Viking

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First published in hardcover in Great Britain by Virago Press, an imprint of Hachette UK Limited, London, in 2023

First United States edition published by Viking, 2023

Copyright © 2023 by Jenni Nuttall

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ISBN 9780593299579 (hardcover)

ISBN 9780593299586 (ebook)

Cover design: Nayon Cho

Cover art: (detail) Ernest Guillot, 1897. Bridgeman Images

Interior design adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen

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For my daughter, whom I love more than words

Contents

Introduction: Women’s Words

1 Cors: Words for Female Anatomy

2 Flux: Menstrual Language

3 Lust: Sex and its Terms

4 Matrix: The Womb’s Words

5 Nurse: The Language of Care

6 Industry: Working Words

7 Ghyrles and Hags: Words for Ages and Stages

8 Fors: Naming Male Violence

9 Custom and Tyranny: Finding Feminism’s Vocabulary

After Words

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

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Introduction

Women’s Words

As a tutor at the University of Oxford, I teach the history of the English language as well as Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature. Each term my students and I explore English in its infancy and adolescence. I love the urgent, need-to-know queries about vocabulary that get fired at me without warning. Often young feminists want to know more about the history of words relating to women’s lives and experience. Does the first syllable of woman come from womb or from another root? one undergraduate asks. Is a maiden always a virgin? demands another, and is a maiden always a girl? What do spinsters have to do with spinning? How can rape and rapture derive from the same etymological origins?

Sometimes I know the answer off the top of my head but often I have to look things up. And the questions don’t stop there. At home in the last decade or so, bringing up a daughter who is, like so many children, fascinated by the origins and meanings of words, I’ve answered many queries about names and terms. Now she’s a teenager, we search for the right words to tackle trickier topics. What is the best vocabulary with which to talk about the practicalities of puberty? What do I tell her about the myths and realities of love and sex, those new voyages on which she might soon embark, their dreams and their nightmares? In my teaching room or seated around the kitchen table, I’ve often turned to my dictionaries for help and encouragement.

The history of women’s words, it turns out, is full of surprises, of things which aren’t necessarily what you’d expect. Even our basics have unfamiliar beginnings. In Old English, the very first version of the language brought to the British Isles by fifth- and sixth-century migrants, mann or mon (as it was then spelled) meant not ‘man’ or ‘male’ but ‘human’ or ‘person’ (so mankind was once not quite as default male as it sounds to modern ears). Though the oldest English writings are hard to date precisely and the survival of texts very patchy, the first illustrative quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for our modern word man, taken from one of the oldest medical books in English copied at the end of the tenth century, in fact describes a woman being treated for heavy periods. The book advises that a doctor should place horse dung on a hot coal and let it smoke between the thighs so that ‘se mon swæte swiþe [so that the person sweats a lot]’. Not a pleasant-sounding treatment, but rather marvellous that this dictionary’s first person is female.

Likewise, the etymology of woman itself is not a simple story. Some Renaissance language experts thought its origin must indeed be ‘womb-man’, with woman meaning ‘that kynde of man [i.e. human] that is wombed’ (so says Richard Verstegan in a 1605 book). But woman in truth comes from the Old English compound wifman. You might think that a wifman was a person who is, or is destined to be, a married woman: a limited, patriarchal definition. But that’s not exactly right either. Wif and wer, in the oldest English, mean ‘woman’ and ‘man’, regardless of marital status. So a wifman is a woman-human. Scholars have not been able to agree on the etymological roots of that single syllable wif. Something to do with weaving, they speculate, or waving to and fro (perhaps our swaying hips or our busy multitasking?), or something about our private parts. No one really knows.

As I’ve been fielding questions at work and at home, I’ve realised that many of our current words for women’s lives and experiences are relative newcomers into English, at least when viewed from the perspective of someone who spends most of her time paddling around in English’s very beginnings. While words like wife and man have the deepest roots, many others appear much more recently, inventions of what linguists call Modern English, the version of the language which has evolved from the beginning of the eighteenth century to our present day. But what about the English that came before: the thousand and more years spanning Anglo-Saxon Old English, medieval Middle English and the Early Modern English of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Was there just radio silence, gaps and voids of meaning ready and waiting to be filled with words not yet coined? Or did women have useful terms within reach before this more recent set of inventions? There might, I realised, be a lost history of women’s words.

