dictionary entries.
The millions of quotations slips that eventually found their way into James Murray's
scriptorium then had to be sorted alphabetically by the word which each quotation illustrated.
The bulk of this task was undertaken by Miss Scott and Miss Skipper, two young women,
a fair education from the village of Mill Hill, where James Murray was living when he began work on the dictionary in 1879.
They worked together at this huge task for nearly three years, with Ellen Skipper carrying on for another three.
After that, once the quotations were in order, the actual lexicography could begin in earnest.
The compilation of dictionary entries. In the early days of the project,
Frederick Furnivall had realised that the task of compiling every entry was too big for one person and had conceived a way of spreading the load.
Preliminary work could be done by a body of volunteer sub editors, each of whom would undertake a letter of the alphabet or part of one.
A sub editor would be sent all the available quotations for their assigned letter and would prepare preliminary draughts of entries.
The subeditors assembled by Furnivall varied enormously in ability,
and unfortunately he failed to supervise their work closely enough so that when James Murray took over as editor,
he inherited a very heterogeneous body of material, most of which was lexical graphically of very little use.
One of the more conscientious of furnivall subeditors and the only woman amongst them was the novelist Charlotte Young.
She undertook the letter N in 1862 and not only worked her way right through it.
Many celebrities failed to finish their allocated letter, but compiled a complete wordlist for the letter.
Noting the range of evidence collected for each word, which was published anonymously in 1865, she was one of only three subeditors to do this.
She did abandon the work some years before James Murray took over,
but her work would have been of significant value when the letter N came to be edited by William Craigie.
Nearly half a century later.
The system of voluntary subeditors was revived in a somewhat different form by Murray out of the roughly 60 some editors who worked in this period.
Five were women, including one of the most prolific Jazmyne, Matt Brown, who is subeditor parts of five different letters.
Like many subeditors, she was also a reader with 4500 quotations to her name.
By 1884. And after the subediting, the materials at last reached the scriptorium or one of one or other of the dictionaries,
other offices where the first full draughts of dictionary entries would be prepared
by members of its staff overseen by Murree or one of the other three editors.
The first woman to work as one of these assistants was probably Murray's eldest daughter, Hilda, in the 80s 90s.
She was soon joined by her sisters, Elsie and Ross Frith, although in fact,
all of the 11 I think Murray children worked in the scriptorium earning pocket money by helping with the alphabetical sorting of slips.
Now, it's not clear whether Hilda worked directly on dictionary entries as Elsie and Roz Frith did,
nor whether she was paid for her work as they were for many years as fully fledged members of staff.
But she did valuable work for the project,
including the laborious task of compiling statistics on the number of words of various kinds in each dictionary.
Farcical dictionary. Second, Ed Henry Bradley also took on one of his daughters.
He formally engaged his daughter Eleanor as as an assistant in 1897, and she continued to work on the dictionary and supplement until 1932.
And even after that, she continued to contribute quotations until not long before her death.
In 1950, William Craig, his sister in law, Bella Hutcheon, worked on the dictionary from 1915 to 1921.
Now, members of the family, you might say, are different.
The first female non relative to join the staff of the OED was Mary Dormer Harris, who worked for a few months as an assistant in 1895.
Shortly after graduating in English from Lady Margaret Hall. But the suggestion that women might be taken on as assistance was first made many
years earlier and was repeated many times before Mary Harris arrived in 1882.
The American old English scholar Albert Cook suggested to Murray that he might engage Mariah Whitney,
the sister of the famous philologists William Dwight Whitney, who was at this time studying Germanic languages in Leipzig for whatever reason.
Nothing came of Cookes suggestion, nor the suggestion needs to marry by another English scholar.
In 1884, Edward Arber, a great friend of James Murray, wrote to him as to assistance.
I do not know what you require of them only if you do not require Sanskrit at Icelandic, etc.
I should strongly advise you to employ women. They are more conscientious and cheaper.
In 1889, Murray himself wrote to a yuppie to suggest engaging a little feminine assistance.
The suggestion met with a favourable reception from a U. P. Philip Middleton Jel wrote back.
I wish we could enlist a few thoroughly competent and qualified women in the work.
