What if the two topics you could never, ever mention in polite conversation were yourself and your enemy? Welcome to Victorian feminine conversation, where your tongue was an "unruly member" requiring constant restraint.

In this episode, we're diving into Matilda Ann Mackarness 1888 conduct book "The Young Lady's Book," where the chapter on conversation is actually a masterclass in silence. Discover why ladies withdrew to the drawing room after dinner to discuss only servants and babies while gentlemen debated politics and business. Learn which words—awfully, stunning, checky—threatened the very foundations of the English language in the Great Slang Crisis of the 1880s. And meet the young woman so paralyzed by conversational rules that when a gentleman tried engaging her, she could only manage two words in a grave monotone: "So you said."

But here's the devastating irony: Matilda Mackarness herself violated every rule she prescribed. Widowed at 43 with seven children and "very slender provision" (Victorian speak for near-poverty), she had to write constantly to survive—producing over 40 books between 1849 and 1881. She couldn't afford to be silent. She couldn't worry whether discussing her hardships was "egotism." She had to speak, loudly and persistently, through every book and periodical she could sell.

So why did she teach young ladies to bind their tongues? Was she protecting them? Believing in the rules? Or was she quietly handing over survival strategies for navigating a world where women had no power at all?

We'll explore the economics of being "agreeable" (new books cost £150 in today's money), the divine surveillance of idle words ("a heavy reckoning will be demanded"), and why women's speech—like women's bodies—was considered fundamentally unruly and requiring external control.

From pure springs flowing effortlessly to the tongue that required constant correction, this is Victorian feminine conversation in all its terrified, tongue-tied glory.

Features readings from "The Young Lady's Book" (1888) by Matilda Ann Mackarness