With the aid of dictionaries and glossaries, I trekked back into the first thousand years of the English language to find the beginnings of women’s words, our now-forgotten vocabulary, like an explorer going far inland to locate the origin of some mighty river. There’s something perverse, I know, about turning away from a vast flood to find the soggy patch in a field or the unimpressive spring bubbling through a rock which marks its source, but there’s a certain satisfaction in knowing a word’s history and a certain magic in finding the very first articulation of a particular idea or experience. There’s no need to fall for what linguists call the ‘etymological fallacy’, the idea that a word’s initial sense or its etymological origins must determine its current meaning. English today is many Englishes, a global ocean system of different varieties and local currents, and when words flow out into their wide oceans, as millions of speakers use and abuse them, their meanings broaden and change. This book will map out some of these evolutions. From time to time words get lost along the way and this book rediscovers them too.

These early English words for aspects of women’s lives have so much to offer us today. It’s clear that working women, for example, aren’t a recent invention of modernity but a long-established workforce who were as proud of their labours as we are of our own jobs nowadays. Paying attention to the first vocabularies of caring, motherhood and maternity shows that these three words are not exact synonyms which demand that all women be maternal and motherly. The histories of words for the ages and stages of female life cycles explain some of the pigeonholes into which society still wants to post us. The origins of the terms we use today for violence targeted at girls and women expose the deep-dug foundations on which perpetrators build their excuses and justifications. But, as well as showing us what we’re up against in a patriarchal world, these words might also inspire us. Any lingering sense of shame we might feel about menstruation, for example, is dispelled by the past’s enthusiastic and fluent discussion of this topic. In old words we can find surprising new thoughts about our bodies’ capacities for desire, for pregnancy and for much, much more.

These old words might also embolden us to find as many new words as we need to express exactly what we think and feel. And there’s nothing to stop us finding fresh purposes for aged terms. As women have slowly made progress towards equality, we’ve paradoxically lost some of the most expressive and eloquent bits of English vocabulary for describing our lives and experiences. Like vintage tools laid out for sale at a flea market, we can pick up these older words, puzzle out their purposes, compare them with today’s language and see if we have any use for them, decorative or practical.

*

Heading back upstream, this book explores women’s words in the English spoken in Anglo-Saxon, medieval and Early Modern Britain up to around the year 1800, as well as casting some glimpses overseas as the horizons of this language were expanded through exploration and colonisation. My mother tongue’s history begins with Old English, the language brought to England’s shores in the 400s and 500s by migrants from Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, some of whom were from tribes called the Angles or Engles. By the year 600, written records use Englisc to name both some of the people living in England and the language that they spoke. This name Englisc gains currency rather quickly, so you might think that other languages like Late Spoken Latin and Brittonic were rapidly swept away. Yet the arrival of English didn’t bring about wholesale and immediate ethnic and linguistic cleansing. On the ground there was a mix of cultures and plenty of multilingual speakers for many decades until English dominated in the ninth century. In this book I use the modern adjective Anglo-Saxon to describe the people and cultures of England between the arrival of these migrants and the Norman Conquest in 1066, but this is a shorthand label for a much more diverse situation. English found its way to dominance amid the fusions brought about by waves of immigration as well as amalgamation with the native Romano-British population. Over several centuries English was transformed from immigrant language to a vernacular, the name given to the language spoken by most people in a country as a matter of course (as opposed to languages learned and used for specialised purposes by a smaller elite).

When William I and his Norman followers conquered England in 1066 and took over its lands and institutions, English was demoted to a third-class language below Latin and French. It was now the vulgar tongue (from vulgus, Latin for the ‘general public’ or the ‘common people’). Vulgar as an adjective first meant ‘commonly understood’ or ‘widely known’ before its meaning gradually grew ever more negative: first ‘unlearned’, then ‘ordinary’ or ‘coarse’, and finally ‘rude’. This subordination below other languages dramatically transformed English, its grammar changing markedly and its vocabulary supplemented with words borrowed from French. In the following centuries, Middle English, as scholars call medieval English, was a kind of linguistic Wild West. Without dictionaries or grammar books to keep it in check, Middle English ran riot with different dialects, rebellious spellings and experimental, unregulated vocabulary. From the thirteenth century, English gradually regained its former role as a language for literature and for officialdom and institutions as the French influence weakened over time. Things settled down a bit with Early Modern English, the language which evolved across the centuries between 1500 and 1700. Little by little, driven by the need for mutual intelligibility and by the wider circulation of texts which served as models to imitate, English’s variation was reduced, and its wildness reined in by dictionaries, grammars and the teaching of the language in schools.

