reflect paper about reading
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DEFINING REALITY A Powerful Tool
Dale Spender
FOR REASONS I EXPLORE in this essay, too little attenti on has been paid to the role of language in the construction of inequality. This reluctance on the part of many to consider language and power issues is itself worth attention. As evidenced by the essays in this collection, there are many ways of approaching the topic of language and power; the one I am going to use is that of sketching my own route to the in- tersection of language and power . It is an idiosyncratic route, but one that helps map out the terrain, and leads to some of the reasons for the long tradition of separating questions about language from questions about power-a separation that has implications for every speaker in every conversation.
To attempt to itemize the properties of language in terms that would be satisfactory to all those who focus on language as an area of research would be to take on an impossible task; to attempt to categorize definitively the properties of power would be to assume an equally impossible task; at the very least this makes language and power an area of debate and contention. However, despite the many differences of opinion that may exist about the nature of language and the nature of power, it may be possible to arrive at a consensus that will help formulate the parameters and permit discussion .
For example, it is likely that, regardless of one's background or in- terest, there would be little disagreement with the statement that language is a means of organizing and structuring the world. It is also likely that most people would accept both Suzanne Langer's thesis (1942, 1976) that language is a means of symbolizing and representing experience, and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman's thesis (1972) that it is the vehicle for constructing reality. And perhaps there would be little quarrel with a broad definition of power as the capacity of some persons to produce effects on others, effects sometimes contrary
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to their interests. If these claims can be accepted, then there is a basis for bringing language and power together and for formulating the focus of this chapter: I will consider how some people affect others through the means of organizing and structuring the world, through symbolizing and representing experience, through the construction of reality.
To begin, I am going to address myself to the issue of men having the capacity to have effects on women, through language. I am going to discuss the negation of women's experience in a male-dominated society fro m inside that framework, from within the context of male domination. As a woman, I am going to describe the experience of women in a society where women's experience is frequently denied or dismissed . If I were a man, speaking for women, or if I were describ- ing men 's experience, then my case would probably be seen as representative, but-because I am a woman, describing women's ex- perience , I confront the very problem I am attempting to address. I am involved with-as distinct from detached from-my data, and within our socially constructed schemata this is in itself problematic, because convention suggests that I should be reporting on previously acquired data and that this essay should not of itself constitute data . For many reasons-which will emerge later-I challenge that conven- tion and those who are responsible for it.
My initial interest in language and power was broadly with the realm of meaning. I began with the attempt to find an explanation for sexually differentiated meanings in the language: Why did the English language possess fewer meanings for women (see Nilsen [1977] for documentation of the fewer lexical items for women); why were so many of these meanings negative (see Schulz [1975] for evidence of the semantic derogation of women); and why were so many of these negative meanings concentrated in a few specific areas (see Stanley [1973] for the discussion of promiscuous terms for women, terms that outnumber the promiscuous terms for men by ten to one)? What were the implications of this in terms of organizing and symbolizing ex- perience, for the construction of reality?
I was conscious that language does not spring forward into the World, ready made, but that it is invented, and I was interested in find - ing out if explicit reasons had ever been given for these sexually differ- entiated meanings. That male grammarians and politicians had specifically stated that the term ''man'' should be used for woman, on the grounds that the masculine gender was more worthy and compre- hensive (Snowden, 1913: 143-144; Bodine, 1975), seemed to me a
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rather unusual pronouncement, given their data , but it also helped me to focus on the sexually differentiated participation that has occurred in the making of the language . I began to suspect that , while both sexes used the language, it was men who had created the English that is codified in our textbooks and dictionaries.
However, it was not just these single units of meaning that in- terested me; I was also interested in "available sets of meanings ," which is the terminology that Michael Young (1975) uses to designate knowledge. Within the available sets of meanings that constitute such disciplines as anthropology, history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, I found patterns comparable to those manifested in the language; women were negated, absent, or noted in a derogative or negative manner. I began to appreciate that codified knowledge, and the codified language, had been constructed primarily by men, that men considered themselves representative of humanity, and that this has had numerous consequences for women.
