Women in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Conference paper at The Hague, 26 November 2004
Vivienne Larminie
The original Dictionary of National Biography was the brainchild of a publisher, George Smith.
At first Smith had intended to produce a dictionary of world biography, but he was persuaded to
scale down his ideas. None the less, the resulting dictionary, which was published at the rate of
one volume every three months between 1885 and 1901, was in many respects remarkably
inclusive. British people active abroad, inhabitants of the colonies before independence, and
foreign-born people who visited or settled in the British Isles were all represented in its pages.
Supplementary volumes devoted to the newly dead and to ‘missing persons’ were published
regularly up to 1995, taking the total number of articles up to about 36,500. Although there are
notable exceptions, the choices underpinning twentieth century additions were somewhat more
conservative and restricted.
By the 1990s ‘the shortage of articles on women, and the way their lives were treated,
had come to seem perhaps the DNB’s most notorious weakness – and it was one which was most
frequently mentioned when opinions were canvassed on the need for a new dictionary’.1 At just
5% of the dictionary articles they were one of several underrepresented groups: people engaged in
science, medicine and business had also been neglected, as (relatively speaking) had people
important in the provinces rather than in London, Edinburgh or Dublin. However, female underrepresentation wasn’t just a question of mere numbers but also of an imbalance in selection from
different categories of women. There was a preference for extraordinary women, particularly the
heroic and or the scandalous. Thus in the seventeenth century there was a bias towards royal
mistresses, actresses, Quaker leaders, and aristocratic women who defended their houses in civil
war sieges. Because public life and direct action were considered much more important than
private life and covert influence, the exclusion of most women had seemed natural: they did not
sit in parliament and they did not belong to the professions of law, medicine and the church.
Furthermore, because private and family life were of little interest, articles on men were written
with little reference to their wives and families. Articles on women, on the other hand, seemed
compelled either to reassure readers that their subjects still had feminine and domestic virtues or,
alternatively, to assure them that their vices had received appropriate censure from society.
Moral judgments were made to a far greater extent than in articles on men.
When the New Dictonary of National Biography project began in 1992 it set out to
address these weaknesses in a number of ways. Since the decision was taken to retain all the
subjects from the old dictionary and to set the new total at around 50,000, new women entrants
had to compete for the 13,500 new places with deserving candidates from other neglected groups.
Given the high baseline and the relative youth of the discipline of women’s history, we consider
that, for the time being at least, the raising of the proportion of women to 10% in the dictionary
published as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in September 2004 is a significant
achievement. Within chronological periods the figures differ markedly for several reasons which
I’m happy to discuss later if you wish, but there are positive signs in all periods. Concentrating
on the period before 1850, I want to introduce today three aspects of women in Oxford DNB.
First, briefly, women’s higher profile in articles on men; secondly, the improvement of existing
articles on women and the challenges of writing women’s biography; and thirdly different areas
which have proved fruitful sources of new female subjects. After that I’ll introduce you briefly to
the electronic version of the dictionary.
‘Introduction’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds Colin Matthew and Brian Harrison
(Oxford, 2004), ix.
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The old dictionary routinely placed scanty details of men’s marriages after their death, at
the end of the article. Recognising that the character, talents, wealth, social standing and family
connections of a wife might, even in a very traditional society, have a profound influence on his
professional or public career, the new dictionary introduces marriages at the appropriate
chronological point in the article. Women who acted as their husband’s or brother’s business
partners, who helped manage estates, who acted as unpaid secretaries or amenuenses, or who
used their friendship and kinship networks to advance the couple’s careers and reputations are
given greater attention. Sometimes they are formally elevated to the status of co-subjects, which
makes them easier to locate both in the print and electronic versions of the dictionary;
occasionally the position of man and woman are swapped, and the woman becomes the main
entry. Sometimes women are detached and given articles of their own, as for example the native
American princess since celebrated in a Disney film Pocahontas, who had been hiding behind her
husband in the article headed John Rolfe. Indeed, through the dictionary all kinds of women who
were previously hidden are now revealed. For instance, whereas in Old DNB the subject’s
published works were often simply listed, Oxford DNB discusses them in the text, often drawing
attention to the women and men to whom they were dedicated and whose support was often vital.
In the century since the old dictionary appeared, many manuscript collections held in
national institutions or in local repositories have been catalogued and indexed, and some results
have been made available electronically. This has enabled us both to improve existing articles
and to contemplate writing new female lives which previously seemed impenetrable. Published
primary sources including parish registers recording baptisms, marriages and burials, and heralds’
visitations, recording (however inaccurately) the genealogies of gentry families, have also
assisted us to piece together hitherto sketchy lives. The experience of beginning to work on the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in 1998 led us to offer contributors a will or probate search.
Owing to the nature of English property law, few married women made wills, but from those who
did, and from spinsters and widows, we learned much about religious preferences, geographical
and kinship connections, and the material conditions in which our subjects lived. Some
institutional sources which proved indispensable for writing articles on men, like the admissions
registers of schools, universities and professional bodies, were of course unavailable for women
before the late nineteenth century. However, the few that were, like convent records, have been
used to good effect in writing abbesses and nuns. Across the dictionary we have benefited from a
century of scholarship addressing national and local history which has given a broader and deeper
context for all lives. We have also profited from the willingness of professionals and amateurs to
share with us their unpublished research. Equally, methodologies found useful in some areas
have been commended to contributors working in others.
Cross-fertilisation is a recurrent theme. The desire to give greater coverage to other
neglected areas has also led to the inclusion of more women. Once the spotlight is turned on
provincial society and politics, active women emerge running family estates, establishing gardens
and parks, building large country houses, and maintaining such a commanding presence in their
locality that no wise man could overlook them. Through these activities some women became
renowned specialists, for example as horticulturalists or botanists. A search for early
industrialists identified, among others, female iron manufacturers and cotton manufacturers, and
the owner of a gunpowder works. We found a notable woman shipbuilder. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, women were revealed in greater numbers in the commercial and financial sectors.
