Vilken plats hade kvinnan? : Om grammatiskt och sexuellt genus i SAOL:s sjunde upplaga 1900

In the seventh edition of The Swedish Academy Glossary (SAOL) in 1900, biologically based gender was included in addition to grammatical gender. This required the SAOL editor to take a stance as to the sex of the non-neuter nouns referring to persons: Was it a question of men or women or both? Based on the SAOL gender designations, this article discusses those factors, both linguistic and non-linguistic, that were determinative for the editor’s classification. That a word’s traditional grammatical gender continued to play an important role is clear: a significant number of the personal nouns received the designation “m.” (masculine) or “f.” (feminine) regardless of the sex of the reference. And although many of the personal nouns that traditionally were classified as masculine in the 1900 edition were designated as “mf.” (masculine and feminine), a significant discrepancy can be traced between the SAOL gender designations and the reality outside the linguistic world – the place women received in SAOL is considerably narrower than that which was the actual case for women at the turn of the 19th century