CUNT: A History of Reclamation

Inga Muscio dictates, “When viewed as a positive force in the language of women – as well as a reference to the power of the anatomical jewel which unites us all – the negative power of ‘cunt’ falls in upon itself, and we are suddenly equipped with a word that describes all women, regardless of race, age, class, religion or the degree of lesbianism we enjoy” (Muscio 6). Inga Muscio is a paragon of third wave feminism. She, like so many feminists in recent years, is committed to the lexical reclamation that should lift up the collective feminine spirit instead of dragging it down to the depths of all pejoratives. A very similar reclamation has been taking place since the 1960’s in the Pagan/Feminist community regarding the amelioration of the word, “witch”(Nightmare). Feminists have deemed the taking back of pejoratives an essential part of the reclamation of the collective self-esteem of woman kind. These attempts at amelioration beg the question: have these words always been pejoratives, or have these words suffered a cruel etymological journey through the history of our language? Cunt is perhaps the most reviled and derogatory word in the English language. But has that always been the case? The answer according to a plethora of dictionaries and historians is no.
In her groundbreaking 2002 book, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, Ms. Muscio denounces the term “vagina” as being inadequate in its ability to encompass the totality of the female gender. She heralds Barbara G. Walker’s definition of cunt as delineated in The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. Muscio states that the word cunt was meant as a title of respect, indicating a strong woman, or a woman of social stature. While the origin of such a definition is unclear in Mucio’s book, Walker’s own text does indicate that the word derives from the Hindu Goddess Cunti. There is also a Roman Goddess by the name if Cunina who is reported to be the protector of newborn infants. One cognate, cunctipotent, is said to mean “all-powerful (i.e., having cunt-magic)” (Walker 197). The New Book of Goddesses and Heroines spells Kunti with a k and states that she is a key figure in the epic Indian poem, the Mahabharata. Kunti is a princess living in a county of the same name. Kunti is renowned for her hospitality. She willingly receives any traveler who requests food and lodging at the palace. She receives a powerful mantra from the hermit Durvasas as payment for her hospitality. The mantra gives Kunti the power to call on any god in heaven to lie with her and bear a son. She takes the mantra for a test run and bears a child the next day by the god Surya. Once married, her husband Pandu is cursed by the deer gods for killing a buck and a doe while they are in coitus. The curse renders Pandu sterile. Kunti’s mantra therefore, saves the kingdom because she can magically bear a child any time she pleases. That is not to say that sexuality was even-handed in India. This was a patriarchal society where women did belong to men, just as they did in early Judeo-Christian societies. However, unlike Judeo-Christian values, women’s sexuality was celebrated, not covered up in shame (Clark). Therefore it is safe to hypothesize that an ameliorative connotation would have traveled hand-in-hand with the word it defined as our hospitable princess made her lexical travels northward and to the east to the languages of Old English, Old Norse and Old Frisian.
Dating the origin of cunt back to the Mahabharata places the inception of the word somewhere between the second century B.C. and the second century A.D. (Van Nooten xiii). In 1786, a philologist by the name of Sir William Jones gave a speech to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal. Jones had noticed similarities between Greek, Latin and Sanscrit. He hypothesized that all language derived from one hypothetical language he termed “proto-indo-european.” His theory was that all language came from this one central source. As the expansion of western civilization spilt out beyond the banks of the Euphrates and trade routes began to be established, lexical evolution transmogrified a goddess into cunt (e).
General consensus among etymological dictionaries date cunt back to Middle English, spelled both with and without an e in the final position. Partridge’s Origins claims that cunte was recorded once in Old English but gives no mention of where that might be (135). Partridge’s eighth edition of A Dictionary of Slang makes mention of three Old English cognates: cwithe, meaning womb, and cweman, meaning come. It also lists kunte, but seems to believe that the nt in the final position is difficult to explain, thus making no attempt to correlate any eastern cognates as Jones might have done to come up with the Hindi Goddess (278). The word kunte can be found in Danish, Old English and Old Frisian. It is spelled with an a in the final position in Old Norse.
