‘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.


Introduction
During the late nineteenth century, a variety of conduct books, etiquette manuals, and essays in popular periodicals attempted to convince women and girls not to use slang. 2 This discourse is a classic example of what Deborah Cameron terms 'verbal hygiene', or 'the urge to meddle in matters of language'. 3 She elaborates, 'More precisely, 'verbal hygiene' describes the set of normative metalinguistic practices that arise from this urge to meddle'. 4 This article will use Cameron's theories as a framework for investigating late-Victorian verbal hygiene discouraging women and girls from using slang.
Focusing on examples published in the United States between 1868 and 1900, 5 I will explore how this practice relates to a broader cultural anxiety over challenges to traditional gender norms. In particular, I will seek to answer the following research questions: 1) How did verbal hygiene directed at women and girls' use of slang both promote and help to construct a particular image of ideal femininity? 2) What does this rhetoric tell us about the role of verbal hygiene in attempting to enforce 'correct' gender performance? 3) What can the meaning(s) verbal hygienists ascribed to women The almost universal use of slang is of comparatively recent date. Years ago, there were certain 'by-words' heard among factory and shop girls, but if an educated girl used them she was regarded with surprise, if not with suspicion. But this enemy of refinement and good breeding has made its way from corporation boarding-houses to private mansions, from factory walls to college halls. 15 As these examples illustrate, an analysis of this kind of verbal hygiene must recognize that disapproval of slang is often grounded in the notion that verbal hygienists' middle-class audiences should consider themselves above a linguistic habit associated with workingclass speakers.
It is also important to recognize how conceptions of femininity itself are inextricably linked to both class and race. As others have pointed out, it is often the case that 'femininity' tacitly means 'white middle-class ideals of femininity'. 16 No deliberate effort was made to limit this study to sources directed at a particular social class (and indeed, it should be noted that the class backgrounds of the actual readers of these sources were likely more varied than the implied 'ideal' or 'imagined' reader would suggest 17 ). Despite this broad approach, however, the picture of ideal femininity as depicted in these sources noticeably presupposes at least a middle-class lifestyle. Moreover, the debate over women pursuing professional opportunities-especially the idea that women working outside the home was a new phenomenon, and one framed as a matter of lifestyle preference rather than of economic necessity-is an inherently classed discourse.
In addition, mentions of factors such as race, ethnicity, and immigration status are significant in their absence. The verbal hygienists quoted in this article appear to take it for granted that their readers are native speakers of English, and race is not explicitly mentioned in any of the sources considered here. However, it is clear from factors such as illustrations, exaggerated dialects used to represent speakers of colour, and a 'white as default' approach to whether race is specified, that both the ideal woman and the norm-challenging New Woman is assumed to be white. 18 It is thus important to be conscious of who is excluded or ignored in these debates about ideal womanhood and what this implies about who 'counts' as a (feminine) woman. 19 Finally, it is important to distinguish between a study of ideology and a study of linguistic practice. These sources do not, of course, tell us how readers felt about the advice they were given. On one hand, it would be a mistake to assume that verbal hygienists' writings merely 'reflect' the prevailing ideologies around slang and femininity. On the contrary, it is important to appreciate the active role these kinds of sources play in constructing such ideologies. 20 Marisol Del-Teso-Craviotto's point about the 'naturalizing' effect of repeated discourse is particularly relevant here: Obviously, ideologies cannot be sustained simply by the repetition of words, but I believe that the reiterative use of certain linguistic strategies, to the extent that we stop questioning the assumptions upon which the underlying ideologies are built, has a powerful 'naturalizing' effect. For instance, the frequent use of the collocation 'real man' in Cosmo is based on, and helps reinforce, the idea that 'real men' are an identifiable category, and that this category is opposed to 'non-real men', which in turn triggers certain heterosexist and gender-conforming assumptions about what it is to be a man. 21 In a similar way, we will see that much of the late Victorian discourse around slang centres on what is, and is not, 'feminine' or 'womanly'. This kind of rhetoric serves to promote the idea that there is a correct or acceptable way of 'doing gender' that is natural and fixed rather than culturally constructed. At the same time, however, it is important not to view readers simply as passive recipients, absorbing the ideas presented to them without question. Rather, their active role in accepting, rejecting, or modifying these ideologies according to their own thoughts and beliefs should also be considered. 22 These kinds of sources can also provide only limited information about the actual dayto-day linguistic choices of women and girls during this period. 23 An analysis of verbal hygiene cannot give us definite information about how many women and girls used slang or under what circumstances they did so, though the existence of these sources does at least suggest that the practice was common enough for such advice to be considered necessary or relevant. My focus here, however, is not on uncovering how slang was used by any particular speaker, but on exploring verbal hygiene as a discourse about slang. As the following analysis will discuss, this discourse can provide important information about the cultural construction of femininity, and, indirectly, about the role of linguistic choice in negotiating a gendered identity. Moreover, this analysis will explore verbal hygiene as a significant cultural practice in its own right, focusing in particular on its role as an important-and often overlooked-part of how norms for gender performance are promoted and enforced.
