Quite early, I think. There’s a Sherlock Holmes story (“A Case of Identity”) with a woman client who makes pocket-money working from home as a typist. According to Wikipedia, that was published in 1891 and set in 1888.

Research into the methodology of acknowledgments? The mind boggles and wants to know what method they themselves used to give acknowledgments; but yet fears the infinite recursion which might ensue.

What, they recommend that non-native speakers receive assistance in writing acknowledgements?

Cause that’s really what’s holding back their brilliant careers?

I’m pretty sure that no academic career has ever been impeded by an insufficiently sophisticated acknowledgement.

(I mean—you can probably shoot yourself in the foot with something catty. But a simple thanks will always suffice.)

Oh, those are good. There’s also the page in this, not online…but here’s a sample: thanks to “two bitter narcissists in a certain headless department of English who have no loyalty other than to their own self-causes.”

Berry’s 1990 ‘What are People For?’ has an entire chapter about the typing wife.

An excerpt: “Without exception, the feminist letters accuse me of exploiting my wife, and they do not scruple to allow the most insulting implications of their indictment to fall upon my wife. They fail entirely to see that my essay does not give any support to their accusation—or if they see it, they do not care. My essay, in fact, does not characterize my wife beyond saying that she types my manuscripts and tells me what she thinks about them. It does not say what her motives are, how much work she does, or whether or how she is paid. Aside from saying that she is my wife and that I value the help she gives me with my work, it says nothing about our marriage. It says nothing about our economy.

There is no way, then, to escape the conclusion that my wife and I are subjected in these letters to a condemnation by category. My offense is that I am a man who receives some help from his wife; my wife’s offense is that she is a woman who does some work for her husband—which work, according to her critics and mine, makes her a drudge, exploited by a conventional subservience. And my detractors have, as I say, no evidence to support any of this. Their accusation rests on a syllogism of the flimsiest sort: my wife helps me in my work, some wives who have helped their husbands in their work have been exploited, therefore my wife is exploited.

This, of course, outrages justice to about the same extent that it insults intelligence. Any respectable system of justice exists in part as a protection against such accusations. In a just society nobody is expected to plead guilty to a general indictment, because in a just society nobody can be convicted on a general indictment. What is required for a just conviction is a particular accusation that can be proved. My accusers have made no such accusation against me. [...]

I should say too that I understand how fortunate I have been in being able to do an appreciable part of my work at home. I know that in many marriages both husband and wife are now finding it necessary to work away from home. This issue, of course, is troubled by the question of what is meant by “necessary,” but it is true that a family living that not so long ago was ordinarily supplied by one job now routinely requires two or more. My interest is not to quarrel with individuals, men or women, who work away from home, but rather to ask why we should consider this general working away from home to be a desirable state of things, either for people or for marriage, for our society or for our country.

If I had written in my essay that my wife worked as a typist and editor for a publisher, doing the same work that she does for me, no feminists, I daresay, would have written to Harper’s to attack me for exploiting her—even though, for all they knew, I might have forced her to do such work in order to keep me in gambling money. It would have been assumed as a matter of course that if she had a job away from home she was a “liberated woman,” possessed of a dignity that no home could confer upon her.”

Read the whole thing (see link in signature).

I highly recommend Berry’s book “What Are People For?”.