Upon arrival in Middle English, the noun is now spelled with a c in the first position and is occasionally spelled with a u in the middle position, appearing as counte: however, in Middle Low German and Dutch, it is still spelled with a k in the first position. It is only when we arrive at Medieval Dutch and French that the k changes to a c in the primary position. Interestingly, it is in the Middle English era that the Latin root cunnus, meaning wedge, gives rise to the Italian conno or connoscere which is a verb meaning “to know” (Partridge 135). The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that the noun was once common for quaint, which also was a cognate of connoscere in the Middle English era. Quaint, at that time in history, meant skilled, fine, elegant, and clever (Klein 1284). Perhaps Ms. Muscio’s brief summary was not off base after all.
The Middle Ages also gifts us with several examples of cunt’s use in various forms of literature. It is seen in 1230 A.D. in E. K. Walls’ Street Names of City of London; there being a Gropecuntlane at one point in time. It is once again used in the description of a wedding night in Prov. Hendyng in 1325 A.D. Its most famous use in Middle English is of course in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: “For certainly, old dotard, by your leave, you shall have cunt all right enough at eve” (Chaucer 276).
Partridge states in A Dictionary of Slang that “Owing to its powerful sexuality, the term has, since C. 15, been avoided in written and in polite spoken English” (278). Historical proof of this can be found in the following reasonable hypothesis: as language change takes time, this semantic change can be chalked up to the loss of prestige English suffered after the Norman invasion. The slow infiltration of Norman French into the English lexicon started with the coronation of Edward the Confessor in 1042, who had been raised in Normandy. While Norman French was used solely in the royal court up until the coronation of William the Conqueror in 1066, William’s institution of a feudal land owning system did much to affect language change throughout the country. As Frenchmen were granted high offices within the state, church, and education system, this minority population had direct control over the peasant population of England who were bound to the land owned by these Norman dukes. Consequently, the prestige the English language had gained over the six hundred years of Anglo-Saxon rule was slowly worn away. The Norman elite learned enough rudimentary English to interface with their native wait staff and the native English people eagerly learned French in an effort to improve their socio-economic standing. This semantic change continued on into the Middle English period as a flood of loanwords made their way into the English lexicon. This onslaught of language contact not only eroded the inflectional system that had once classified English as a synthetic language, it also gave us more Scandinavian, Latin, Dutch, Low German and,most significantly, Norman French Loanwords over the course of 200 years. It took several generations before the English were using these new words comfortably. As there was very little written English taking place in the early Middle English period it is difficult to say how many loanwords actually made their way into English at this time. However, French loanwords made their way into the ranks of all activities of day to day life. The resulting effect on English was that many words that were previously common parts of everyday vernacular were now thought of as base and crude. One hypothesis is that this semantic change subjected many native words to pejoration due to these new loanwords being viewed as more prestigious.
As rural landowners began combining smaller holdings for more lucrative management of their agricultural holdings, peasants, once tied to the land, began migrating to urban centers, thereby engendering a rise in the middle-class. Etiquette books were also being written around this time in an effort to teach these new arrivals to London how to speak and behave like the upper classes. This phenomenon was documented by William Labov in New York City in the 1960’s. Labov’s study revealed that department store clerks who wanted to sound educated and affluent were less likely to drop their r’s when referring to the fourth floor. This sociolinguistic study elucidates what is known as the Uniformitarian principle, which states: “If something is true in the present, we can assume that in all likelihood, the same was true in the past” (McIntyre 59). As evidenced in the Old English period, when West Saxon ultimately became the dialect of power, word choice, pronunciation and syntax will always be dictated by what is perceived by the speakers of that language as availing them of power and prestige. This then explains the debasement of cunt during the 15th century.
