ABSTRACT
When women are included, American linguistics at the time the LSA was founded was more respectful of the past and less revolutionary, more diverse and less constrained than existing historiographic work leads us to expect. It is not that women had some special niche in the field, but rather that, viewing the field from the perspective of their work and their careers, we come to see those early years differently. With this different perspective, it is impossible to accept the characterization given by Stephen Murray (1991:3):
With their contempt for how languages were studied at the time, their rejection of received categories and presuppositions…, their regard of fieldwork as the only reliable method of gathering data, and their tendency to disregard any previous scholarly work, the founders of the Linguistic Society of America look like scientific revolutionaries.
