The history of the crossword puzzle intersects surprisingly with the history of American feminism. Between 1913, when the puzzle was invented, and the 1960s, most crosswords were created by women (often bored housewives with college degrees that they otherwise weren’t putting to use—women who wanted careers but, before the second wave, not the social stigma of being “career women.”) Now, more than 80% of crosswords are created by men.
As we've shifted to a service economy marked by gig work, many jobs have become feminized, in which low wages, flexible hours, and few benefits are the norm. This talk examines an inverse history: how did puzzlemaking masculinize as a profession? Why is a job once associated with flappers and housewives now run by men?
Anna Shechtman is an Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University, specializing in media studies and American literature. Her scholarship has been published in Critical Inquiry, Representations, and nonsite.com. Her freelance essays and reviews have appeared in many outlets, including ArtForum, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Yale Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is an editor-at-large. She writes monthly crossword puzzles for the New Yorker, and her first book, The Riddles of the Sphinx, was published by HarperOne in 2024.
This public event is presented by IHGC's Games Lab. FREE COPIES of Shechtman's book, The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle, will be available at the event, while supplies last. Registration is not required.