In England, the opposition to free discourse on venereal disease seems to come, not from religious bodies, but from the newspapers. When, in 1937, Sir William Wilson Jameson, a distinguished health officer there, demanded “Let us get rid of this taboo,” and the Ministry of Health followed a year later by preparing the first of a series of very frank advertisements for insertion in the newspapers, the copy committee of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association, of which Leonard Raftery, advertisement manager of the London Daily Mail, was chairman, objected to some of the terms used, and the ministry was forced to modify them. Here, for example, is a paragraph from the advertisement:
The two principal venereal diseases are syphilis and gonorrhoea2 (vulgarly known as pox and clap). Both are caused by tiny living organisms or germs, but the germ of syphilis is quite different from that of gonorrhoea.
And here is what the prudish copy committee made of it:
The two principal venereal diseases are syphilis and gonorrhoea. They are caused by quite different living organisms or germs.
In another paragraph the sentence “Professional prostitutes are not the only source of infection” was struck out, and in yet another the phrase sex organs was twice eliminated. The Lancet, the principal organ of the English medical men, protested against this bowdlerization with great vigor, saying:
This is the second occasion on which prudery has been allowed to hinder health education: it will be recalled that about a year ago advice to the public about washing the hands after evacuation of the bowel had to be withdrawn because the papers could not bring themselves to print water-closet. In the present instance the precision of the original advertisement has had to give place to vaguer general statements.… It would be well to bear in mind that this advertisement has been designed to reach the simplest people; a barricade of unfamiliar terms may seem almost as impenetrable to them as a barricade of silence.
This protest had some effect, but not much. The Times, after some hesitation, accepted the original advertisement with a few minor changes, but the Daily Telegraph and other papers insisted on substituting reproductive organs for sex organs, and the Daily Express, the Evening Standard and a group of Scotch papers did not print it at all.1
The rage for euphemisms arose in England in Puritan times, and was quickly transferred to the American colonies. The Restoration naturally brought some abatement at home, but there was never any real return to the free utterance of the Elizabethan era, and during the Eighteenth Century prissiness enjoyed a considerable revival. The Puritans not only made war upon all the old expletives and all the immemorial names for physiological processes; they also strove to put down the abhorrent vocaoulary of Holy Church, which they described elegantly as the Whore of Babylon. Zachary Grey records in his notes to Samuel Butler’s “Hudibras,” 1744, that the word saint was actually deleted from the titles of the principal London churches, and that some of the more fanatical Puritans began substituting an ironical sir for saint in the designations of the saints themselves, e.g., Sir Peter, Sir Paul and even Sir Mary. Some of them, going further, tried to substitute Christ-tide for Christmas in order to get rid of the reminder of the outlawed mass in the latter, but this effort seems to have failed. The nasty revival of prudery associated with the name of Victoria in England went to extreme lengths in the United States, and proceeded so far that it was frequently remarked and deplored by visiting Englishmen. Said Captain Frederick Marryat in 1839:
[The Americans] object to everything nude in statuary. When I was at the house of Governor Everett, at Boston, I observed a fine cast of the Apollo Belvidere; but in compliance with general opinion it hung with drapery, although Governor Everett himself is a gentleman of refined mind and high classical attainments, and quite above such ridiculous sensitiveness.1 In language it is the same thing. There are certain words which are never used in America, but an absurd substitute is employed. I cannot particularize them, lest I should be accused of indelicacy myself. I may, however, state one little circumstance which will fully prove the correctness of what I say.
When at Niagara Falls I was escorting a young lady with whom I was on friendly terms. She had been standing on a piece of rock, the better to view the scene, when she slipped down, and was evidently hurt by the fall: she had, in fact, grazed her shin. As she limped a little in walking home, I said, “Did you hurt your leg much?” She turned from me, evidently much shocked, or much offended, — and not being aware that I had committed any very heinous offence, I begged to know what was the reason of her displeasure. After some hesitation, she said that as she knew me well, she would tell me that the word leg was never mentioned before ladies. I apologized for my want of refinement, which was attributable to having been accustomed only to English society; and added, that as such articles must occasionally be referred to, even in the most polite circles in America, perhaps she would inform me by what name I might mention them without shocking the company. Her reply was, that the word limb was used; “nay,” continued she, “I am not so particular as some people are, for I know those who always say limb of a table, or limb of a piano-forte.”
