Quiz: Chairman or chairwoman?

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:41 AM -0500 11/7/06, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>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"!
>
The OED entry does say of "chairwoman" that it was "Hardly a
recognized name until 19th c."  I suspect it wasn't invented due to
17th century feminist agitation, but because "chairman" was taken to
apply to men and thus to be not so much sexist as referentially
inappropriate for those (unusual) occasions in which the individual
in question was a woman.  (If a "chairman" is transparently a man who
chairs a meeting/committee, it simply doesn't apply to a woman doing
so.)  Note for example this 19th c. cite, indicating the tension
between established lexical usage and referential accuracy:

1869 Pall Mall G. 9 Sept. 8 The Duchess rose and said..then I think
the arduous duties of chairman--or shall I say chairwoman?--will
cease.

I doubt that the (mostly nonce) occurrences of "chairwoman" during
the early centuries led to the gender-specificity of "chairman",
which presumably was essentially as gender-specific as "man".

Interesting that "chair" in the relevant sense, often dismissed as an
illogical neologism, has a respectable lineage of its own.

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org