Her Speech Betrays Her: The New Woman and Gendered Slang in the Periodical Press

Abstract:To Victorian prescriptivists writing for the periodical press, slang threatened the sanctity of the English language. While their complaint texts criticize slang as lower-class vulgarity, this language policing also fixates on the slang vocabularies of female speakers. By tracing three gender-based language ideologies expressed in Victorian periodicals—that women learn slang from men, that slang corrupts womanliness, and that slang is symptomatic of the feminist movement—this essay explores how Victorians denounced vulgar speech as a masculine act associated with the New Woman and nonconformist gender performance at the fin de siècle.