These changes in English’s status altered how people felt about their mother tongue. The phrase lingua materna appears first in the early twelfth century when scholars unfavourably compared this domestic language, the speech you learned among the women who looked after you as a small child, with Latin, the language of the fathers. Not literally the language of your father necessarily but clerical or academic ‘fathers’ who taught in schools and universities. Only when reformers demanded that the Bible and other aspects of Christian worship be available in English from the fourteenth century onward did the mother tongue begin to be described more approvingly as a familiar and homely kind of communication. In the eighteenth century, the mother tongue was represented by some philosophers as the language in which you could express yourself most intimately and authentically. Scaled up, this same logic argued that there were discrete ‘nations’, ethnically and linguistically distinctive groups (‘the English’ or ‘the Germans’, for example), whose characteristics were supposedly reflected by the particular qualities of their different vernaculars. Proponents of these nationalistic views used the phrase mother tongue to hint that there were some natural, biological underpinnings to their theories.

These days we’re more suspicious of simplistic equations made between language and identity. The language in which you feel most comfortable may not be your own mother’s first language. Like Anglo-Saxon, medieval and Renaissance societies, we take multilingualism for granted as a familiar part of our world. Today, as a result of Britain’s ignoble history of colonisation and empire, English is a mother tongue for some speakers but a second or third language for many more. In 1578, the Anglo-Italian dictionary-maker John Florio said that English was ‘a language that wyl do you good in England, but passe Dover, it is woorth nothing’. Speaking English well was a real advantage in Britain, says Florio, but once you set out from its borders, sailing across the Channel, heading out toward the wider world, it was pretty useless. Not true, of course, today. Now about 1.35 billion people speak English across the globe, of whom 1 billion speak it as a second or additional language.

It’s almost impossible to conceptualise today’s variety of world Englishes, the different seas and rivers through which the English language’s numerous currents flow. So this book concentrates on the English that I study in the writings of the past and the words that I hear in my own small world. In these chapters, I work by snippets and excerpts, assembling a patchwork quilt of dictionary entries and quotations, each phrase or sentence making up my larger textile. More often my discoveries are the oldest words used about women by men, for most of the words in the mouths of women in the past were never recorded. But sometimes my patches are the words of women themselves, some of them the first women to write and publish on particular subjects.

*

Many of the terms used by and about women went the way of natural wastage, lost from view as newer words were invented. But words can also be suppressed by more deliberate attempts to restrict speech. It’s easy to think of knowledge and language marching on in lockstep, leaving behind myths and ignorance and heading toward clarity and openness. But society goes backward as well as forward, sometimes getting worse rather than better at talking about certain topics. In the 1390s, for example, the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer included frank descriptions of parts of a woman’s body in one of his Canterbury Tales. In the Miller’s Tale, a woman called Alison takes revenge on Absolom, the obsessive parish clerk who’s getting in the way while she has a fling with her lodger, an Oxford student called Nicholas. Offering her admirer-cum-stalker a kiss through the window, Alison puts out her ‘hole’, her anus, and he kisses her ‘ers’, her arse. Feeling something scratchy with his lips, Absolom recoils because, as he says, women don’t generally have a beard. Chaucer is having some fun here because pubic hair was called the nether beard in medieval English, the beard down below.

Almost exactly four hundred years later, an anonymous author published a modernised version of Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale. For Georgian readers, Chaucer’s language, especially his frank realism about a woman’s body, was a much more sensitive matter, even though they took pride in the literary history of their mother tongue. While Chaucer’s original audience enjoyed the thrill of rude words, Georgian readers weren’t so keen. The updated 1791 version replaces ‘hole’ and ‘ers’ with ‘buttock’ and ‘bum’, making this outrageous kiss somewhat less precisely located. Chaucer’s description of Alison’s pubes, ‘rough and long y-herd [long-haired]’, becomes something ‘rougher than the down on ladies cheeks’. Medieval and Georgian bodies have just the same bits, the ‘limbs which few see, but all know to exist’, as this anonymous Georgian moderniser describes them. Yet the eighteenth-century fashion for decorum dictated that such knowledge had to be modestly veiled in language.