There the conversation dropped; but a few months afterwards I was obliged to acknowledge that the young lady was correct when she asserted that some people were more particular than even she was. I was requested by a lady to escort her to a seminary for young ladies, and on being ushered into the reception-room, conceive my astonishment at beholding a square piano-forte with four limbs. However, that the ladies who visited their daughters might feel in its full force the extreme delicacy of the mistress of the establishment, and her care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge, she had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!2
Marryat then quoted the following from the book of a fellow traveler, Mrs. Trollope:
An English lady, who had long kept a fashionable boarding-school in one of the Atlantic cities, told me that one of her earliest cares with every newcomer, was to endeavour to substitute real delicacy for that affected precision of manner. Among many anecdotes, she told me of a young lady about fourteen, who, on entering the receiving-room, where she only expected to see a lady who had inquired for her, and finding a young man with her, put her hands before her eyes and ran out of the room again, screaming, “A man, a man, a man!” On another occasion, one of the young ladies, in going upstairs to the drawing-room, unfortunately met a boy of fourteen coming down, and her feelings were so violently agitated that she stopped, panting and sobbing, nor would pass on till the boy had swung himself up on the upper bannisters, to leave the passage free.1
Mrs. Trollope recorded that, to the more delicate Americans of that day, Shakespeare was obscene and unendurable, and that the very mention of Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” made them shrink in horror. It is worth noting here, as one of the ironies of literary history, that Pope himself, in his edition of Shakespeare, brought out in 1725, heavily bowdlerized the Bard. In the masquerade scene of “Romeo and Juliet,” for example, he changed the word toes in the lines:
Gentlemen, welcome! Ladies that have their toes
Unplagued with corns will have a bout with you.
to feet, though letting corns stand.2 A century later, in the United States, feet was also under the ban. The palmy days of euphemism ran from the 20s to the 80s. Bulls became male cows, cocks became roosters,3 the breast became the bosom,4 both a chair and the backside became seats, harlots became fallen women, cockroaches became roaches,5 trousers became inexpressibles, unmentionables, unwhisperables, nether garments,6 or conveniences,7 stockings (female) became hose1 and such ancient words as bitch, sow, boar, stallion, ram and buck disappeared from the vocabulary. How, in the midst of this excess of delicacy, the harsh and forthright female should have come into general use as a noun I simply can’t tell you. It was old in English and had been used by Steele in the Guardian in 1713, but it seems to have carried a suggestion of scorn in early Nineteent
h Century England. In the United States, however, it was used perfectly seriously, and was apparently a special favorite of clergymen, reformers and other such patterns of propriety. The DAE shows that there were female seminaries, boarding-schools, institutes, orphan-asylums and missionary societies in the 1820–70 era. The term did not go unchallenged, but it took a long while to put it down, for there was a span of nearly thirty years between the time the Legislature of Maryland expunged it from the title of a bill on the ground that it was “an Americanism” and the time Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book succeeded in persuading the trustees of Vassar to drop it from the name of that great institution. Thus her argument:
Where used to discriminate between the sexes the word female is an adjective; but many writers employ the word as a noun, which, when applied to women, is improper, and sounds unpleasantly, as referring to an animal. To illustrate: almost every newspaper we open, or book we read, will have sentences like these: “A man and two females were seen,” etc.,… “The females were much alarmed.” … It is inelegant as well as absurd. Expressed correctly, thus, “A man and two women.… The women were alarmed.” … who does not see and feel that these last sentences are in better taste, more correct in language, and more definite in meaning?2
The Maryland Legislature substituted women for females, in the bill just mentioned, but woman was felt to be somewhat rough, and the true rival of female, for many years, was the English favorite, lady. Says Dixon Wecter in “The Saga of American Society”:3
Harriet Martineau, visiting the United States from 1834 to 1836, quotes the rhetorical question of a preacher: “Who were last at the Cross? Ladies. Who were first at the Sepulchre? Ladies.” When she asked the warden of the Nashville prison whether she might visit the women’s cells he replied: “We have no ladies here at present, madam. We have never had but two ladies, who were convicted for stealing a steak; but, as it appeared that they were deserted by their husbands, and in want, they were pardoned.” By 1845 New York boasted a Ladies’ Oyster Shop, a Ladies’ Reading Room, and a Ladies’ Bowling Alley elegantly equipped with carpets and ottomans and girls to set up the pins. Banks and post-offices afforded a ladies’ window where the fair sex would be untouched by greasy elbows and tobacco-laden breath. Mrs. A. J. Graves in her book, Woman in America (New York, 1855) reported that our cities were crowded with “females in their ambition to be considered ladies” who employed their lily hands only “in playing with their ringlets, or touching the piano or guitar.” We are told that a poor Irish prospector, John H. Gregory, who struck the fabulous lode of gold near Central City, Col., on May 19, 1859, flung down his pick and exclaimed with instant fervor: “Thank God, now my wife can be a lady!”
