Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words

Historian Nuttall (The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship) offers an eye-opening survey of the etymology of words used to identify women’s body parts, the kind of work they performed, and the violence they suffered from men in Anglo-Saxon English from the 400s to the 1800s (with brief forays into more recent times). Delving into sources from law, literature, and medicine, Nuttall contends that because men enjoyed higher literacy rates, they often crafted meanings advantageous to patriarchal institutions: the word hysteria, derived from the Greek for womb, became a byword for irrationality; words like occupation, employment, industry, and business that once “described activity itself” became “particularly associated with paid employment,” while terms like housework and homemaking surfaced late in the 1850s to demarcate and devalue women’s labor; and the “ambiguous histories” of words like ravishment and seduction have complicated the definition of rape and women’s attempts to secure legal remedies. Nuttall concludes that though people now have language to denounce the chauvinism of words that began “in the service of sexist theories,” their etymology serves as a sobering reminder of how closely “the world-which-once-was snaps at our heels.” This is required reading for logophiles, feminists, and history buffs. (Aug.)