I’ve always associated crossword puzzles with men. When I was a child my father did the Telegraph crossword religiously every day; in the age of pen and paper, when only one person in a household could fill in the empty squares, that was understood to be his prerogative. Later on, as an avid reader of detective fiction, I discovered characters like Lord Peter Wimsey and Inspector Morse, men whose puzzle-solving prowess demonstrated the same erudition and mental agility they brought to the unravelling of murder mysteries. To the extent I thought at all about the creators of crosswords, I assumed that they too must be male. I vaguely imagined them as scholars or “boffins”, working at desks piled high with reference books which their wives were not allowed to dust.
But in fact, as I learned from Anna Shechtman’s book The Riddles of the Sphinx, the earliest crossword enthusiasts, and the most influential figures in the development of the crossword puzzle as we know it (or at least, as they know it in the US*), were women. Though a man, Arthur Wynne, came up with the basic idea (his diamond-shaped “word-cross” made its debut in 1913), the rules that would come to define the standard crossword, governing everything from the proportion of black squares to the ordering of clues, were put in place by women like Ruth Hale, the founding president of the Amateur Cross Word Puzzle League of America, Helen Haven, who organized the first competitive crossword-solving contest in 1924, and Margaret Farrar, who became the first editor of the New York Times crossword in 1942. It wasn’t until the 1970s that crossword-constructing started to become a job for male “boffins”. But it didn’t take long for them to displace women almost entirely, and their dominance has continued into the 21st century: today around 80 percent of crossword constructors are men.
Anna Shechtman is one of the other 20 percent. As a student she was the second youngest woman ever to have a puzzle accepted by the New York Times, and when she graduated in 2013 she spent two years as an assistant to the Times’s long-serving crossword editor Will Shortz. Though she eventually went back into academia, she still contributes crosswords to the New Yorker, and is actively involved in current efforts to modernize and diversify the “CrossWorld”. Her inside knowledge is one of her book’s strengths: there’s a lot of fascinating detail about both the technical and the political aspects of contemporary crossword construction. The main focus of the book, however, is history—both Shechtman’s personal history as a former/recovering anorexic (which she sees as inextricably linked to her precocious passion for making crosswords–both were expressions of her need for control) and the longer history of the crossword itself. In this post I’ll be concentrating on the second of these strands, since it’s the one that speaks most directly to my interest in women and language.
Just as I didn’t know the crossword was a largely female creation, I didn’t know until I read Shechtman’s book that in the 1920s, when crosswords first became popular in the US, solving them was a largely female pastime, and was disaparaged for that reason. Disapproval of the mid-1920s crossword craze ran the gamut from sexist condescension (“look at these silly women with their trivial word-games”) to full-blown moral panic (“these women are so addicted to crosswords they’re neglecting their duties as wives and mothers!”) Cartoons depicted women hunched over their puzzles while their husbands tended to their neglected infants (“what is home without a mother?” asked one caption), while columnists warned that women’s “crossword puzzleitis” was causing an epidemic of divorce. This panic was linked to wider anxieties about the changing role of women (who in the US had gained the right to vote in 1920). The selfish and irresponsible crossword addict was often portrayed specifically as a New Woman or a Flapper–a woman who rejected traditional femininity and demanded the same freedoms as men.
One woman who fit this stereotype was Ruth Hale, who in addition to codifying many of the rules for crossword construction was a journalist, a member of the Algonquin Round Table in New York City, and a feminist in the tradition of the 19th century radical Lucy Stone. Like Stone, Hale kept her birth-name when she married fellow-journalist Heywood Broun, but their marriage still damaged her professionally; though her husband acknowledged her as “the better newspaperman [sic]”, it was he who got the high-profile assignments (some of which he delegated to her, though they still appeared under his byline). Eventually she divorced him, not because their relationship had broken down, but in an attempt to assert her independence. Sadly, this effort came too late: Hale died not long after. But her involvement with crosswords had given her one sphere of influence where she was not overshadowed by her husband.
Shechtman thinks crosswords may also have answered a psychological need for structure and rules that could not be met in other areas of Hale’s life because of her commitment to feminism. Her political principles led her to do many things that were highly unconventional by the standards of the day (like divorcing her husband while continuing to live with him), but in her crossword-related activities she was free, paradoxically, to be a stickler for convention. Shechtman sees her as one of many women in the story of the crossword who “wrestled with the norms of gender by rigidly attaching themselves to the norms of language”.