Partridge’s eighth edition of The Dictionary of Slang also indicates that censorship laws were passed during the 1700’s that made the use of cunt forbidden, even in classical literature (278). The timing here coincides with the push in England for an English academy that would protect and sanitize the English language in very much the same manner that the Academie Francaise did in France beginning in 1635. The 1600’s saw many attempts at just such a prescriptive institution, most notable were the attempts of R.H, Esquire, who wanted to “purifie (sic) our Native Language from Barbarism” (McIntyre 155), as well as those of Dryden and John Evelyn who influenced the Royal Society to “improve the English tongue, Particularly for Philosophic purposes” (McIntyre 155). Jonathon Swift and John Adams also called for the perfecting and purification of the English tongue. Suggestions included spelling reforms, the revival of archaic words and dialectical expressions, and the separate compilation of technical terminology. The first dictionaries and grammars were also being written at this time. Unlike today’s dictionary entries, which display how a word is used in natural vernacular, the first dictionaries were prescriptive in nature and displayed how words should be used rather than how they actually were used. What is interesting here is that the movement for an English academy spanned from 1650 to the 1800’s, a time when Greek and Roman literature was experiencing a renaissance. This renaissance inspired many in England to wish for some classical literature of their own. Once again the desire for prestige did its best to elevate and augment how we choose to use language.
The censorship rulings of politicians and strong-arming by those with political influence did manage to squelch profanity for a time. Cunt only managed to make its way into one publication in the nineteenth century: the anonymously published, My Secret Life in 1890, in which the Victorian gentleman professes “I sicken with desire, pine for unseen, unknown cunts” (“Cunt”). It was not until the mid twentieth century that censorship was to be challenged head on. Over the course of the 1950’s and 1960’s, Barney Rosset of Grove Press published Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Of that time period Rosset is documented as saying: “I didn’t go through lawsuits to open up culture; I wanted to publish Henry Miller. That certainly involved fighting censorship. But the first thing I thought of was Miller. So, in other words, my thinking never went along the lines of, ‘We are doing all of this for a very set purpose’” (Cole). Rosset’s legal victories were part of the slow birth of what would eventually become the social, political and sexual revolutions of the 1960’s and seventies. These revolutions transformed how westerners as a whole looked at women, minorities, and the concept of war. Making these radical changes to society automatically entailed the use of and the transformation of modern language.
On February 14th, 1998 in the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City, Glenn Close got 2500 people to chant the word Cunt over and over again. Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, used her groundbreaking play as a catalyst to launch V-Day, a movement which raises funds to support feminist organizations working to end violence against women all over the world. Cunt, thanks to the women’s movement, has regained its power and has been reclaimed. In the foreward to the V-day edition of the play’s script, Gloria Steinam writes: “After all, the Indo-European word cunt was derived from the Goddess Kali’s title of … Cunti” (Steinam xiv). Here the most prominent feminist of the twentieth century reconnects us to our pre-Christian past.
Cunt has traveled a long and harrowing road. It has been celebrated by those who embrace the power of the yoni, the spiritual power of the female genitals. It has been disparaged in the 15th century during a time when politics and philology did their best to effect a change in day to day vernacular. It was censored at the hands of those who would have purified the English language amidst their hapless attempts to establish an English academy and it has been retrieved and given new life by the likes of D.H. Lawrence, William Burroughs and finally the women’s movement that began in the nineteen sixties, which brings us back to Inga Muscio: “I have found ‘cunt,’ the word and the anatomical jewel to be a venerable ally in my war against my own oppression. Besides global subjugation, our cunts are the only common denominator I can think of that all women irrefutably share. We are divided from the word. We are divided from the anatomical jewel. I seek reconciliation” (Muscio 11). While amelioration is still a work in progress, like witch, the feminist movement is constantly making great strides to inform the general public and change societies’ perception of what is considered taboo. It is the wish of this author that this small paper be considered an effort in that same direction.


Works Cited
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Cole, Williams. “A Life In Underground Letters: Barney Rosset With Williams Cole.” The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Prespectives on Art, Politics and Culture.The Brooklyn Rail, March 2012. Web. 14 April 2012.
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