ABSTRACT
The enormous significance accorded to language in feminist debates over the past twenty years or so provides the context for Alison Assiter's critical essay on the work of another feminist, Dale Spender. Yet although it has been feminists who have put language at the centre of a number of crucial debates across a variety of diciplines, it cannot be claimed that the question of women and their relation to language is a novel one. For as James' essay on 'The Speech of American Women' indicates, the construction of particular speech forms for women is a practice with a substantial history. And Swift in the Proposal, in a somewhat surprising gesture, even declared that women are better users of the language than men:
Now, although I would by no Means give ladies the Trouble of advising us in the Reformation of our Language; yet I cannot help Thinking that, since they have been left out of all Meetings, except Parties at Play, or where worse Designs are carried on, our Conversation hath very much degenerated.
