Gender Equality in The Dial: Pronoun and Named-Person Analysis

I. The Question

The dial carrel documents nearly a century of advocacy for women's rights — suffrage, economic independence, legal equality, access to education and the professions, and personal freedom. But does the journal's own language reflect the equality it advocated? To what degree are the pronouns indexed in the carrel equally divided between the sexes? To what degree are men as well as women equally represented in the content of the carrel?

II. Pronoun Frequencies: Male vs. Female

Key Gendered Pronouns

The Ratio

The male pronouns (he, his, himself) collectively appear 396,913 times. The female pronouns (she, her, herself, hers) collectively appear 85,917 times. The ratio is approximately 4.6 to 1 — for every one female pronoun, there are roughly four and a half male pronouns.

Broken down individually:

• he / she = 191,973 / 43,017 ≈ 4.5 to 1
• his / her = 189,193 / 39,693 ≈ 4.8 to 1
• himself / herself = 15,747 / 2,891 ≈ 5.5 to 1

The imbalance is consistent across all pronoun forms and actually worsens with the reflexive pronouns, suggesting that men are not only mentioned more often but are also more frequently described as agents acting upon themselves.

III. Named Persons: Men vs. Women

Top 20 Most Frequently Mentioned Persons

Not a single woman appears in the top 20. Not one.

Top Female Names by Frequency

The most frequently mentioned female name — Elizabeth (840) — would rank roughly 25th in the overall list, well below male names like Thomas (1,045), William (957), Arnold (937), Wilson (868), and even single male first names like John (1,902). The combined frequency of the top ten female names (Elizabeth through Mary) is approximately 3,013 — which is less than the frequency of "Tennyson" alone (2,290) or "John" alone (1,902).

Named Female Authors and Figures

Compare these to the frequencies for male authors:

George Eliot (519) is the only woman who approaches the frequency of the most-mentioned male authors, and even she is mentioned less than half as often as Tennyson and roughly two-thirds as often as Carlyle or Dickens.

IV. Context: What The Dial Advocated

For contrast, here are representative sentences from the carrel documenting the conditions women faced and the changes the journal's reviewed authors hoped to see:

The Right to Vote

"But the very men who performed this act of justice refuse the ballot to women"

(item mdp.39015030979614-02, idx id1180)

"That Woman Suffrage is coming there can be little doubt"

(item pst.000020201036-01, idx id1315)

"English women demand the ballot because it is a symbol of equality and because they 'believe in its overwhelming importance'"

(item mdp.39015031048187-05, idx id2624)

"the brutality shown in dealing with the suffragettes almost passes belief"

(item uva.x004604851-01, idx id2950)

Legal Rights and Property

"she does not hold property on equal terms with men; so that, if a husband dies without a will, the wife, instead of stepping at once into his place as head of the family, inherits only a part of his fortune, as if she were a child, or ward only, not an equal partner"

(item hvd.32044054766878-01, idx id334)

"Were woman established in the rights of an immortal being, this could not be"

(item hvd.32044054766878-01, idx id642)

"It is part of the American morality to believe that women are human beings"

(item pst.000020203276-04, idx id2058)

Economic Dependence

"women have for centuries been economically dependent upon men; that as a result they have become more and more feminine and less and less normal members of the human race"

(item pst.000020201081-04, idx id616)

"She is not trying to widen the gap between the sexes, but, on the contrary, to bring them together in common pursuits and common aims"

(item mdp.39015031048161-06, idx id2738)

Wages and Equal Pay

"for the most part women not only do the low-paid but the unskilled work"

(item mdp.39015031048039-05, idx id2585)

"Women have entered every line of industrial work but still are underpaid"

(item chi.78013691-04, idx id3322)

"It holds that women should receive the same pay as men where they turn out as much work, do it as well, and do not cost the employer more than men in supervision, overhead charges, etc."

(item mdp.39015031076527-01, idx id3082)

Personal Freedom

"when inward and outward freedom for woman, as much as for man, shall be acknowledged as a right, not yielded as a concession"

(item hvd.32044054766878-01, idx id372)

"This self-dependence, which was honored in me, is deprecated as a fault in most women"

(item hvd.32044054766878-01, idx id413)

"The selfish sex insists upon keeping political rights within its own control"

(item pst.000020201272-01, idx id897)

V. The Paradox

The dial carrel presents us with a striking paradox. On the one hand, the journal reviewed an extraordinary range of books advocating women's suffrage, women's economic independence, women's education, women's legal rights, and feminism as a named movement. It documented the woman movement across nearly a century of publication, from Margaret Fuller's Transcendentalist appeals in the 1840s through the Pankhursts' militant campaigns in the 1910s to the post-suffrage feminist moment of the 1920s. It presented both pro- and anti-suffrage arguments, tracked the movement internationally, and connected women's rights to labor, education, law, and personal freedom.

On the other hand, the journal's own language — its pronouns and its named entities — reveals a world overwhelmingly dominated by men. Male pronouns outnumber female pronouns by approximately 4.6 to 1. The top 20 most frequently mentioned persons include no women at all. The most frequently mentioned woman — Elizabeth — would not crack the top 20. The most frequently mentioned female author — George Eliot — is mentioned less than a quarter as often as Tennyson.

How Do We Explain This Paradox?

Several factors may be at work:

1. The journal reviewed books, and most books were by men. The publishing world that The Dial documented was itself male-dominated. The journal's coverage reflected the existing literary canon, which was overwhelmingly male.
2. The journal's reviewers were mostly men. The names of the carrel's most frequent contributors — William Morton Payne (728), Percy F. Bicknell (408), Titus M. Coan (507), Francis F. Browne (353) — are all male. The reviewing voice was predominantly male, and male reviewers may have defaulted to male pronouns when discussing authors, critics, and readers in general terms.
3. The historical and literary figures discussed were mostly men. Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Carlyle, Dickens, Tennyson, Goethe, Tolstoy, Nietzsche — the Western canon that The Dial evaluated was a male canon. Even when the journal reviewed books about women's rights, the books themselves were often written by men (Mill's The Subjection of Women, for instance) or discussed in relation to male-authored frameworks.
4. Publishers dominate the named entities. A large proportion of the most frequently mentioned "persons" are actually publishing houses — Charles Scribner's, J. B. Lippincott, G. P. Putnam's, A. C. McClurg — reflecting the journal's function as a book-review and advertising periodical. These are all male-named firms.
5. The woman movement was a subject of discussion, not the subject of the journal. The Dial covered women's rights as one social question among many — alongside labor, race, democracy, education, and war. The journal was not a feminist periodical but a literary-critical one that included feminist concerns within its scope.