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In October 1986, James Murray was looking for a new assistant for the OED.

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The search for an assistant involved writing many letters, asking his contacts for any recommendations.

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One of Murray's correspondence on this occasion was Charles Herford, professor of English at Victoria University, Manchester.

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And his reply to Murray provides me with the quotation of my title, Must It Be a Man?

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The kind of work you require is, I should say, such as women of good linguistic and literary training are particularly well qualified for.

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Harvard was neither the first nor the last to suggest that women be engaged to work on the first edition of the dictionary.

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And in fact, women made a significant contribution to the project from its earliest days.

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This shouldn't be surprising when we remember that one of the many passions of Frederick Furnivall,

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arguably the key figure in the conception of the dictionary and one of its most energetic supporters

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and contributors throughout his life was his passionate advocacy of equality of opportunity for women.

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It's therefore to be expected that even in the very first public communication about the proposed dictionary project,

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a circular issued in 1857 by Furnivall and two other members of the Philological Society appealing for volunteers to help collect quotations.

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The list of people who'd already undertaken to read particular books for this purpose included a lily,

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a lady or other lady, as you can see, since she was not listed by name.

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By the time another list of books to read was issued the following year, six works were listed as being read by women,

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including one who is named explicitly Harriet's too good,

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a Yorkshire rector's wife and minor author and another who can be identified as Safire Easdale,

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the daughter of a Colchester Tanner who continued to read texts for the dictionary well into

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the eighteen eighties and who was credited in 1884 with having supplied 5000 quotations.

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By 1861, over a dozen women were reading the dictionary.

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The number would grow and grow within five years of James Murray's taking over as editor in 1879.

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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,

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considering in each case some of the women who carried them out,

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women made a particularly significant contribution to reading, making up something like a third of the lists of named readers for the first edition.

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Of course, some readers contributed very little in terms of actual numbers of quotations,

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but there are plenty of women whose contribution is numerically significant.

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For example, by 1888, Janet Humphreys, the author of a number of books for children,

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had contributed nearly 19000 quotations, making her the 11th most prolific contributor of all at that point.

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There were clearly many well-educated women who found a fulfilment in contributing

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in this way to a great scholarly project that was perhaps harder to come by.

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Elsewhere. In the later history of the dictionary, too, we have benefited from some exceptionally impressive contributions of quotations by women.

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None more so than the journalist and literary Lioness Marghani to Laski, who over 30 years, starting in the 1950s,

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contributed a quarter of a million quotations mainly to the OED supplement, edited by Robert Birchfield.

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I should add that the group of paid freelancers who currently make up we are EDI's

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directed general reading programme and the person who runs it are all women.

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And in fact, have been for some years. Now, reading during the compilation of the first edition of the OED was generally unpaid,

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voluntary work, and so at least one can say that the women readers were paid no less than the men.

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A few readers did receive payment for reading during the early years, and Murry's added editorship, including at least two women.

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However, the only one about whom I know anything wasn't a great success.

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Eleanor Marx, daughter of the more famous Carl. And a personal friend of Furnivall.

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She sent James Murray a claim for 100 hours,

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a hundred and ten hours work spent collecting evidence for just 144 words work which he thought he could have done in 12 hours.

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Although he undertook to pay her in full, she wasn't asked to do any further reading.

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Now, the collection of quotations was it was only the first stage in the process of compiling dictionary entries.

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The millions of quotations slips that eventually found their way into James Murray's

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scriptorium then had to be sorted alphabetically by the word which each quotation illustrated.

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The bulk of this task was undertaken by Miss Scott and Miss Skipper, two young women,

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a fair education from the village of Mill Hill, where James Murray was living when he began work on the dictionary in 1879.

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They worked together at this huge task for nearly three years, with Ellen Skipper carrying on for another three.

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After that, once the quotations were in order, the actual lexicography could begin in earnest.

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The compilation of dictionary entries. In the early days of the project,

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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.

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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.

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A sub editor would be sent all the available quotations for their assigned letter and would prepare preliminary draughts of entries.

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The subeditors assembled by Furnivall varied enormously in ability,

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and unfortunately he failed to supervise their work closely enough so that when James Murray took over as editor,

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he inherited a very heterogeneous body of material, most of which was lexical graphically of very little use.

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One of the more conscientious of furnivall subeditors and the only woman amongst them was the novelist Charlotte Young.

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She undertook the letter N in 1862 and not only worked her way right through it.

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Many celebrities failed to finish their allocated letter, but compiled a complete wordlist for the letter.

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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.

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She did abandon the work some years before James Murray took over,

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but her work would have been of significant value when the letter N came to be edited by William Craigie.

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Nearly half a century later.

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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.

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Five were women, including one of the most prolific Jazmyne, Matt Brown, who is subeditor parts of five different letters.

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Like many subeditors, she was also a reader with 4500 quotations to her name.

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By 1884. And after the subediting, the materials at last reached the scriptorium or one of one or other of the dictionaries,

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other offices where the first full draughts of dictionary entries would be prepared

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by members of its staff overseen by Murree or one of the other three editors.

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The first woman to work as one of these assistants was probably Murray's eldest daughter, Hilda, in the 80s 90s.

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She was soon joined by her sisters, Elsie and Ross Frith, although in fact,

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all of the 11 I think Murray children worked in the scriptorium earning pocket money by helping with the alphabetical sorting of slips.

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Now, it's not clear whether Hilda worked directly on dictionary entries as Elsie and Roz Frith did,

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nor whether she was paid for her work as they were for many years as fully fledged members of staff.