At this stage I became familiar with the work of Shirley Ardener (1975) and Edwin Ardener (1975). Edwin Ardener, for example, had noted the propensity among male anthropologists for going off to other cultures and consulting only males about the way the wo rld worked. He concluded that "Those trained in ethnography evidently have a bias towards the kinds of models that men are ready to provi de (or to concur in) rather than towards any that women might provide" (E . Ardener, 1975: 2). This helped to explain for Ardener why it was that "no one could come back from an ethnographic study of 'the X' having talked only to women and about men, without professional comment and some self-doubt [but that the] reverse can and does hap- pen constantly" (p. 3). That ethnographers should seek out males when trying to "crack the code" of a particular culture was under- standable, however, according to Ardener. The male version of reali- ty, he argues, is more readily accessible to anthropologists, because males are more articulate, more experienced at bridging the kind of gap between themselves and ethnographers than are women, and tend "to give a bounded ·model of society such as ethnographers are at- tracted to" (p . 2). This represents an analytical problem for Ardener , who says that
if the models of a society made by most ethnographers tend to be models derived from the male portion of society, how does the symbolic weight of that other mass of persons-half or more of a normal human population, as we have accepted-express itself [E . Ardener, 1975 ; 3]?
This was certainly a question that attracted me; but it is not the only way the problem can be conceptualized . Ardener assumes that the
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men in societies studied by ethnographers actually do have a more de- veloped and accessible version of reality, to which ethnographers from our society are attracted; there is an assumption that ethnographers from our society are neutral and value free, and no attempt is made to analyze the reasons for their attraction to the male version of reality in other societies. The problem of getting women's experience into anthropology, of giving women a voice to articulate the symbolic weight of their experience is, as he sees it, a problem of getting women into the data of Western anthropologists; it is about making their ver- sion of reality more accessible. But perhaps it is the anthropologists who need to have their behavior modified.
One thing that Edwin Ardener does not do is examine the frames of meaning that Western anthropologists bring with them to the societies they study. He assumed that the invisibility of women in an- thropological explanation and interpretation is a product of the women's behavior, but I would want to ask whether it might be the product of the values of Western anthropologists. For it seems to me that English-speaking anthropologists, at least, have a language that negates women's experience, and they have codified bodies of knowl- edge that negate women's experience (see Spender, 1981), and it is therefore "understandable" that they should impose this pattern of invisibility or negation on women outside, as well as inside, their own society. Whereas E. Ardener assumes that the superiority of male models of the world is a product of their particular construction of reality, I would want to ask if it might not be a product of their cultural maleness. Perhaps he was not pointing to a methodological problem in anthropology, but to a problem that has its origins in male dominance-a problem of language and power .
It was Shirley Ardener who articulated the concept that women's meanings were blocked at the level of expression in a male-dominated society. In my own work on language as the vehicle for the construc- tion of reality, I have encountered repeatedly the negation of women's experience and the possibility that when it comes to language, it is men who have the power, for, although the evidence is to some extent cir- cumstantial, it seems unlikely that it has been women who have been the producers, the originators, of these devalued meanings about women and their experience of the world.
When I began to undertake more systematic research in this area I found that the problem of expressing the symbolic weight of women's experience was not confined to other societies (which anthropologists might study) but was a problem consistently encountered by women Within our own society (and which anthropologists have not studied). That it has never been the central focus of any discipline, that it has
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been rendered invisible or trivial, that it has been negated , despite the fact that it has been consistently expressed for centuries by represen- tatives of half the human population, was data in itself. There is a long, varied tradition of women's protest against male power (see Spender, 1982, 1983a, 1983b ), and the fact that it is not part of the conventional set of meanings, that it is not readily accessible, is more an indication of the way women's voice is "denied , dismissed, distorted"' than it is evidence that women have not protested. From Christine de Pisan in the fifteenth century, through Aphra Benn, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Wright, Harriet Marti- neau, to Matilda Joslyn Gage, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Ritter Beard, and Simone de Beauvoir (to name but a few), women have been encoding an experience as women-as subordinated women-an experience that men do not have; and men have been denying the authority and significance of that experience, on the precise grounds that it is an experience they do not have. After all, they are ostensibly representative of humanity!
Between the sexes there has been no parity, no exchange of ex- perience, no dialogue; on the contrary, the limited experience of one sex has been legitimated as the complete human experience, so that those who do not endorse it are marked as not fully human , as the de- viants from humanity.
By such means is a significant segment of human experience deemed not to count; it is categorized as nondata. And the experience of reality of those who dominate, of those who have power, dominates. It is men who are the arbiters of convention, said Virginia Woolf (1929), and when a woman presents her version of experience,
she will find that she is perpetually wishing to alter the established values-to make serious what appears insignificant to a man, and trivial what is to him important and for that, of course, she will be criticized: for the critic of the opposite sex will be genuinely puzzled and surprised by an attempt to alter the current scale of values, and will see in it, not merely a difference of view, but a view that is weak, or trivial, or sen- timental, because it differs from our own [Woolf, 1972: 146].
