British women’s roles in the standardization and study of English

This chapter traces key developments in the history and historiography of English, identifying women’s most-representative opportunities to engage with the linguistics of English and describing works that have earned their authors attention in modern scholarship. Women have shaped and studied the English language since speakers of a West Germanic language invaded Britain in the fifth century CE. Yet, given the subordinate status of women’s intellectual activities, their work was often oral, unacknowledged, or published pseudonymously or under a male’s name. While identifying individual women’s contributions to the standardization and study of English, I consider women’s educational opportunities and their stereotypical social roles. Their family’s status and (typically) male relatives’ support gave some women unusual advantages. Women’s stereotypical associations with domestic conversation and elementary pedagogy gave later women space to work and write on the vernacular, though persistently in ways that were low-prestige.