In addition to milliners and lace-dealers, there is a grocer and a miller, a banker and several
moneylenders, and a mid seventeenth century Oxford laundress notorious because she presided
over a presbyterian conventicle. Elizabeth Wilford, who died in 1559, was a founder member of
the Muscovy Company, trading with Russia, while in the late seventeenth century there is
Catherine Nicks, trader in Madras, India. The field of medicine also yielded interesting women.
We found a seventeenth century physician and a bonesetter, as well as, perhaps more predictably,
a notable practitioner of folk medicine and several midwives.
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As indicated, the old dictionary had included a good many female criminals, but study of
legal records in the twentieth century has not only revealed celebrated litigants – people who
brought cases which engaged the attention of contemporaries – but also allowed us to put all
connected with the law in a much more rounded social context, explaining the significance and
the impact of their actions, and to probe the accuracy of some of the accounts of criminals in the
literature of the time. Thus we have a swindler, an arsonist, a bigamist, several murderers, and
‘half-hanged’ Maggy Dickson, who recovered after a bungled ‘execution’ for concelament of
pregnancy to live another thirty years. We have one or two high-profile victims of crime like
rape and abduction, and Jane McCrae, whose murder resulted in her becoming a folk heroine.
Among pirates and highwaywomen (highway robbers), several of whom inspired twentieth
century films, we have tried to disentangle fact from fiction.
Although the old dictionary gave some place to female courtiers, particularly the
scandalous, coverage was far from comprehensive. The new dictionary includes for the first time
many women now recognised to have had an important impact on political life. Mary and Jane
Boleyn, sister and sister-in-law of Henry VIII’s queen Anne Boleyn, were caught up at the heart
of court faction. Lady Frances Howard’s trial for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury constituted
for many contemporaries the most shocking proof that the court of James VI and I was hopelessly
riddled with scandal and corruption. Finding prominent female plotters and rebels was not
difficult, but recent scholarship has also brought to light women who, more subtly, exercised
crucial patronage in parliamentary elections, interfered in party politics, were hostesses of
political gatherings, and who intrigued on behalf of husbands or friends in government. Leading
politicians like William Pitt and Charles James Fox are now joined in the dictionary by articles on
their wives.
Religious significance accounted for a sizeable proportion of entries on women in Old
DNB, but there had been an emphasis on the saintly or the eccentric. Although we now have
some more examples of those – for example an eighteenth century hermit and a woman who
claimed to be a female Messiah – we also have women who fulfilled more mainstream roles:
formidable matriarchs who advanced the careers of leading puritan ministers or whose ingenuity
sheltered Catholic priests on the run. One new entrant is a Spanish resident of London in the
early seventeenth century who made regular trips out at night to seek out and preserve (in her
cellar) the bodies of executed Jesuits. We have more founders of churches and writers of spiritual
meditations, and we try to tease out the real lives of women celebrated in funeral sermons and in
edifying literature as exemplars of godliness.
Religion underpinned the involvement of many women in charitable work and in
education. Catholicism probably prompted Dorothy Wadham’s participation in the foundation
and early governance of Wadham College, Oxford, while protestant piety was behind Susanna
Howard, countess of Sussex’s endowment of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. We have many
new schoolteachers, and social improvers like Susan Carnegie, responsible for the construction of
the first purpose-built lunatic asylum in Scotland.
Perhaps the greatest source of female subjects for the period before 1850 remains, as it
was in the old dictionary, women involved in literature and the arts, but even here the balance has
shifted. Painters and illustrators are now joined by silversmiths and silk designers, as well as by
Magdalen Aston, the subject of a celebrated portrait. Thanks to the explosion of interest in early
music, we now have a wider range of singers, and they are joined by instrumentalists. Actresses
are now matched by theatre managers and shareholders. It has become clear that women were
notably involved in every aspect of the development of the printed book, from being printers and
typefounders to publishing novels, polemics and translations. The rediscovery by literary
scholars over the last twenty years of extensive manuscript circulation has revealed many women
at the heart of learned circles producing unpublished poetry and drama: they were very wellknown to educated contemporaries, but their work had been almost completely overlooked after
their deaths.
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Like the old dictionary, we still have room for oddities. Among new entrants active
before 1850 are: Mary Read, cavalry trooper and proprietor of an eating-house near Breda;
Signora Violante, rope dancer; Elizabeth Stokes, pugilist and prizefighter; and Marged ferch Ifan,
Welsh harpist and wrestler. Imaginative solutions have even allowed us to include women for
whom we have names but lack sufficient information to construct a life. Thus we have group
articles, for instance on medieval women traders in York and Lollard heretics, and on witches, as
in North Berwick on the England/Scotland border in the 1590s and in Salem, Massachusetts, in
the 1690s.
As I said earlier, we think that Oxford DNB has achieved much in improving both
quantitatively and qualitatively the coverage of women in the national dictionary. But we also
think that there is plenty of scope for further development. Women’s history is still in its infancy,
and a proportion of women identified as significant still await the construction of a rounded life.
Much has been accomplished through sharing research results and methodologies, but we
considered that the very act of publication was likely to encourage new research and elicit new
information. So far it looks as though we shan’t be disappointed. In the last two months we have
begun to receive communications pinpointing omissions, correcting mistakes and offering further
details. We are an ongoing project: from January 2005 we shall be publishing new material
online three times a year. Releases will appear under a wide spectrum of different themes as
miscellaneous additions, but women look like being well-represented.
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