The girl of the period, the new woman, and slang Late-nineteenth-century verbal hygienists' disapproval of women using slang is clearly rooted in a broader cultural tension over challenges to traditional gender roles during this period. This tension can especially be seen in the discourse around the related, and sometimes overlapping, constructs of the 'Girl of the Period' and the 'New Woman'.
The term 'Girl of the Period' originates with Eliza Lynn Linton's 1868 essay of the same title. In this highly controversial piece, Linton characterizes the current generation of young women as self-absorbed, obsessed with fashion and luxury, disrespectful of their elders, immodest in speech and dress, and inappropriately free in their behaviour towards men. The term 'New Woman', on the other hand, was originally used in a positive sense to describe women who pushed against the constraints of normative femininity. Coined by Sarah Grand in 1894 and popularized by 'Ouida's' [Maria Louise Ramé] adoption of the term in her antifeminist rebuttal, the label came to be especially associated with women who pursued new opportunities in higher education and professional careers. 24 The New Woman was likely to live a more independent, unchaperoned life than had traditionally been considered appropriate. She might adopt fashions inspired by men's clothing, ride a bicycle, or participate in other sports traditionally restricted to men. Although not all women who fit this description were feminists, the term 'New Woman' was also strongly associated with those who were active in the fight for women's rights, especially women's suffrage. 25 Though the term 'New Woman' did not come into use until the end of the nineteenth century, concern over the kind of norm-challenging behaviour this label came to represent is evident throughout the period considered in this article.
The following section will focus on the role of verbal hygiene in advocating for, and fighting against, various models of femininity amidst this climate of contested gender roles. Cameron's notion of a 'double discourse' of verbal hygiene is particularly helpful in untangling the relationship between disapproval of women using slang and the broader cultural conflict over beliefs about appropriate gender performance. She explains: To say that verbal hygiene debates just play out 'deeper' social conflicts in the arena of language is to overlook those features of verbal hygiene that are grounded in specifically linguistic attitudes and beliefs; it is also to gloss over the crucial question why language, rather than something else, becomes the arena where certain social conflicts find symbolic expression. Conversely, to deny that ideas about language are recruited very often to non-linguistic concerns is to miss most of what gives meaning to any particular verbal hygiene debate. 26 Following these ideas, this section will focus on two aspects of understanding the verbal hygiene around slang during this period. First, it will explore the cultural meaning attributed to women and girls' use of slang and the kind of gendered identity a speaker who used slang was seen to be claiming. Second, it will address the 'deeper' social conflict driving much of this verbal hygiene, which helps to explain the degree of emotional investment in what amounts, after all, to quite a small subset of vocabulary. As Cameron says (speaking of contemporary advice promoting 'assertiveness' for women), '[N]either the advice itself nor the anxiety it mobilizes is entirely, or even mainly, about speech … It could be that 'the problem of women's speech' is a figure for the problem of femininity in a world where gender identities seem to be increasingly unstable'. 27 I will suggest that the same can be said of 'the problem of women using slang' at the turn of the twentieth century and its relationship to the increasingly contested question of what it meant to be a ('true' or 'womanly') woman.
