Quiz: Chairman or chairwoman?

[Jonathan Lighter]

Joel, if the others are like me, they didn't take the quiz because

  A) they didn't want to look dumb, and

  B) they didn't want to cheat.

  JL

"Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Joel S. Berson"
Subject: Re: Quiz: Chairman or chairwoman?
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At 11/2/2006 06:16 PM, I wrote:
>A short quiz (do NOT consult your local OED, or other historical dictionary).
>
>Which came first, chairman or chairwoman?
>By how many decades?
>How many centuries later did chair arrive? (For the occupier, not
>the place he sat.)
>Which came first, chairwoman or chair?

Since there was such great interest in the question I asked, as
contrasted with the small interest in digressions introduced by other
correspondents, I will provide the answers (from OED2):

chairman -- 1654.
chairwoman -- 1699
chair -- 1658-9 [a long and honorable history for
today's gender-neutral term]

And responding to JL's questions:
>How do we know that "chairman" is gender-specific? If it is, hasn't
>it become so only since the introduction of "chairwoman"?

"Chairman" presumably became gender-specific as soon as, or earlier
than, "chairwoman" appeared, less than 50 years later. The dates
above also make me wonder if there wasn't an early feminist don,
between 1654 and 1658-9, who decided that "chairman" was sexist, and
introduced "chair"!

Joel

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