“A volitional interference”: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study on Birth Control in Edwardian England

Abstract

The Edwardian period (1901-ca.1910) saw numerous social changes that deeply transformed Britain and its society. A series of reforms that what would lay the foundations of the welfare state constituted a widespread source of public debate throughout the British press. Birth control was among the most debated topics. Though criminalised in 1861, abortion remained the most common birth control practice among working-class and upper-class women. Among the existing studies on abortion and birth control practices between the Victorian age and the Edwardian period, there is no evidence of a quantitative and qualitative linguistic analysis of their representation in the Edwardian press. This study aims at contributing to the existing body of research in historical news discourse and historical pragmatics by combining corpus linguistics and corpus-assisted discourse analysis to examine a corpus of letters to the editor on birth control published in the Edwardian British press, to show the recurrent linguistic patterns through which birth control was represented in early 20^th-century news discourse.