Key to understanding the role of slang in negotiating a gendered identity during this period is the strong association between slang and the Girl of the Period and/or the New Woman. 28 Linton's original description of the Girl of the Period cites using slang as one of the many supposed failings of the modern girl: This imitation of the demi-monde 29 in dress leads to something in manner and feeling, not quite so pronounced, perhaps, but far too like to be honorable to herself or satisfactory to her friends. It leads to slang, bold talk, and fastness; 30 to the love of pleasure and indifference to duty; to the desire of money before either love or happiness; to uselessness at home, dissatisfaction with the monotony of ordinary life, and horror of all useful work; in a word, to the worst forms of luxury and selfishness, to the most fatal effects arising from want of high principle and absence of tender feeling. 31 For Linton, using slang is not simply a typical habit of the Girl of the Period, but a concrete symptom of the loss of the 'high principle' and 'tender feeling' that should define proper femininity. A decade later, a parenting book similarly associates using slang with the Girl of the Period. The author claims, 'Young ladies who use slang are generally girls of the periodfast young ladies!' and expands on this description with: 'Some of the accomplishments of the fast young ladies of the present day are as follows: the talking of slang; the uttering of mild oaths; the smoking of cigars and cigarettes; the whistling of snatches of song'. 32 Later in the period, a magazine article connects using slang with the New Woman: '[Slang] is most affected by the 'bachelor girl' and the new woman, bona-fide types of whom are dashing, independent creatures, who, with all their vivacity and 'go,' are often a great trial to their elders'. 33 An important aspect of understanding late-Victorian disapproval of women and girls using slang, then, is understanding what kind of women verbal hygienists believed used slang (and by extension, what kind of feminine identity a woman who used slang was seen to be claiming).
This association between slang and non-traditional feminine identities is further evidenced by the frequent mention of slang in descriptions of girls and women whose gender performance incurs verbal hygienists' disapproval more generally. For example, one etiquette manual claims: Many ladies … will affect a forward, bold manner, very disagreeable to persons of sense. They will tell of their wondrous feats, when engaged in pursuits only suited for men; they will converse in a loud, boisterous tone, laugh loudly; sing comic songs, or dashing bravuras in a style only fit for the stage or a gentleman's after-dinner party; they will lay wagers, give broad hints and then brag of their success in forcing invitations or presents; interlard their conversation with slang words or phrases suited only to the stable or bar-room, and this they think is a dashing, fascinating manner. 34 Another etiquette guide gives the following description of a girl who is 'bad society': 'A young girl who … goes about without a chaperon and talks slang; who is careless in her bearing towards young men, permitting them to treat her as if she were one of themselves'. 35 A third author characterizes slang as a sort of gateway to transgressing approved gender roles in other ways: The girl who is slangy in her manner is the girl who commenced by being slangy in her speech, and who is to-day the worst specimen of bad manners in existence. Carelessness in speech has brought this about. She sees no use for the pretty courtesies of every-day life; she doesn't care to be treated like a lady, because she wants to be 'one of the boys.' She likes to call herself 'a jolly fellow.' 36 It is clear that the verbal hygiene directed at women's use of slang during this period is closely connected to a broader cultural anxiety over the perception that women and girls were overstepping the bounds of traditional femininity in unprecedented ways. Rather than simply a stand-in for these 'deeper' social issues, however, linguistic choices are themselves an important part of 'doing gender'. Thus, slang was subject to scrutiny and judgment because the choice to use slang, or not to use slang, was one resource for claiming a particular kind of gendered identity. These examples demonstrate that women who used slang, especially in combination with other behaviour considered loud, bold, or uninhibited, were seen to be embracing new models of womanhood that were deeply threatening to the Victorian social order.
It should also be emphasized that verbal hygiene is not only an expression of disapproval over particular linguistic choices, but also an active attempt to change those choices. The arguments leveraged in attempts to convince readers to avoid slang are a rich source of insight into models of (white middle-class) femininity, both those verbal hygienists sought to promote and those they opposed. Further, these arguments often provide more explicit information about the 'deeper' social issues that give weight to this discourse, helping to answer the question of why people were sufficiently concerned about women using slang to perform verbal hygiene in significant numbers.
