Among the first feminist books I ever read was Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden from History. It was one of many attempts by feminists in the 1970s to write women back into a historical record which was partial in both senses of the word–incomplete and distorted by male bias. Rowbotham notes in her preface that filling the gaps had required her to piece together scraps of information found by combing through secondary sources: women, for the most part, had lacked the means to write their own stories.
The fact that women’s own words have so often gone unrecorded, or else been lost, discarded and forgotten over time, is a problem for feminist historians generally, but it’s particularly challenging for historians of language. Nevertheless, there’s a long tradition of attempts to recover or reconstruct the hidden history of women’s words.
Some attempts to do this have focused on what are often, though not entirely accurately, described as “secret” women’s languages—distinctive varieties which, in certain times and places, were used by women among themselves and were unknown to, or concealed from, men. One interesting case (which I had never heard of before a student from India told me about it*) is Begamati zubaan (“women’s tongue”), a variety of Urdu which was used until the 20th century in the zenanas (women’s quarters) of Muslim households across northern India. In fact it was more a lexicon than a language: its vocabulary is said to have been “earthy and colourful”, and particularly rich in endearment terms, blessings and curses. Another example is Nushu (“women’s writing”), a syllabic script developed by peasant women in Hunan Province who had no access to formal instruction in the standard, character-based Chinese writing system.
These “secret languages” were the in-group codes of socially segregated and marginalized groups: they flourished in conditions of inequality and oppression, and were lost (or more exactly, abandoned) when those conditions changed. Much of what we know about them comes (ironically) from texts written by men. That’s especially true of Begamati zubaan, for which the main sources of detailed information are male-authored scholarly and literary texts produced in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was also a man, Zhou Shuoyi, who pioneered the modern academic study of Nushu (though recent efforts to revive it have been led by women).
But attempts to retrieve the hidden or forgotten vocabulary of women are not confined to cases where women had their own distinctive spoken or written variety. This post was inspired by two books I’ve read recently which explore, from different angles, the history of women’s words in English.
I’ll start with Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words, which was published earlier this year. Its author Jenni Nuttall points out in the introduction that “many of our current words for women’s lives and experiences are relative newcomers into English”. Her book examines the way women were represented in earlier forms of the language: in Old English (spoken during the early mediaeval period), Middle English (which developed after the Norman Conquest of 1066) and Early Modern English (the language of Shakespeare’s time, roughly the 16th and 17th centuries). For the reasons I’ve already mentioned, her evidence comes largely from texts written by men, but she does make use of women’s writing wherever possible.
There have been nonfiction books about “women’s words” before: examples include Jane Mills’s 1989 Womanwords, a feminist riff on the socialist critic Raymond Williams’s Keywords, and the various feminist dictionaries of the 1980s. Mother Tongue, however, takes a different approach: it’s not structured as a list of individual words (rather the chapters deal with broad themes such as the vocabulary of menstruation, sex, reproduction, care, work, violence, etc.), and AFAIK it’s the first book for non-specialists which concentrates on the immediate ancestors of modern English, looking for clues to the way women, and matters pertaining to women (from their bodies and life-cycles to their labour and their relationships), were seen and thought about by English-speakers in the past.
Though I’ve studied (and indeed taught) the history of English, there was plenty in Mother Tongue that was new to me, particularly in the chapters dealing with the female body, sex and reproduction. (Oddly enough, these were not subjects the men who taught me Old and Middle English in the 1970s were eager to discuss.) I didn’t know that before English acquired Latin anatomical terms like vulva and vagina, the relevant body parts were often named using words like gate, wicket (i.e., small gate) or port—a metaphor which we might think is both more logical and less offensive than what’s implied by vagina, the Latin word for a sheath or scabbard. Both sexes had tits, and for a long time both could have wombs (i.e., bellies). Rather than menstruating (another Latin word), women had their courses or their flowers: the latter term may have reflected the understanding that just as plants flower before setting fruit, regular bleeding in women is a sign of fertility.
Early English speakers inherited from antiquity the belief that conception required orgasm in both partners. Orgasm “released the seed” in men, and was assumed to do the same in women, though what the female seed consisted of remained a matter of speculation. Women were not viewed as sexually passive, but as actively lustful, and—being the weaker sex—less able to control their lust than men. On that basis the 14th century Lollards argued that nuns should not take vows of celibacy: unable to resist their urges, they would be constantly “busy knowing [having sex] with hemself”.
