© Copyright 2012 Lindsay Rose Russell
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© Copyright 2012 Lindsay Rose Russell WOMEN IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE DICTIONARY Lindsay Rose Russell a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2012 Reading Committee: Anis Bawarshi, Co-Chair Colette Moore, Co-Chair Candice Rai Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Department of English University of Washington Abstract Women in the English Language Dictionary Lindsay Rose Russell Chairs of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Anis Bawarshi and Associate Professor Colette Moore Department of English “Women in the English Language Dictionary,” is at once a historical account and rhetorical analysis of how women have been involved in the English dictionary from its bilingual beginnings in the early modern period to its present-day array of instantiations. Departing from well-worn accounts of the English dictionary as a series of more-or-less discrete texts created by more-or-less famous men to constitute a near-neutral record of the entire language, “Women in the English Language Dictionary” conceives, instead, of the English language dictionary as a rhetorical genre, the form, content, audience, exigence, and cultural consequences of which are gendered and gendering. As a focused analysis of the emergence and evolution of a genre, “Women in the English Language Dictionary” finds that women—as an abstract construction and as a social collectivity—were integral for the framing of early dictionaries’ exigencies and for the fashioning of audiences invoked by the genre. Women signal major shifts in the genre’s purposes and participants, shifts heretofore neglected in favor of generic phases delimited by changes in form and content. The project fills a gap in language scholarship which has inadequately accounted for the presence of women in English dictionaries: as pupils and patrons who modeled reader roles, as primary audience signaling transforming exigences, as volunteers and staffers who both supported and critiqued the work, and as authors and editors who have modeled and remodeled the shape, content, and consequences of the genre. The project also contributes to rhetorical scholarship, by modeling generic historiography and suggesting the value of theorizing rhetorics of reference. As a genre that testifies to shared meaning, dictionaries can and should be understood as important scenes of rhetorical education, contention, and resistance. The term sleeping dictionary is used to describe a woman with whom a man sleeps in order to learn her language, but it also signals the untapped potential of reading dictionaries as they register, reinforce, and reinvent social relations. Table of Contents Table of Contents PAGE I List of Figures PAGE II Acknowledgements PAGE III Dedication PAGE VI INTRODUCTION To Wake a Sleeping Dictionary: The English Language Dictionary and Gender PAGE 1 CHAPTER 1 The English Language Dictionary as a Rhetorical Event and a Social Action PAGE 25 CHAPTER 2 Gentle Readers and Generic Expectations: Women as Audience and Exigence for the Emerging Dictionary Genre, 1500–1700 PAGE 67 CHAPTER 3 Absent Authors, Brazen Borrowers, and the Edge of English: Dictionaries Attributed to Women, 1600–1900 PAGE 127 CHAPTER 4 Contributions from the Parlor: Women as Participants in and Critics of Large-Scale Dictionaries, 1700–1900 PAGE 162 CHAPTER 5 Wymyn, Websters, and Genre Benders: Feminist Lexicography, 1970–2010 PAGE 214 CONCLUSION The Waking Dictionary: The Genre of the English Language Dictionary Reimagined PAGE 250 References PAGE 256 Cirriculum Vitae PAGE 284 Women in the English Language Dictionary • Lindsay Rose Russell Table of Contents • i List of Figures FIGURE 1.1 Aspects of a Genre PAGE 55 FIGURE 1.2 Landau’s Dictionaries (1984) PAGE 56 FIGURE 1.3 Aspects of an Emerging Genre PAGE 58 FIGURE 2.1 Dictionaries of English and Another Vernacular, 1500–1700, Cited in Murray (1900) PAGE 74 FIGURE 2.2 Tudor Women and Early Modern Bilingual English Dictionaries PAGE 92 FIGURE 2.3 Stuart Women and Early Modern Bilingual English Dictionaries PAGE 93 FIGURE 2.4 Monolingual English Dictionaries, 1600–1700, Cited in Murray (1900) PAGE 95 FIGURE 2.5 Murray’s Phases of Evolution in English Lexicography PAGE 125 FIGURE 3.1 English Dictionaries Attributable to Women, 1486–1900 PAGE 135 FIGURE 3.2 Timeline of Dictionaries Attributable to Women, 1486–1755 PAGE 155 FIGURE 3.3 Timeline of Dictionaries Attributable to Women, 1755–1800 PAGE 157 FIGURE 3.4 Timeline of Dictionaries Attributable to Women, 1806–1830 PAGE 158 FIGURE 4.1 Women Contributors to the First and Fourth Editions of A Dictionary of the English Language: Household Members, Friends, and Paid Staff PAGE 170 FIGURE 4.2 Women Contributors to the First Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: Readers PAGE 192 FIGURE 4.3 Women Contributors to the First Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: Unpaid Subeditors PAGE 193 FIGURE 4.4 Women Contributors to the First Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: Unpaid Assistants PAGE 193 FIGURE 4.5 Women Contributors to the First Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: Paid Staff PAGE 195 FIGURE 5.1 Feminist Dictionaries, 1970–2006 PAGE 224 Women in the English Language Dictionary • Lindsay Rose Russell List of Figures • ii Acknowledgements In deciding to write a dissertation, I was determining the fate of persons other than myself. These persons may have cared little for dictionaries, dissertations, or doctoral degrees, but they cared for me. And so I found myself the beneficiary of their guidance, intelligence, criticism, encouragement, wit, and diversion. My thanks are inadequate to their contributions. The particular memories below only gesture to general generosities. In my first year of graduate school, Colette Moore, with characteristic clarity, told me that to pursue academic work, I should “find an interesting archive and ask smart questions of it.” Her elegant advice became, for me, an invitation and a challenge. It was leave to look for and think about what I found inherently interesting in the world, and it was a continual encouragement to ask better, brighter questions—first the friendly ones and then the critical kind. The answers I have found in this project owe much to her superior abilities of inquiry and interrogation. Sometime before the beginning of an Autumn term, Anis Bawarshi, with characteristic enthusiasm, described to me how time slows with experience. He said he had watched a football game and seen the moment when the underprepared replacement quarterback became competent, the precise point when the player could finally appreciate things as they happened and early enough to capitalize on potentials. Time must be endlessly slow for Anis, who sees potential in everything. He helped me to presume the possibilities of this project, to push against the urge to haste, the tendency to doubt, and the habit of pessimism. I thank him for being so generous with me that he gave me time as well as a better sense of it. Long before I began this project, Candice Rai, with characteristic persistence, asked me to ground my musings on methodology. She said, “In the most concrete terms possible, what Women in the English Language Dictionary • Lindsay Rose Russell Acknowledgments • iii might a feminist rhetorical project look like? Is there a creative, productive, generative type of feminist rhetorical theory that has a different aim than critique or resistance?” After many airy answers, I hope to have touched ground with this project. Candice’s encouragements toward careful precision and practical focus have been instrumental to my methodology. Throughout graduate school, Sarah Cohen, with characteristic sparkle, has given me the best kind of camaraderie. Always a step ahead, brilliant and bold, witty and endlessly optimistic, she has encouraged me to keep up. And though it was difficult to do so, I tried with all my might for there could be no better companion in scholarship. She has enabled and enriched this project at nearly every stage, encouraging my interest in feminist dictionaries (and Furry/Grimalkins), imagining for me possible chapters and sections, indulging my anxieties about research, reading drafts and drafts and drafts, maintaining an unshakable confidence in my ability to revise, and being all the while as delightful as an ice cream social. All the houseboats and all the hummus plates in all the world would be insufficient commemorations of the sunny time we have spent together in a rainy place building our “braine babes.” In the summer of 2010, Heather Arvidson, with characteristic fearlessness, accepted my invitation to form a writing group. It was not until then that I realized how indispensable were her mercurial talents: She showed me that work can unfold in dreamy notebook diagrams or meticulous twenty-five-minute measures; she taught me that prose can be stunningly dense or strikingly simple; she insisted on calendars and not keeping to them. Like Piozzi to Johnson, Heather’s fine taste in books and animation in conversation have informed and improved my project. I thank her for reading drafts and proposing revisions but also for being patient, smart, practical, quick, interested, energetic, and hilarious. Women in the English Language Dictionary • Lindsay Rose Russell Acknowledgments • iv All my life, I have had the good fortune of a good family. My mom, Susan Smith, is a wordsmith who I have thought of often in completing a project about my mother tongue. My father, George Ray Russell, is a curious