The word woman had become a term of depreciation if not downright abuse; it was however sufficient for that foundation in Philadelphia named the Lying-in Charity for Attending Indigent Women in their Homes, and in such a euphemism as the phrase fallen women. Female was at least noncommittal as to the financial, social and moral standing of the person designated; this nice distinction appears in the title of a charity organization started in 1833 in the frontier town of Jacksonville, Ill.: the Ladies’ Association for Educating Females. Yet for the lady in excelsis a term of even higher praise was reserved. Of Mrs. Paulding, wife of Van Buren’s Secretary of the Navy, we read in Mrs. Ellet’s Court Circles of the Republic, 1869: “The word lady hardly defined her; she was a perfect gentlewoman.”
The DAE notes that gentleman was used, so early as 1804, as “a courteous appellative regardless of social standing,” and offers “gentleman tailor from 1838. So far as I am aware, gentleman never had any rival save masculine, which was reported in use at the fashionable resorts of New York in 1856,1 but is not listed by Bartlett, Scheie de Vere or the DAE. In those days no American lady was permitted to use slang, even the most decorous. Said a famous female writer of the time:2
Men can talk slang. Dry up is nowhere forbidden in the Decalogue. Neither the law nor the prophets frown on a thousand of brick. The Sermon on the Mount does not discountenance knuckling to.3 But between women and these minor immoralities stands an invisible barrier of propriety — waves an abstract flaming sword in the hand of Mrs. Grundy.… Who can reckon up the loss we sustain?… I should like to call my luggage traps, and my curiosities truck and dicker,4 and my weariness being knocked up,5 as well as Halicarnassus, but I might as well rob a bank. Ah! high-handed Mrs. Grundy, little you reck of the sinewy giants that you banish from your table! Little you see the nuggets of gold that lie on the lips of our brown-faced, shaggy-haired newsboys and cabmen!… Translate them into civilized dialect—make them presentable at your fireside, and immediately the virtue is gone out of them.1
As we have seen, there is still a strong tendency in the United States to deprecate plain words, but the war upon them has become official rather than popular, and though the movies and the radio still submit, the majority of newspapers and magazines make some show of resistance. One of the first rebels against the delicacy of the era we have been reviewing was the elder James Gordon Bennett (1795 – 1872), founder of the New York Herald. Says Frank Luther Mott: “He flouted the prudery of the times which prescribed the use of the word limbs for legs, of linen for shirt, of unmentionables for trousers.”2 As we have also seen, it took a long while to break down even the most irrational and preposterous of the taboos, but in the end they succumbed. They survive today, save in the obscene fancies of Post-office wowsers, only in the back-waters of American speech, e.g., dialects of such regions as the Ozarks. Vance Randolph, whose studies of the Ozark vocabulary have been numerous and valuable, has devoted one of them to its forbidden words.3 In it he says:
The names of male animals must not be mentioned when women are present; such words as bull, boar, buck, ram, jack and stallion are absolutely taboo.… It was only a few years ago that two women in Scott county, Arkansas, raised a great clamor for the arrest of a man who had mentioned a bull-calf in their presence. Even such words as bull-frog, bull-fiddle and bull-snake must be used with considerable caution, and a preacher at Pineville, Mo., recently told his flock that Pharaoh’s daughter found the infant Moses in the flags: he didn’t like to say bull-rushes.… The hillman sometimes refers to animals merely as the he or the she, and I have heard grown men use such childish terms as girl-birds and boy-birds.
A stallion is sometimes called a stable-horse, and very rarely a stone-horse, the latter term being considered unfit for respectable feminine ears. Such words as stud and stud-horse are quite out of the question, and a tourist’s casual reference to shirt-studs once caused considerable embarrassment to some very estimable hill-women of my acquaintance. The male members of most species of domestic animals are designated simply as male. Cow, mare, sow, doe and ewe are used freely enough, but bitch is taboo, since this last term is often applied to loose women.
The male fowl is usually called a crower; the word cock is quite out of the question, since it is used to designate the genitals.… I have myself seen grown men, when women were present, blush and stammer at the mere mention of such commonplace bits of hardware as stop-cocks or pet-cocks, and avoid describing a gun as cocked by some clumsy circumlocution, such as she’s ready t’ go or th’ hammer’s back.… Even cock-eyed, cock-sure and coxcomb are considered too suggestive for general conversation, and many natives shy at such surnames as Cox, Leacock, Hitchcock and the like.…
American Language Supplement 1 Page 87