A common theme in verbal hygiene directed at slang is an appeal to the idea, common in the gender ideology of this period, that women were the moral centre of society and the 'natural' guardians of manners, culture, and values. 37 The proper woman, it was claimed, would exert an elevating influence from within the domestic sphere, especially through her role as a mother. For example, one advice book for girls says: Every young girl has her own share in making and keeping society pure and elevated … Each has a cordon of hearts which feel her power, each has loving eyes that watch her constantly, and each is surrounded by some who take impressions for their lives from her manners and her methods. Determine that slang shall not creep in where you abide. 38 Another advice book uses a similar argument to call upon girls to protect the reputations of English speakers and the English language itself: Girls not only hurt themselves [by using slang], but go to work to defame the very English language and the people who speak English … The responsibility rests with you, girls, to stop this increasing use of slang, and of words of double meaning. I say you can prevent it because you are so much regarded. Your influence is wide, wider than you suppose. If you do not cease speaking slang, your younger sisters will not, your friends and acquaintances may not. 39 A similar argument held that women and girls who used slang damaged the reputation of all women. For example, one etiquette manual warns: It is a shock to the finer feelings of a young man, no matter if he is a trifle given to that style of speech himself, and his respect for womanly delicacy is immeasurably lowered. He has been told that girls are modest, retiring, and artless. How does he reconcile this with the answer some timid little Miss may give to some question -'Not for Joe!' or 'I can't see it!' or to hear her declare to some other fairy-like creature, alluding to some one [sic] who has offended her, that she 'will go for him.' 40 Girls were to be responsible not only for their own reputations, then, but for preserving men's belief in all women's 'womanly delicacy'. This ideal of the 'true woman' as cultural guardian, which framed the appropriate performance of femininity as a moral duty, of course carried with it the requirement to conform to a narrow range of acceptable behaviour. Indeed, many argued that women's 'natural' moral influence was only possible because they were free of the corrupting effects of involvement with business and politics. 41 Thus, though purportedly attributing considerable power to women, this ideal of women as society's moral centre served to reinforce the boundaries of normative gender roles.
A related argument contended that women could achieve success in 'masculine' fields only by forfeiting the special privileges due to the appropriately feminine woman. Commonly cited examples include the supposedly natural joy and fulfilment of a life centred on home and family, entitlement to chivalric devotion or respect, or 'freedom' from the concerns that weighed upon men. 42 One verbal hygienist claims that women's status as cultural guardians-specifically, their role in shaping their children's linguistic habits-is itself one of these privileges: Among the many strong cards in woman's hand is her acknowledged subtlety and refined strength in the use of language; but she throws it away when she rivals men in 'talking shop,' and in professional slang, and the jabber of the season. There is an incongruity, grotesque but serious, in the notion of an 'awfully jolly g.p.' (girl of the period) presiding at the dawn of intelligence in the child who is father to the man. On her early care and wise governance depends largely the after-day of his life … A crew of freckled girl-students may some day [sic] challenge the elder universities; some withered phenomenon may ride a Derby winner, the phrenological formation of the heads of the coming race of women may be as pronounced as that of Socrates, and all men may be bound in the meshes of feminine legislation: yet these triumphs would be a bad exchange for that natural power of moulding ordinary speech which our fair leaders in jargon seem disposed to sacrifice. 43 The choice of language here is particularly noteworthy as an indication that more is at stake than simply a disapproval of nonstandard language. For example, women's potential achievements in academia are downplayed by the dismissive description of 'a crew of freckled girl students', while a successful female jockey must be 'some withered phenomenon', echoing the common argument that New Women would 'unsex' themselves through forays into masculine fields. 44 The same author goes on to expound upon the perceived defects of the modern woman, saying: Women especially suffer in the general race after pleasure, and are the first to shirk labor. They shriek for work which they know nothing about, because shrieking is in these times a paying profession, and there is in it infinite satisfaction to vanity; but women have, even more than men, lost the habit of labor, and with it disappears the sense of responsibility for action … To how many idle mothers and daughters nothing 'matters much' if the social daily round of amusement is secured; and, of course, words matter less and less to these victims of indifferentism … Our exaggerations in color and ornament, and our appeals in every art to coarser tastes, are from the same source as our eccentricities of speech. 45 Again, the derisive choice of language in expressions like 'shrieking for work which they know nothing about' is striking here. Having expounded at some length on the perceived problems with 'women these days', the author returns loosely to the topic of the article (titled 'Drawing-Room Slang'), claiming that slang comes from the same root cause as the other criticized behaviours. In other words, slang is simply another symptom of the moral failings and character flaws that characterize women who reject normative femininity, especially those who intrude on territory traditionally exclusive to men. This kind of rhetoric provides further evidence that disapproval of women using slang during this period was strongly rooted in the 'deeper' issue of increasingly contested beliefs about appropriate gender roles.
