‘Must it be a man?’: the women who helped to make the Oxford English Dictionary

An examination of women's contribution to the University of Oxford, to mark the centenary of women's graduation.

‘Must it be a man?’ wrote Charles Herford to James Murray when the latter was seeking an assistant to work on his Oxford English Dictionary. The expectation in 1906, when the letter was written, was that such positions would ‘naturally’ fall to men, and this epitomises the assumptions which governed the University of Oxford until long into the modern era. In fact...