Towards a history of feminist counter-language: insights and legacies from the long nineteenth century

Nowadays, the Internet and social media are full of a whole new terminology created by the Third-wave feminist movement which includes neologisms like mansplain (“to explain something […] in a manner thought to reveal a patronising or chauvinistic attitude”; cfr. Oxford English Dictionary), and multi-word expressions like yes means yes (a paradigm shift that looks at rape by highlighting the idea that consent should be explicit). However, this does not mean that feminist language did not exist before the advent of social networks and chatrooms; this paper proposes the (partial) results of a long-term project that aims at reconstructing the history of feminist discourse by looking at examples of British feminist writings from the long nineteenth century. The research has considered a corpus of 715 articles taken from four of the most important feminist periodicals of the period between 1894 and 1914, and results have shown that a key feature of their discourse was the semantic renegotiation of words like womanhood, suffragette, and sisterhood. Their specific extended meanings, which were not acknowledged in official reference works, demonstrate how the feminist movement has always adopted what might be labelled as “feminist counter-language”, which has mainly aimed at deconstructing and renegotiating terms defined by patriarchal ideology. The analysis underlines how studying nineteenth-century feminist language can be useful for different reasons: (a) reconstructing its history and creating a historical glossary; (b) filling a niche in linguistic studies of the feminist movement, which have tended not to consider this period; (c) helping in the revision and redefinition of key headwords related to gender in dictionaries, and thus eliminating any form of sexist bias from them; and (d) in an interdisciplinary perspective, contributing to scholarship concerning the history of the feminist movement and to media studies on Victorian and Edwardian periodicals.