“With hemself” could mean either “with themselves” or “among themselves”, making it unclear whether the concern here was about masturbation or women having sex with women. Neither practice was shrouded in ignorance: while there were many things early English speakers didn’t know about women’s bodies, they did know what the clitoris was for. Nuttall cites texts whose authors mention various dialect terms denoting it, such as “the kiker in the cunt” and “hayward of corpse’s dale” (a hayward was a field overseer, so this expression figures the clitoris as the boss of women’s genital area). Jane Sharp, a midwife who wrote a book for other midwives in 1671, described it as “a little bank called a mountain of pleasure”, adding that the pleasure could be enhanced by touching the “folds and pleats” of the labia. Three hundred years later, the sex education I got in school was both less informative and more male-centred.
But mediaeval women didn’t spend all their time having sex. The work-themed chapter of Mother Tongue illustrates the range of jobs they did: they appear in Old English texts with occupational descriptors like spinster (which would later become a general term for unmarried women, but literally means “woman who spins [wool]”), webster (weaver), combster (wool-comber), hewster (dyer), maltster (maker of malt), tæppestre (“tapster”, server of ale) and bæcestre (baker). All these terms contain the Old English feminine ending –estre or its variant –ster. Male occupational terms ended in the masculine –ere: a male server of ale was originally a tæppere, a tapper rather than a tapster. But in some cases—including tapster—the feminine form became the generic term, used for men as well as women. Later English-speakers sometimes felt the need to clarify where occupational –ster terms referred to women by giving them a newer feminine ending (from which we can deduce that –ster itself had stopped being a clear indicator of a worker’s sex). An example is the word seamstress, where the French feminine suffix –ess(e) has been tacked onto an English form (semestre) that already contains an Old English feminine suffix.
Jenni Nuttall does not deny that mediaeval English society was deeply patriarchal, but she does want to challenge the common folk-view of women’s history as a simple narrative of progress from the unmitigated horrors of the supposed Dark Ages to the enlightenment that allegedly characterizes our own time. The story she tells through language is less about the gradual fading of sexism and misogyny than about the different forms they took at different times. It’s also about the niches women in the past were able to create for themselves, and how that sometimes enabled them to evade the most restrictive forms of patriarchal control.
Patriarchal authority and women’s resistance to it is a central theme in the second book I want to talk about, Pip Williams’s The Dictionary of Lost Words. First published in 2020, this is not a work of linguistic scholarship but a novel—a fictionalized version of a story that’s been told numerous times in nonfiction, about the making of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The main action takes place during the compilation of the OED (which was published in instalments from the 1880s onwards: the last volume appeared in 1928), and the characters include a number of real people who worked on it, most notably its chief editor James Murray. The main protagonist Esme Nicoll, however, is a fictional creation. She learns about dictionaries as a child by accompanying her widowed lexicographer father to work in Murray’s “scriptorium” (basically a shed outside his house), and later becomes (as some of Murray’s daughters did in reality) a paid OED employee herself.
Though the f-word is never used, Esme also becomes a feminist. She has some involvement with the women’s suffrage movement, as well as other personal experiences that make her conscious of women’s generally unjust treatment in Victorian/Edwardian England, but she is mainly interested in using her professional skills to retrieve women’s words from the obscurity to which conventional lexicography has consigned them. The material she collects for that purpose is the titular “dictionary of lost words”: eventually it will be printed (though not published) in a volume entitled Women’s Words and Their Meanings.
The concept of “women’s words” in this novel overlaps with, but isn’t identical to, the one that informs Mother Tongue. Esme is most concerned to record words, and senses of words, used predominantly by and among women, which are left out of mainstream dictionaries because their male editors either lack access to women’s talk or else consider it too trivial or too distasteful to record. Some of the words she collects are items she finds in the OED’s reject pile. But many are words that would never reach the scriptorium because they don’t come from “reputable” printed sources. Rather they belong to the everyday speech of uneducated working-class women like the Murrays’ servant Lizzie (who provides Esme with knackered, meaning “so tired as to be fit for nothing, like a worn-out horse”) and the market trader Mabel, a former prostitute who is a prolific source of sexual terms. Esme also collects novel vocabulary items from the women she knows in the suffrage movement, including the word suffragette and the political sense of sister(hood).
