‘Girls, Don’t Talk Slang!’: late-Victorian verbal hygiene and contested gender roles

Abstract

Late-nineteenth-century efforts to discourage women and girls from using slang constitute a classic example of what Deborah Cameron terms ‘verbal hygiene’ or ‘the urge to meddle in matters of language’. Using excerpts from a variety of conduct books, etiquette manuals, and opinion pieces published in the United States between 1868 and 1900, this article will investigate the relationship between this practice of verbal hygiene and a broader cultural anxiety over challenges to traditional gender norms during this period. It will discuss how verbal hygienists’ efforts to convince women not to use slang helped to construct a particular cultural ideal of femininity, and it will explore what this rhetoric can tell us about the role of this linguistic choice in negotiating a gendered identity. Finally, it will look at the practice of verbal hygiene as an important, and often overlooked, means by which compliance with normative femininity is monitored and enforced.