Women and Dictionary Making : Gender, Genre, and English Language Lexicography

This wide-ranging history of women's contributions to lexicography is aimed at readers interested in women's roles in writing, the history of English, or the practices of dictionary making. It establishes the importance of women as dictionary patrons, collaborators, readers, compilers, and critics and examines how gender has affected lexicography.

Dictionaries are a powerful genre, perceived as authoritative and objective records of the language, impervious to personal bias. But who makes dictionaries shapes both how they are constructed and how they are used. Tracing the craft of dictionary making from the fifteenth century to the present day, this book explores the vital but little-known significance of women and gender in the creation of English language dictionaries. Women worked as dictionary patrons, collaborators, readers, compilers, and critics, while gender ideologies served, at turns, to prevent, secure, and veil women's involvements and innovations in dictionary making. Combining historical, rhetorical, and feminist methods, this is a monumental recovery of six centuries of women's participation in dictionary making and a robust investigation of how the social life of the genre is influenced by the social expectations of gender.