Occasionally Esme succeeds in getting a meaning or a quotation into the relevant OED entry, but mostly the men are not interested. When she tries to give Oxford’s Bodleian Library a copy of Women’s Words and Their Meanings, the librarian declines her offer, saying that it’s “an interesting project, but of no scholarly importance”. To this Esme replies: “it is not for you to judge the importance of these words”. But of course, part of the point the novel makes is that our view of the English language has been shaped by the judgments of educated men on what and whose language was important. Though the makers of the OED prided themselves on their objective, evidence-based approach, they didn’t always practise what they preached (it wasn’t for want of evidence that the word lesbian did not get an OED entry until 1976); and some of their guiding principles, such as the requirement that words be attested in respectable published sources, reinforced both class and gender bias.
Pip Williams has explained that she was partly inspired to write The Dictionary of Lost Words by reading Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne, a nonfiction bestseller (later adapted into a film starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn) which tells the story of the OED through the figure of William Minor, a doctor and convicted murderer who contributed material for thousands of entries while confined to an asylum for “criminal lunatics”. Williams recalls being “left with the impression that the Dictionary was a particularly male endeavour”. “Where”, she asked herself, “are the women in this story?”
The answer (documented in detail in Lindsay Rose Russell’s academic history of women and dictionary making) is that a large number of women contributed in some way to the making of the OED, and some made very substantial contributions–they included Murray’s daughters Hilda, Elsie and Rosfrith, his co-editor A.C. Bradley’s daughter Eleanor, and Edith Thompson, a volunteer reader, sub-editor and proof-checker who becomes a major character in The Dictionary of Lost Words. Despite their experience and long service, which in some cases spanned several decades, the OED’s women were paid less than their male counterparts and received little public credit for their work. Pip Williams dramatizes this lack of recognition by having Edith Thompson write a (fictional) letter recounting the (true) story of the formal dinner which was held to celebrate the dictionary’s completion. No women were invited, but as a special concession, three of them were allowed to sit in a balcony to hear the speeches and watch the men eat.
Dictionary-making was not always such a male endeavour. Many early English dictionaries were compiled by women (e.g. Mary Evelyn, whose 1690 Mundus Muliebris (“Women’s world”) included a “fop-dictionary” devoted to the vocabulary of fashion and cosmetics); some were not unlike the fictional Women’s Words and Their Meanings, in that they focused on “English as it was spoken among and with women” (here I’m quoting Lindsay Russell’s description of the 1694 Ladies Dictionary). The marginality of women and women’s words in the OED is another illustration of Jenni Nuttall’s point that advances in knowledge don’t always represent progress for women. As lexicography became more “scientific”–more systematic, more fact-oriented, more rigorous–it also became more male-dominated, and more masculinist in its assumptions about what did or didn’t belong in dictionaries.
The books I’ve been discussing are explicitly about the past, but we should not overlook their relevance to the present. English-speaking women are no longer confined to a “separate sphere” (or hidden away in a balcony), but there is plenty of evidence that, today as in the past, women’s words get less attention than men’s. In mixed-sex groups, both online and face-to-face, research shows that men dominate most interactions; we also know that men’s tweets, blog posts and newspaper articles get more engagement (though women’s attract more abuse), and that men’s literary writing is studied more than women’s. Meanwhile, women’s talk among themselves–whether in private or in female-dominated forums like Mumsnet–continues to be disparaged as trivial and distasteful.
In a male-dominated and sexist society we can expect women’s voices, their words and what they know about the world to be underrepresented and undervalued. But if we want things to change, one important thing we need to do is acknowledge that they haven’t changed as much as we’ve been led to believe by the standard progress narrative. In Mother Tongue and The Dictionary of Lost Words the past is another country–but it’s not a completely alien land, nor in every way inferior to our own.
* Thanks to Shayeree Chakraborty
Postscript: Jenni Nuttall, the author of Mother Tongue (and also my former colleague at Oxford University), died in January 2024. Her death is a sad loss to feminist language study; I hope many more people will read her book about women’s words, and I dedicate this post to her memory.
language: a feminist guide 