By 1835, when Charles Cowden Clarke published his Riches of Chaucer, an anthology of the medieval poet’s greatest works, he left out words, phrases and entire tales, supposedly ‘impurities’ which ‘modern refinement’ did not require. In Clarke’s collection the Miller’s Tale was omitted completely. Such censorship, Clarke explained, was to ensure that this anthology of Chaucer was suitable to be read by the ‘young women of England’. Those subjects which a culture feels to be taboo, often matters related to our bodies, to sexuality and to human reproduction, are pushed out of sight and out of direct language. In the nineteenth century, taboos about talking or reading about sexuality and fleshiness got ever stronger, especially for girls and women. Our vocabulary today still bears the consequences of this general shushing of women and their words.

This is in part because, despite the fashion for politeness and prudery, scientists and doctors in these centuries, predominantly men of course, had professional licence to carry on their sexist speculations about women’s physiology, anatomy, sexuality and psychology. Their freedom to speak was something more ideologically inflected than mere hypocrisy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, claims for universal rights for every human had grown ever more purposeful and insistent. Enslaved people demanded liberation, social reformers agitated for better conditions and political representation for the poor, and women had begun voicing their claims for equal treatment in society. Yet spooked by revolutions and radical upheavals, those who preferred the status quo kept culture’s brakes firmly jammed on against rapid change.

One way to resist reform was to promote ‘science’ (however inaccurate or misconstrued) that divided humans into biologically distinct ‘races’ or which supposedly ‘proved’ the lower classes to be somehow naturally degenerate. Likewise, it was claimed that new scientific discoveries confirmed earlier philosophical and religious prejudices that women were (in various immortal phrases) the gentler, weaker, fairer, softer or frailer sex. Aspects of femininity which we would now call gendered stereotypes were presented as essential attributes of womanhood. Much of the key vocabulary we use today for aspects of women’s bodies, lives and experiences comes from this period when certain parts of society dug in to resist change.

*

It turns out that before Georgian and Victorian fashions for modesty dampened down discussion, there was a glut of lively, unruly and often startlingly vivid women’s words. There was plenty of sexist thinking, of course, but always voices ready to challenge misogyny and sexism. Good reason then to leapfrog over the last two centuries of English, going further back to rediscover our language’s first thousand or so years. The openness of the distant past reminds me strongly of our own current commitment to candour. Today we talk much more plainly and urgently about experiences of menstruation and menopause, pregnancy and childbirth, and about other aspects of women’s health across our life cycles. We’re also speaking far and wide about the consequences of living in a gendered society. Women are challenging the sexist thinking embedded in medical science and psychology. We’re calling out the culture which enables the sexual and physical violence some men target at women. We can now, in theory, narrate our life stories in any register or genre with whatever vocabulary we like. But we might nonetheless still want to have women’s words to hand. Though laws have granted equality on paper for some of us, statistics show we’re not yet there in practice. Gendered socialisation still tries to set us off on different paths through life. The work of caring falls disproportionately on women’s shoulders, as does the housework, both of which have to be juggled with work outside the home.

The subjects of this book’s chapters – the language of the distinctive parts of female anatomy, of menstruation, of sexuality, of pregnancy and childbirth, of caring, of working, of the stages of our life cycle, of male violence aimed at women and of patriarchy and inequality – may not be relevant to every one of us. Not every woman’s body works in exactly the same way. Some of us won’t ever be pregnant. Some do a great deal of the work of caring and some of us not so much. Some of us will be fortunate to feel relatively immune from violence directed at women, but many of us do not. Some won’t feel that the sexist lineaments of the past have much influence on our lives, but many of us do. Some of these words we share with transgender and non-binary people who wouldn’t classify themselves as women. Each individual takes what they need from the common word-stock.

