In Mother Tongue (Viking, Aug.) Oxford University English professor Nuttall delves into the history of words describing women’s bodies and experiences.
How did you come to realize there’s a lost history of women’s words in English?
I teach medieval and Old English texts, and increasingly my women students, when they find a word connected to women’s experiences where they can see the meaning is very different from what it means now, will just stop dead, look straight up and kind of treat me like the OED and ask, ‘Why does that mean that?’ It’s a burning question for them. I was looking up so many of these words, and noticing women in general speaking out more about all sorts of experiences, and I thought, there’s a book here. It started to write itself. I was also thinking about how many of today’s words for women’s bodies bear the traces of the 18th and 19th century, particularly of medicine and science, which meant there must be earlier vocabularies that had been lost. So I went back and found them.
You mention that some older words imply a different attitude toward gender categories than many people have today. How is that so?
I’m very conscious of what we technically call polysemy, meaning words are always being used in more than one sense, with more than one meaning, because words are stretchy and elastic. So, looking at the older word womankind as a category, if you remember that woman in its etymology just means “woman-person” and kind just means a “type,” there’s stretchiness there. I’m always amused on Twitter when people try to pin down meaning through etymology, as if they’ll find the “right” answer. It doesn’t work like that.
What are some of your favorite women’s words?
The one that everyone I talk to seems to like the most, which is only used briefly by one writer, is lunations, which is a word for periods, connecting them with the moon. But that was never common usage. Periods were, however, in a very common, everyday way, called your flowers. I like quick—in the sense of quick-witted—and the early uses of quick to mean “alive,” and that moment when the baby moves in the womb called the quickening. There are a lot of words that link pregnancy and thinking. We still have it in conception. Margery Kempe, the medieval mystic, says at one point in her autobiography, “I’m going to have a new housewifery,” by which she means what we would call a business. It’s a mill, and she wants to make money. And that’s the meaning of housewifery for a long time. We have medieval men in letters congratulating each other on being great housewives if they’ve done a great business deal!
