ABSTRACT
Biographical sketches, lists of names and of publications, numbers and percentages all serve to reveal the presence of women in American linguistics during the first half of the twentieth century. Such information even permits the formulation of a few generalizations about the status of women within the professional world and about the climate in which they worked. But a great deal is still missing. We gain no sense of how these women came to their subjects, of the degree of their commitment and the reasons for it, of the people with whom they worked and the relationships that affected their careers, of their victories and their struggles, of their strategies for success and the factors behind their failures. What were the principles that guided their work? How was that work received? How has it held up over time? And more specific to the study of language and the field of linguistics, what were their perceptions of the nature of human language? How did they define linguistics? Did they remain within the boundaries created by other people and institutions of the time or did they push beyond them, establishing their own territory?
