The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle

Shechtman, a crossword compiler for the New York Times and the New Yorker, debuts with a rigorous yet fleet-footed exploration of the crossword puzzle’s feminist legacy. Profiling four women pivotal to the crossword’s evolution—Ruth Hale, Margaret Farrar, Julia Penelope, and Ruth von Phul—Shechtman tracks the crossword from its 1913 invention, through its rising popularity in the 1920s and ’30s, to its eventual widespread adoption by newspapers and magazines. Noting that women were long the primary creators of crosswords, Shechtman explains how the rise of computer technology that transformed the way crossword constructors work has led to the field being taken over in recent decades by men. Pairing this history with a ruminative memoir that chronicles both her love for crossword construction and her youthful struggles with anorexia, Shechtman draws effortlessly on feminist theory and psychoanalysis to ultimately make the astute observation that both her eating disorder and her crossword-constructing habit stem from a need for control—of the body and language. Throughout, Shechtman investigates how gender, race, and politics affect crosswords, though her self-analyzing narrative often pushes back against this line of inquiry (“The question risks a double embarrassment: trivializing the serious stuff of politics or, maybe worse, taking trivialities too seriously”). By turns incisive and roving, this teases out hidden connections and forgotten histories that will enthrall readers. (Mar.)