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But she did valuable work for the project,

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including the laborious task of compiling statistics on the number of words of various kinds in each dictionary.

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Farcical dictionary. Second, Ed Henry Bradley also took on one of his daughters.

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He formally engaged his daughter Eleanor as as an assistant in 1897, and she continued to work on the dictionary and supplement until 1932.

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And even after that, she continued to contribute quotations until not long before her death.

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In 1950, William Craig, his sister in law, Bella Hutcheon, worked on the dictionary from 1915 to 1921.

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Now, members of the family, you might say, are different.

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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.

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Shortly after graduating in English from Lady Margaret Hall. But the suggestion that women might be taken on as assistance was first made many

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years earlier and was repeated many times before Mary Harris arrived in 1882.

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The American old English scholar Albert Cook suggested to Murray that he might engage Mariah Whitney,

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the sister of the famous philologists William Dwight Whitney, who was at this time studying Germanic languages in Leipzig for whatever reason.

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Nothing came of Cookes suggestion, nor the suggestion needs to marry by another English scholar.

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In 1884, Edward Arber, a great friend of James Murray, wrote to him as to assistance.

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I do not know what you require of them only if you do not require Sanskrit at Icelandic, etc.

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I should strongly advise you to employ women. They are more conscientious and cheaper.

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In 1889, Murray himself wrote to a yuppie to suggest engaging a little feminine assistance.

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The suggestion met with a favourable reception from a U. P. Philip Middleton Jel wrote back.

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I wish we could enlist a few thoroughly competent and qualified women in the work.

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There are many philologists amongst them nowadays, but it will be another six years before Mary Harris arrived and she stayed only briefly.

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She was followed by a Miss M. Turner, who joined Bradlees staff in 1898 for a year and the rather more durable Ethelwyn Steam,

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an Oxford wine merchant's daughter who was taken on by William Craigie in 1981 and

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remained on the staff until the completion of editorial work on the first supplement.

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The dictionary, which was published in 1933. She married a fellow assistant, Laurence Powell, on bottom right here in nineteen nine.

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In fact, a good half dozen women worked on the 1933 supplement, including Jesse Senior,

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who, as Jesse Colson went on to be an important figure in Oxford lexicography.

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She made a sufficiently substantial contribution to the first edition of the shorter OED that her name appeared on the title page.

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The first woman to do so on an Oxford dictionary. And she edited several other dictionaries in her own right.

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Interestingly, she was an English graduate from the University of Leeds, where she was almost certainly taught by the former OED staff member.

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J.R. Tolkien. Several other women who worked on the supplement and other Oxford dictionaries had also studied at Leeds under Torquing,

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who apparently gave some of his students special training in lexicography when Robert Birchfield

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began to assemble a new staff of lexicographers in the 1950s to work on the new supplement.

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It included women from the start, and there has been a pretty even gender balance ever since.

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With women well represented across different grades and types of work, two women have held the title of deputy chief editor of the OED,

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Sandra Rieffel, who was joint deputy with John Sykes under Birchfield on the supplement,

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and Penny Silver, who succeeded Edmund Vyner as deputy chief editor under John Simpson and who went on

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to become director of the OED but to return to the compilation of the first edition.

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Once the copy for a dictionary entry had been draughted by an assistant and reviewed by his or her chief editor,

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printed proofs were sent out to be read by an important group of volunteers whose contribution went far beyond simple typographical correction.

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Their comments could lead to a definition being extensively we would reworded or a whole entry being recast.

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Most of these readers were men.

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But there is one important exception the historian Edith Thompson, who read and marked up OED proofs from 1882 until her death in 1929.

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Edith would also provide expert comment on particular historical terms.

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And this final group of specialist consultants advising on particular words, of course, included women.

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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.

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Of course, it's not surprising in view of the state of the world of scholarship at this time,

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that in many subject areas the pre-eminent scholars were men.

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But there were some domains where women came into their own.

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Someone whom James Murray consulted about historical cooking terms and who was in fact writing a book of her own on early cookery,

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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.

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I'd like to consider who was in some ways one of the most important of all.

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Now, several letters from Janet Humphries survive amongst the Murray papers in the Bodleian Library.

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Many of them are distinctly gushing in tone, reflecting her style as an author.

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US and this one from 1886 is no exception.

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It's addressed to James Murray's wife, ADA. Pleased to give the paper to Hilda.

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Then she will teach the little ones. Professor Harold will find a holes in the metre.

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Must be poetry of some sort. Then give an extra kiss to Elfrink and Elsie Minar, Baby and Co.

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P.S. This letter requires no answer because you are a married woman.

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That is a joke. Married women have plenty to do.

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The contribution of ADA Murray to the OED is immeasurable.

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It's also hard to measure and is often overlooked.

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She did read and excerpt books for the dictionary like so many others.

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She doesn't seem to have worked alongside her husband in the scriptorium like her daughters,

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but she did act as James Laris, unpaid secretary for many years.

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And, of course, around the Murray household, thereby allowing Murray to concentrate all his energies on his work.

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He described her as the pivot on which the whole house revolved, and he consulted her on every important decision.

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It seems to have been at her urging that he decided to take on the editorship of the dictionary in the first place.

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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.

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And perhaps she makes a fitting figure on which to end. Many women were obliged by circumstances to be merely wives, mothers and housekeepers,

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although in Ada's case, her domestic contribution to the dictionary was hugely important.

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But I hope I've been able to show that the OED did provide many opportunities for women to make as much of an

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intellectual contribution as was possible within the constraints of the society in which it was conceived.

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And they provided what was and it provided what was, if anything, a comparatively progressive environment in which to make such contributions.