There are many philologists amongst them nowadays, but it will be another six years before Mary Harris arrived and she stayed only briefly.
She was followed by a Miss M. Turner, who joined Bradlees staff in 1898 for a year and the rather more durable Ethelwyn Steam,
an Oxford wine merchant's daughter who was taken on by William Craigie in 1981 and
remained on the staff until the completion of editorial work on the first supplement.
The dictionary, which was published in 1933. She married a fellow assistant, Laurence Powell, on bottom right here in nineteen nine.
In fact, a good half dozen women worked on the 1933 supplement, including Jesse Senior,
who, as Jesse Colson went on to be an important figure in Oxford lexicography.
She made a sufficiently substantial contribution to the first edition of the shorter OED that her name appeared on the title page.
The first woman to do so on an Oxford dictionary. And she edited several other dictionaries in her own right.
Interestingly, she was an English graduate from the University of Leeds, where she was almost certainly taught by the former OED staff member.
J.R. Tolkien. Several other women who worked on the supplement and other Oxford dictionaries had also studied at Leeds under Torquing,
who apparently gave some of his students special training in lexicography when Robert Birchfield
began to assemble a new staff of lexicographers in the 1950s to work on the new supplement.
It included women from the start, and there has been a pretty even gender balance ever since.
With women well represented across different grades and types of work, two women have held the title of deputy chief editor of the OED,
Sandra Rieffel, who was joint deputy with John Sykes under Birchfield on the supplement,
and Penny Silver, who succeeded Edmund Vyner as deputy chief editor under John Simpson and who went on
to become director of the OED but to return to the compilation of the first edition.
Once the copy for a dictionary entry had been draughted by an assistant and reviewed by his or her chief editor,
printed proofs were sent out to be read by an important group of volunteers whose contribution went far beyond simple typographical correction.
Their comments could lead to a definition being extensively we would reworded or a whole entry being recast.
Most of these readers were men.
But there is one important exception the historian Edith Thompson, who read and marked up OED proofs from 1882 until her death in 1929.
Edith would also provide expert comment on particular historical terms.
And this final group of specialist consultants advising on particular words, of course, included women.
All four editors of the first edition would consult whoever might be most useful in regard to a particular word in a particular subject area.
Of course, it's not surprising in view of the state of the world of scholarship at this time,
that in many subject areas the pre-eminent scholars were men.
But there were some domains where women came into their own.
Someone whom James Murray consulted about historical cooking terms and who was in fact writing a book of her own on early cookery,
was the writer Janet Humphries, who in fact became a friend of the Murray family and who provides me with a link to the last woman.
I'd like to consider who was in some ways one of the most important of all.
Now, several letters from Janet Humphries survive amongst the Murray papers in the Bodleian Library.
Many of them are distinctly gushing in tone, reflecting her style as an author.
US and this one from 1886 is no exception.
It's addressed to James Murray's wife, ADA. Pleased to give the paper to Hilda.
Then she will teach the little ones. Professor Harold will find a holes in the metre.
Must be poetry of some sort. Then give an extra kiss to Elfrink and Elsie Minar, Baby and Co.
P.S. This letter requires no answer because you are a married woman.
That is a joke. Married women have plenty to do.
The contribution of ADA Murray to the OED is immeasurable.
It's also hard to measure and is often overlooked.
She did read and excerpt books for the dictionary like so many others.
She doesn't seem to have worked alongside her husband in the scriptorium like her daughters,
but she did act as James Laris, unpaid secretary for many years.
And, of course, around the Murray household, thereby allowing Murray to concentrate all his energies on his work.
He described her as the pivot on which the whole house revolved, and he consulted her on every important decision.
It seems to have been at her urging that he decided to take on the editorship of the dictionary in the first place.
In many respects, ADA Murray is a more typical representative of the women of her time than many of the other women I've mentioned.
And perhaps she makes a fitting figure on which to end. Many women were obliged by circumstances to be merely wives, mothers and housekeepers,
although in Ada's case, her domestic contribution to the dictionary was hugely important.
But I hope I've been able to show that the OED did provide many opportunities for women to make as much of an
intellectual contribution as was possible within the constraints of the society in which it was conceived.
And they provided what was and it provided what was, if anything, a comparatively progressive environment in which to make such contributions.