Women in America played a significant role in the ‘Americanisation Movement’, which aimed to assimilate the large numbers of immigrants arriving to the USA in the early twentieth century into American culture. Learning English was an important part of Americanisation, and women were active in teaching English classes and publishing language teaching manuals. These manuals are the subject of this study. Using five female-authored English teaching manuals published between 1906 and 1915, corpus methods are used to identify the quantity and type of pragmatic language taught, and to survey the topics and themes they contain. These are compared to results from a reference corpus of male-authored manuals from the same period, to examine gender perspectives. The value of using a corpus approach to historical texts of this kind is discussed.