Not all of them were feminists like Hale. Some were college-educated women who had chosen not to pursue careers, but who struggled to reconcile their ideological commitment to traditional domestic roles with their experience of domesticity as monotonous and stultifying. Crossword-constructing, Shechtman suggests, offered women in this position “an intellectual outlet” and gave them a break from “the relentless routines of childcare and the doldrums of an empty nest”. In most cases it did not take them out of the home or provide them with an independent income: it was more like a hobby they pursued in their spare time. But for a few women it did become a career.
One such woman was Margaret Farrar, the first crossword editor at the New York Times. Farrar’s attitude to women’s role was conservative: she always maintained that her family came first, and even used her earnings to fund her husband’s publishing house. Her conventional views were also reflected in her approach to the crossword itself, which Shechtman describes her as “domesticating”. She instructed Times contributors to make their puzzles “bright and entertaining”, and instituted what came to be called the “breakfast test”, requiring the removal of any word or clue that might put a solver off their breakfast. This ruled out not only gross and indecorous topics, but also anything politically controversial. When the US entered World War II she extolled its virtues as a morale-booster: “you can’t”, she observed, “think of your troubles while solving a crossword”.
Later on, some crossword constructors would produce puzzles which were designed not to distract solvers from the grim realities of life, but to raise their awareness of social problems and teach them the ideas and terminology of radical social movements. Unlike more conventional forms of political education, which generally required a high tolerance for boredom, the crossword could deliver its message through an activity people actually enjoyed. Among those who used it in this way were second-wave feminists: Shechtman devotes a chapter to Julia Penelope, a radical lesbian feminist and linguist who turned to crossword-constructing in the 1990s. Her academic specialism—the history and significance of sexism in the English language—was also a theme that featured prominently in her puzzles: they contained clues like “never the governor’s equal (9)” (answer: GOVERNESS), and “independent woman (8)” (answer: SPINSTER).
Penelope was clearly a much less influential figure in crossword history than Hale or Farrar, and it’s unclear if her puzzles found a significant audience even among feminists. In the 1970s and 1980s she had published in periodicals with a large (by radical feminist standards) circulation, but by the time she started making crosswords (the mid-1990s) those outlets had cut their ties with her. One of them, the journal Sinister Wisdom, had publicly denounced her on the grounds that her brand of lesbian separatism was transphobic, white-centric and insufficiently sex-positive, and told its readers not to buy an anthology she had edited (a reminder that cancel culture existed long before we called it that). Her response was to circulate a letter in which she repudiated the entire lesbian feminist community. Since she appears to have lost much of her previous following as a result of these events, it seems unlikely that her later crosswords had much impact.
Shechtman evidently finds Penelope a distasteful figure, noting that while she was very insistent on the power of words to wound, her own words did significant harm to others. Though a lot of her writing wasn’t my cup of tea either, I did find myself wondering why she’s singled out for this very damning assessment, when the other women discussed in the book (who were hardly paragons of virtue by contemporary feminist standards) are criticized, if at all, in much more muted terms. Not only did I find this jarring (because it’s at odds with the book’s prevailing tone), it also bothered me for another reason.
Whereas the other women Shechtman discusses, feminist or not, benefited from their status as respectable married ladies, Penelope was a far more marginal figure. Shechtman’s own account makes clear how badly she was treated throughout her life (she died in 2013) for being, in her own words, “a lesbian who couldn’t pass”. Coming of age at a time when lesbians and gay men faced vicious persecution, as a student she was expelled from two different universities in Florida by order of a state committee tasked with rooting out homosexuals. Though she went on to study elsewhere, eventually earning a Ph.D and holding a series of academic positions, she was repeatedly passed over for tenure and promotion. In her later years she depended on casual editing work to pay her bills. It’s surely not hard to understand why someone who’d had those experiences might have become, over time, increasingly angry, combative and uncompromising.
I couldn’t help feeling that the reason Penelope gets a chapter is less because of her contribution to the history of the crossword and more because it’s important to Shechtman to explicitly condemn the kind of feminism she represented. Yet in fact there are some striking similarities between Penelope and the current generation of progressive crossword constructors. They may deplore her political views, but they share her theoretical understanding of language as an ideological instrument shaped by patriarchal, racist and heteronormative values. They also share her belief that those values can be resisted by making organized efforts to change the way words are used—even in seemingly peripheral linguistic products like crossword puzzles.