Appeals to women's 'naturally' elevating influence on manners and culture are also often infused with nostalgia for an idealized past. An article titled 'Decline of Politeness', for instance, is another case where disapproval of women using slang is explicitly connected to anxiety over changing gender norms. Again advancing the idea that women who rejected traditional femininity abdicated their right to chivalry, the article first gives some insight into what the author feels has been lost and what kinds of transgressions of traditional gender roles she believes are to blame: In the middle classes, women have gradually identified their work with the work of men, and in this social disturbance the most delicate graces of life are being lost. Women's work is indeed an immense gain to the community in working power; but chivalry and tender reverence for women began in an age that knew nothing of strong-minded, strangely-dressed females, voluble and exacting, elbowing their male competitors in the market-place, in the courts, in the dissecting-rooms, and in the halls of colleges. The very element of rivalry makes chivalry meaningless and impossible. 46 The article goes on to draw an explicit connection between slang and this perceived decline in manners in general and men's respect for women in particular: But before deeds come words; and here again women are to blame, because of the perversion of language they not only permit, but practice. Slang is a note of savagery on our hearths and in our drawing-rooms. It replaces the easy grace of courtesy by a familiarity often tinged with indelicacy, and it is incompatible with that respect and deference that the noblest ideal of womanhood demands. And coarse speech is speedily followed by loose manners. The real responsibility for the high social tone of any nation rests with its women. … And undoubtedly the first step towards this noble manifestation of woman's power to reform manners will be her rigorous refusal to speak or to listen to slang. 47 Again, we see slang depicted as one aspect of a larger phenomenon of women overstepping 'correct' gender roles in other, more threatening ways. In particular, this author associates slang with failing to adopt the modest reserve expected of the ideal woman and instead competing directly with men in academic and professional fields. Once again, we see an appeal to women's role as cultural guardians leveraged in an attempt to convince women not only to avoid slang, but also to conform to normative femininity more broadly.
Another popular strategy for attempting to convince female speakers not to use slang was to warn that women who adopted this 'unfeminine' habit would find themselves unable to attract husbands. Linton's description of The Girl of the Period contains just such a threat: All men whose opinion is worth having prefer the simple and genuine girl of the past, with her tender little ways and pretty bashful modesties, to this loud and rampant modernization, with her false red hair and painted skin, talking slang as glibly as a man, and by preference leading the conversation to doubtful subjects. She thinks she is piquant and exciting when she thus makes herself the bad copy of a worse original; and she will not see that though men laugh with her they do not respect her, though they flirt with her they do not marry her[.] 48 A generation later, another author makes a very similar argument in denouncing 'The Mannish Girl': To talk slang, to ride to hounds, commend her in a measure to her male companions. They declare her to be jolly, fetching, stunning. But they rarely marry her. That is where the maidenly girl has her revenge. 49 This kind of rhetoric, drawing on 'real respect' and the claim that 'boys flirt with, but don't marry, girls who do X' is familiar across many generations of women as a strategy for attempting to ensure compliance with established norms, especially by discouraging behaviour viewed as immodest or sexually immoral.
Examining the rhetoric in examples of verbal hygiene that leverage this threat also helps shed light on the 'deeper' issues driving much of this effort to discourage slang. One article about the perceived rise in unmarried adults, for example, again echoes the idea that women who 'act like men' cannot inspire the chivalric love that is due to the properly feminine woman: At present, the ordinary man regards the Amazonian girl of epicene tendencies rather as one views a freak of nature, only that the freak in this case is not Nature's, but an artificial social product. He looks at her critically, sorrowfully, while in the matter of matrimonial leanings toward her he too often holds his peace and goes his way … [S]he cannot have her bread buttered on both sides. She must not expect to go in for the role of the male, and yet exact his deference or win his devotion. 50 The solution, unsurprisingly, is a return to an idealized past. The author calls on girls to renounce the 'unfeminine' behaviours of the modern woman, including the use of slang: I say our girls of the social midlands and higher levels must reconsider their position and their ways, if they would check one of the contributory causes of the augmenting bachelorhood and spinsterhood within their ranks. The frantic pursuit of mere outdoor personal amusement must be abandoned … The use of men's slang; sporting and stable talk; the growing habit of ladies smoking, the mannish stride, the swagger, the knock-you-down demeanor, the strident, self-assertive voice tones-all must go. The sweetness and refinements, the sympathetic atmosphere, the graciousness and grace, of woman's genuine nature-after our mother's pattern-must return into favor. 51 As with previous examples, this characterization of the ideal woman of the past noticeably focuses on the need for women to display modesty and reserve towards men rather than positioning themselves as equals. We see the promise of marriage leveraged once again in an attempt to convince women and girls to adhere to the linguistic style expected of the ideal woman speaker, 52 and, more broadly, to the behaviour expected of the ideal woman. This argument, relying on the assumption that the desire to attract a husband will motivate girls to reject non-conforming behaviour, itself serves to reinforce a model of ideal femininity in which marriage is the ultimate goal. 53 As we have seen, there is a strong link between verbal hygiene directed at women's use of slang and a broader cultural anxiety over growing resistance to traditional gender norms. It appears clear that this explicitly gendered discourse is not merely about disapproval of nonstandard language; rather, this linguistic choice intersects in important ways with beliefs about gender roles and appropriate feminine behaviour. At the same time, linguistic choices are not simply a stand-in for the 'real' issue of gender performance, but an important part of how that gender performance is achieved. Perhaps, then, the appropriate question is not 'what is disapproval of women using slang 'really' about', but rather, 'what else is it about?'

