Ernest Hemingway revolutionized more than just the style of modern prose. He also reshaped the vocabulary of literature, taking words that polite society considered unprintable and giving them cultural weight. Among them was one of the most provocative words in the English language: bitch.

In the course of my research for Bitch: The Journey of a Word, I discovered how Hemingway and his contemporaries, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, John Steinbeck, and other so-called Lost Generation writers, helped popularize what became known as the “bitch archetype.” This formidable anti-heroine waged war in the battle of the sexes. Hemingway described these women as “the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory, and the most attractive.” To him, they were man-eaters, femmes fatales, and “bitch goddesses” who used their beauty and power to dominate men.

But Hemingway’s fascination with the word was also deeply personal. He infamously called his mother Grace “an all-time all-American bitch,” blaming her for, among other things, his father’s suicide. He flung the word at his literary rival Gertrude Stein, scrawling in a book inscription: “A bitch is a bitch is a bitch is a bitch,” a parody of the line from her poem “Sacred Emily,” “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Yet Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas turned the insult on its head, commissioning dinnerware decorated with that very phrase. This was an early act of reclamation of the word.

In Hemingway’s fiction, bitch took on new meaning. At times, the word embodied female strength, edginess, and independence. Lady Brett Ashley, the iconic heroine of The Sun Also Rises (1926), is often accused of being a bitch, and even calls herself one. Hemingway’s editor Max Perkins fought hard to keep the word in print, threatening to resign when publisher Charles Scribner balked at this “vulgarity.” Scribner declared he would sooner let guests use his parlor as a toilet than allow such profane language in his books. Yet Hemingway refused to yield: “I never used a word without first considering whether or not it was replaceable.”

The word stayed, and so did the controversy. The novel was banned in several American states, even as critics hailed it as a modern masterpiece. Hemingway’s mother was appalled, saying, “every page fills me with a sick loathing,” and calling it “one of the filthiest books of the year.” To her, bitch remained a shameful obscenity. To Hemingway, it was the only word that captured his characters’ sharp edges and the shifting gender roles of his time.

Hemingway’s embrace of bitch was not just defiance for its own sake. It reflected broader cultural shifts: women demanding autonomy, modernists rejecting Victorian prudishness, and literature pushing back against censorship. What was once an unprintable slur became a literary device, a symbol of the complicated, powerful, and often unsettling women who defined modernist fiction.

Today, bitch is still a flashpoint. It can serve as an insult, a badge of honor, or both at once. Its long and contested journey owes much to the writers of the early twentieth century, and to Hemingway, who was willing to risk censors, critics, and even his own mother to put the word in print.

Dr. Karen Stollznow is the author of On the Offensive: Prejudice in Language Past and Present and her latest book is Bitch: The Journey of a Word.