Mother Tongue
The Surprising History of Women's Words
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
“A fascinating look at how we talk about women. . . . Dense with information and anecdotes, Mother Tongue touches on the hilarious and the devastating, with ample dashes of an ingredient so painfully absent from most discussions of sex and gender: humor.” ―Lisa Selin Davis, The Washington Post
“[Nuttall] examines the origins of words used over many centuries to describe women’s bodies, desires, pregnancies, work lives, sexual victimhood, and stages of life. . . . Her research is comprehensive enough that even longtime word enthusiasts will find plenty of new trivia.” ―The New Yorker
An enlightening linguistic journey through a thousand years of feminist language—and what we can learn from the vivid vocabulary that English once had for women’s bodies, experiences, and sexuality
So many of the words that we use to chronicle women’s lives feel awkward or alien. Medical terms are scrupulously accurate but antiseptic. Slang and obscenities have shock value, yet they perpetuate taboos. Where are the plain, honest words for women’s daily lives?
Mother Tongue is a historical investigation of feminist language and thought, from the dawn of Old English to the present day. Dr. Jenni Nuttall guides readers through the evolution of words that we have used to describe female bodies, menstruation, women’s sexuality, the consequences of male violence, childbirth, women’s paid and unpaid work, and gender. Along the way, she challenges our modern language’s ability to insightfully articulate women’s shared experiences by examining the long-forgotten words once used in English for female sexual and reproductive organs. Nuttall also tells the story of words like womb and breast, whose meanings have changed over time, as well as how anatomical words such as hysteria and hysterical came to have such loaded legacies.
Inspired by today’s heated debates about words like womxn and menstruators—and by more personal conversations with her teenage daughter—Nuttall describes the profound transformations of the English language. In the process, she unearths some surprisingly progressive thinking that challenges our assumptions about the past—and, in some cases, puts our twenty-first-century society to shame. Mother Tongue is a rich, provocative book for anyone who loves language—and for feminists who want to look to the past in order to move forward.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.)