Mother Tongue: The surprising history of women's words

Description

When we look to the past, we often expect to be disappointed. In the history of language, we expect to find misogyny around each corner, a disdain for or absence of the voice of women. But the history of women's words, as it turns out, is full of surprises. From the monthly flux or flowers to the m gs that experience them, from the original helpmeet, Eve, to the viragos who fronted early feminism, it is undeniable that there was a wealth of riches for describing our experiences, our lives and our selves. In fact, as women have made slow progress towards equality, we've paradoxically lost some of the most expressive and eloquent bits of our vocabulary. Here, Jenni Nuttall shines a light on them, to dust them off and see if we've any use for them today. Mother Tongue is a rich, provocative and entertaining history of women's words - of the language we have, and haven't, had to share our lives. Inspired by Jenni Nuttall's deep knowledge of the English language as well as conversations with her teenage daughter, this is a book for anyone who loves language - and for feminists who want to look to the past in order to move forward.

Dr Jenni Nuttall is an academic who's been teaching and researching medieval literature at the University of Oxford for the last twenty years, and who has had a lot of practice at making old words interesting. She has a DPhil from Oxford and completed the University of East Anglia's MA in Creative Writing. She is the author of a readers' guide to Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde with Cambridge University Press and she is contributing a chapter on 'Literary Language' for the Fifteenth Century volume of the Oxford History of Poetry in English, edited by Julia Boffey and A S G Edwards. Mother Tongue is her book first for the general reader.