The first woman to author a work in English whose name we know, the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, said that she wrote about her Christian faith ‘al in general and nothing in special’. By this, she meant she didn’t presume to tell individual readers that they were either damned or saved. Likewise, she didn’t claim any special authority or virtue for herself. Just so the women’s words I’ve chosen are relevant in general but not necessarily in special for every reader. But I hope my grammar of us and we can stretch to include whomsoever might know something of the experiences each chapter describes. Linguists in the eighteenth century once decided that it was supposedly more correct to use the generic he, him and his when referring to mixed-sex categories of people. This default setting makes it seem as if men are central and usual and women the exception. Turning the tables, I hope those readers who don’t have first-hand knowledge of the particular experiences whose vocabulary I explore will forgive me the use of a generic we and us.

Language, the Harvard linguist Dwight Bolinger once said, cheerfully mixing his metaphors, is ‘a stage built over a graveyard from which fossils rise and dance at night’.[1] Not skeletons, you note, but something more primeval, ancient creatures halfway to alien. Thanks to the long continuity of our words, history doesn’t rest quietly dead but stays on to haunt us. Words used by and about women are particularly afflicted by the outdated ideas and backstories that our language drags along behind us. Our vocabulary bears plenty of traces of the sexism of the past when experts and authorities were mostly male. Yet I think it’s still worth bothering with. For all its lagging prejudices, knowing more about this vocabulary can help us root ourselves more firmly in the footings of our culture and of our thoughts. We can take these fossils for another spin around the stage, altering the choreography as we go.

One

Cors

Words for Female Anatomy

We’ll begin our journey into English’s past with the set of words which name what the Georgian moderniser of Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale called the particulars distinguishing male and female anatomy. Worrying that his readers might take offence at even his sanitised version of Chaucer’s tale, he points out that the ‘most mincing prude’, the most refined of ladies, knows, as he so elegantly puts it, that ‘the structure of her body differs in some particulars from that of her brother’s body’. There’s no getting away from the importance of this vocabulary in the history of women’s lives. Female physiology has in the past been the supposed grounds on which certain humans were allocated subordinate roles in patriarchal societies. Those of us in the female category were once limited in our life choices: under-educated, kept out of most professions and hobbled by the law. Women’s paths through the world, whether they liked it or not, were predetermined and constricted because they had been selected for certain treatment on the basis of their particular reproductive anatomy.

Nothing about the fact of being female itself, of course, inevitably invites this subordination. Nothing about the part we might be assumed to play in the two-by-two process of mammalian reproduction demands or deserves or justifies these limitations. Yet it is no accident that those parts of us needed to make new members of our species emerged as the sorting mechanism and were often cited as part of the faux-logic ‘explanation’. The restriction of a chunk of humanity wasn’t based on some arbitrary feature (maybe your eye colour, the length of your big toe, or whether your belly button sank in or popped out). Rather it targeted exactly those things which families and institutions found advantageous to control and exploit: lineage and inheritance, for example, and child-rearing and other kinds of reproductive labour which make and sustain human life.

The anatomical words which name female sex characteristics have been much on my mind recently. I hear myself pronouncing them carefully out loud as I seek to give my daughter plain facts and accurate explanations rather than squeamish euphemisms about the physical changes of puberty. They’ve also rung in my ears as I’ve chewed over the recent trend for the phrasing in some public health campaigns, marketing and journalism which replaces words like women or females with terminology laser-focused on physiology and anatomy such as people with a uterus or menstruators. Some of us find this body-centred language helpfully inclusive, a neat substitution which acknowledges those with female anatomy who would not categorise themselves as women, but others find it dehumanising, reducing an entire person to a body part. Whatever our view on this new linguistic impulse, if we’re to be referred to as vulva-owners or cervix-havers, we’d better be up to speed on these words’ backstories.

As fancy-pants, barely digested Latin – labia, clitoris, vagina, uterus and ovaries, for example – their etymologies are mysterious to most of us. Newly curious, I looked them up in the Oxford English Dictionary. In doing so, I was struck by how relatively late-arriving they are in the history of English. Vulva makes its debut in vernacular books written by medieval surgeons and doctors around the year 1400, but the rest don’t appear in English until the seventeenth century, when the discoveries of Renaissance anatomy were described for English readers. Their belated arrival is surprising because most of the words for parts of the human body, our cors (as you might call your physical form in medieval English), are much more long-serving than