Conclusion
I have sought to demonstrate that studying the practice of verbal hygiene in a particular time and place can provide valuable information about ideologies of gender and appropriate gender performance. Specifically, this analysis highlights three important, and thus far underexplored, ways in which verbal hygiene can provide insight into cultural constructions of femininity and the role of linguistic choices in negotiating a gendered identity.
First, verbal hygiene directed at women and girls is a valuable window into a broader cultural discourse about what it means to be a woman and how the ideal woman should behave. The arguments late-Victorian verbal hygienists used to justify their disapproval of slang, and to attempt to convince women and girls not to use it, both drew upon and helped to construct a particular ideal of white middle-class femininity. Specifically, these sources depict the ideal woman as gentle, modest, reserved in her behaviour towards men, focused on home and family, and exercising a naturally elevating influence on manners, morals, and culture. This picture is held up in contrast to the bold, loud, 'masculine' woman who compromised the purity expected of the properly feminine woman by positioning herself as an uninhibited equal to her male peers. Furthermore, these sources contend that by intruding on territory that rightfully belonged to men, the Girl of the Period and/or the New Woman sacrificed her right to chivalry, 'real respect', and a marriage proposal.
Second, verbal hygiene is an important source of insight into the role of linguistic choices in negotiating a gendered identity. A large body of work has discussed how people use language as part of identity work. 54 Particularly relevant to this study are the numerous examples of women and girls using language as a tool for claiming an identity different from the dominant model of femininity, often by adopting linguistic features typically associated with men. 55 However, this topic has not so far been widely explored in a historical context. I have attempted to show here that verbal hygiene is especially useful as a source of information about language and identity work in historical inquiries where direct approaches such as ethnographic studies or speaker interviews are not possible. Understanding the meaning verbal hygienists attributed to women's use of slang provides indirect evidence about how women could use this linguistic choice to claim a particular kind of gendered identity. In other words, the evidence that slang was so strongly associated with women who rejected traditional ideas of appropriate gendered behaviour suggests that the choice to use slang was one way in which a female speaker could affiliate herself with these new models of womanhood.
Finally, verbal hygiene is worthy of study as a significant cultural practice in its own right. Verbal hygiene is an important, and often overlooked, part of how women's behaviour is scrutinized and regulated. It is particularly telling that efforts to 'improve' women's speech seem to gain traction in times when gender roles are uncertain or contested. 56 In the present study, it is clear that late-Victorian verbal hygiene addressing women and girls' use of slang was part of a larger effort to effect compliance with traditional norms for femininity. The verbal hygiene practiced during this period functioned not only as an expression of cultural anxiety over a perceived threat to established gender roles, but also as an active attempt to combat this threat. Examples appealing to women's 'natural' role as cultural guardians elevated one model of femininity as they attempted to fend off others. Similarly, even as verbal hygienists sought to ensure 'correct' feminine behaviour by threatening consequences for those who overstepped approved gender roles, their warnings about slang deterring potential husbands also served to promote marriage-and by extension, a home-centred lifestyle-as the appropriate ambition for a ('true' or 'womanly') woman.