A recent online clue for the daily Wordle puzzle seemed to sum up a trend I’ve noticed lately – a move towards reframing the female lexicon. It read: “In folklore, women often of an older age with significant power and wisdom. And yeah, sometimes they’re evil, what are you gonna do?” The word in question: ‘crone’. In all of my five decades I don’t believe I’ve ever heard ‘crone’ phrased positively – but if you go back far enough, it wasn’t always thus.
Taking the sting out of nouns that originally offered reverence towards women but that have come to diminish us has become a bit of a cultural focus. A major exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London is one example: Diva focuses on restoring the word’s original meaning, as much as displaying some excellent costumes from the likes of Joan Crawford to Whitney Houston.
“My fascination with the diva concept was originally sparked while I was curating an exhibition about opera, which opened at the V&A in 2017, and in why and how this word, derived from the Latin for goddess – and used to describe exceptionally talented female opera singers in the 19th century – had developed negative connotations,” explains the exhibition’s curator, Kate Bailey. “There are not many words that trigger such a range of ideas and discourse, historically and internationally. We thought it was crucial to re-examine our perception of the diva today – considering why this definition of the diva has shifted against social, technological, and political changes – and how society and language influence and shape its myriad meanings.”
Diva was already in the midst of a rebranding exercise, as showcased by Mariah Carey. In an interview with the Guardian newspaper in 2020, she was asked if she minded being called the D-word, with all its difficult connotations. Her response:
“No! Who the f*ck cares? Honestly! ‘Oh my God, they’re calling me a diva – I think I’m going to cry!’ You think in the grand scheme of things in my life that really matters to me, being called a diva? I am, b*tches, that’s right!”’
By the time Carey appeared on Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s Spotify podcast Archetypes in August 2022 (the aim of the podcast was to “subvert the labels that try to hold women back”) Carey had recast the diva mould. Having told Meghan that she sometimes “gives us diva moments”, Carey later clarified that she meant it ‘”in the most fabulous, gorgeous, and empowering meaning of the word”. Previously, mused the Duchess herself, the noun had gone from “high class to high maintenance”, but now its tide had turned again.
Of course, reframing the female lexicon doesn’t – and can’t – stop there. The recent Radio 4 series Witch looked at what it means to be a witch today, including an episode dedicated to the associated term ‘hag’.
Taking the fight further is feminist publisher Virago, which is known for amplifying women’s voices (its name is a reframe of the original Latin, meaning ‘female warrior’, which went on to be subverted to mean ‘a loud, overbearing woman’). To celebrate the publisher’s 50th anniversary comes Furies, a book of short stories by leading women writers, including Margaret Atwood, Linda Grant and Susie Boyt. Each tale centres around a synonym of ‘virago’ (such as ‘hussy’, ‘muckraker’, ‘harridan’) and is dedicated to altering the negative perceptions that have grown up around them, reclaiming words that have been twisted to denigrate women.
Novelist Susie Boyt took up the ‘muckraker’ challenge. “The original muckrakers were a group of pre-First World War journalists in America who uncovered a lot of scandals relating to cruel institutions, social inequality, hardship and deprivation,” she explains. Obviously, she says, if you’re a cruel institution you aren’t going to like the muckrakers, “but if you look at it another way they could be your hero. That was one of the appeals of the word to me, that is has the two sides, ”which the character in my story has too.”
Ultimately, though, what has happened to words like ‘diva’, ‘muckraker’ and ‘witch’ is that a once-positive term has been deliberately perverted into something designed to be lesser – not to mention the fact that many of these words have no male equivalent. As Sandi Toksvig writes in the introduction to Furies: “Attempting to diminish women by name-calling is nothing new.” But there’s definitely a renewed cry in the air that now is the time for reframing the female lexicon and reclaiming our own vocabulary – much like the true divas we are.
Diva runs until 7 April 2024 at the V&A, London
Edwina Ings-Chambers is a London based lifestyle journalist and editor