In crosswords the influence of patriarchal, racist and heteronormative values is most apparent in judgments on the “puzzleworthiness” of words. To be puzzleworthy a word must be in “common usage”, or refer to something which is “common knowledge”: there’s no point in making puzzles whose obscurity will defeat most solvers. But in practice what counts as “common” reflects the vocabulary and the cultural preoccupations of the straight white middle-aged men who edit most crosswords. That means, for instance, that arcane baseball terms are deemed puzzleworthy, but words referencing the interests of women, minority ethnic groups or LGBTQ people are not. Shechtman lists a number of words which Will Shortz took out of her puzzles on the basis that readers wouldn’t know them: they include not only MALE GAZE (which might be a bit obscure outside feminist circles), but also MATCHA (white men, it seems, don’t drink green tea) and SULA (the title of a novel by Toni Morrison, whose status as a Nobel laureate apparently doesn’t change the assessment of a Black woman writer’s work as “niche”).
Shechtman and her contemporaries want the criteria for puzzleworthiness to be de-biased and updated. They want words that demean or offend minority groups to be banned; they want editors to consult, and test draft puzzles on, a more diverse group of solvers; in a field heavily dominated by white men, they want more opportunities for crossword constructors who do not belong to that demographic. Some of them, more radically, want crosswords to stop just rewarding solvers for what they already know, and start giving them opportunities to learn new things by including a wider range of terms in puzzles.
Though these demands will doubtless prompt some people to complain that “wokeness” is turning their beloved puzzle into an ideological purity test, change is already happening, as much for commercial as political reasons. As Shechtman points out, puzzles these days sell a lot of newspaper subscriptions, so there’s an economic incentive to ensure they don’t just appeal to middle-aged white men. If you want to broaden the audience for them it makes sense to expand their linguistic and cultural range, which in turn makes it logical to diversify your pool of constructors.
While the dominance of white constructors has been a constant throughout the US crossword’s history (the first New York Times crossword constructed by a Black man appeared in 1996, and the first one to carry a Black woman’s byline was published as recently as 2021), the current dominance of men reflects a major shift since the early days. According to Shechtman things began to change in the 1970s, when large numbers of educated women entered the paid workforce and the supply of housewife-constructors began to dwindle. But the shift became decisive with the advent of new technology. As computers became capable of doing some tasks (e.g., searching for words that contain a particular sequence of letters) more quickly and efficiently than humans, crossword construction started to look less like an occupation for people with advanced linguistic skills, and more like a job for scientists and engineers. Today, many parts of the process have been more or less automated: rather than spending hours selecting words and fitting them together in a grid (the graph-paper-and-pencil method Shechtman taught herself as a teenager), constructors now use downloadable wordlists and dedicated software (though they still need to be creative in writing clues and coming up with themes for their puzzles, and successful constructors usually customize the standard wordlists to reflect their individual preferences).
This particular story may be unfamiliar to most feminists (it was certainly new to me), but its basic outline is depressingly familiar. When a task is performed by women it is seen as low-level and undemanding, and the women get no credit for the skill it in fact requires; but when men get involved, and eventually displace the women, the task mysteriously comes to be seen as so highly skilled that only men (indeed, only the most intelligent men) are qualified to do it. The re-gendering of the crossword during the 20th century is a paradigm case of that progression. In the space of a few decades the housewife constructing puzzles at her kitchen table (using graph paper, pencils and perhaps her old college dictionary) morphed into the “boffin” and then the computer nerd; crossword solving, originally disparaged as a frivolous pastime that was rotting young women’s already unimpressive brains, came to be understood as a form of mental calisthenics for cerebral fictional detectives and men like my father.
I’d guess there are similar stories to be told about other language-based pastimes (Scrabble, for instance, whose evolution from a purely recreational and mainly domestic pastime into a tournament sport has both marginalized women (the top-ranked competitive players are 86% male) and sparked heated debates about sexism). It occurred to me that this is potentially fertile ground for language and gender researchers: while there’s been a lot of work on “reclaiming” women’s contributions as lexicographers, grammarians or style-guide and etiquette manual writers, AFAIK there’s been little investigation of their role in the development and popularization of word-games.
Perhaps games have been neglected because we think of them as a distraction from reality rather than a source of insight into it. But Shechtman shows that this is a false dichotomy: the things we use to distract us are also real, and may have as much to tell us as more “serious” pursuits about ourselves and the social world we live in.
* I should clarify that The Riddles of the Sphinx deals exclusively with American crossword history, which means it doesn’t touch on the British tradition of the “cryptic” crossword (invented for the Observer in 1926). This was actually Morse’s and my father’s puzzle of choice: my father left the non-cryptic “quick” crossword in the Sunday paper for my mother, which suggests that in Britain it was specifically the cryptic puzzle that became the key symbol of male intellect.
language: a feminist guide 