Women have experience of the world that men do not have; this is not just the experience associated with the biological condition of be- ing woman, it is the experience of having one's life and values con- stantly negated. It is the experience of being permanently, and by definition, in the wrong. Individual men can make use of this negation of women's experiences, in order to discredit women's arguments. Few women writers/philosophers have not commented on this fun-
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daJDental denial of their experience and the implications it has for their dialogue; in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir summed it up when she said,
In the midst of an abstract discussion it is vexing to hear a man say: "You think thus and so because you are a woman"; but I know my only defence is to reply: "I think thus and so because it is true," thereby removing my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the question to reply: "And you think the contrary because you are a man,'' for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. A man is in the right being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong (de Beauvoir, 1972: 15].
Contemporary feminist writers describe the same phenomenon, although they may use different terminology. Mary Daly (1973) for example, has declared that women have had the power of naming stolen from them, that they have no names that accurately symbolize their experience of the world, but are obliged to use the names that men have produced. And the names that men have produced describe a world from a position women do not occupy; women's perceptions are often " precisely those perceptions that men, because of their dominant position, could not perceive" says Jean Baker Miller (1976: 6). But because men's partial view of the world is decreed to be the whole, men's terms are inadequate and false (Daly, 1973).
It would appear that both sexes generate models of the world, but where there is a discrepancy between the two, the issue is resolved in favor of men (S. Ardener, 1975). By this process, women's experience is negated, declared to be nondata, decreed as nonexistent, as unreal. Were both sexes to enjoy the power to legitimate their own meanings, then there could be a multiplicity of symbols to represent the different views of the sexes on substantive issues, but while only one sex possesses the power to legitimate meanings, its meanings become the totality, its partial meanings are accepted as complete. By such means does one sex have the capacity to produce an intended effect on the symbolizing and structuring activities of the other sex; by such means is sexual inequality constructed, reinforced, and perpetuated. Men have defined themselves as more central, as more worthy, more com- prehensive (and so on), and they have checked only with other men to validate and authenticate their meanings.
The exclusion of women is structural; the negation of their ex- perience is probably the inevitable outcome of such a structure. No matter what women do or say, no matter how they represent their ex- perience, in these terms, if it is not also the experience of men, it will be consigned to the realm of nondata. I can still remember my rage
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(hardly an acknowledged virtue among researchers) when I under- stood the implications of the then-fashionable questions and answers in relation to "tag questions" and "women's language deficiency .': Briefly, the belief was that there was something wrong with women 's language, and this was reflected in the lack of confidence and in the hesitancy and tentativeness of the way women used language. Robin Lakoff (1975) has suggested that the source of this "deficiency" was in women's use of tag questions. Now apart from the linguistic problem of identifying a tag question, 2 I was open to the possibility that there might be something in this hypotheses . So were others. Dubois and Crouch (1975) tested women and men for tag questions in a conference setting and found that, far from women 's being the culprits in the ostensibly deviant usage, it was men whose language was prone to such productions. I waited-as a reasonable research- er-for the discussion of the findings. I waited-with great glee-for the logical development and the finding that as it was men who used more tag questions than women, perhaps it was men who had the hesitant and tentative speech . But no. Instead of a discussion about the deficiencies in male language, I was entertained with the "sweet reason" that obviously the source of women's lack of sel f- confidence was not contained in the tag question. Men' s language, once more, went on its way unchallenged, while the primary task of locating the source of women's deficiency continued-in another place, of course . This is the bias of the discourse.
American, Australian, British, Canadian, and French women have all attested to this phenomenon; they have been describing it for cen- turies (it is present in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women [17921), but because it has not been the experience of men, it is not part of the tradition-which is supposedly our tradition but which is more accurately described as men's tradition. (Had it been the experience of men, feminists have argued, it would have been a central philosophical issue, as would menstruation have been the locus for glorification had it been the experience of men).
Women have been excluded "from a full share in the making of what becomes treated as our culture" says Dorothy Smith (1978 : 283), with the result that women's meanings and experience have been omit- ted or excised from the culture's meanings, and thus from conver- sations. What consequences does thi s have for women? In part, it helps to construct their inequality and dependency , to convince them of their own "inferiority." It is possible, for example, for wom en to feel strong and autonomou s but with no means of representing this concept through language (there are no words for women's strength;
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see Miller and Swift [1976]); they cannot voice that strength and autonomy. They may even begin to doubt the validity of the concept for women; if women can feel strong and autonorp.ous, why has there been no need to encode words to represent this state of existence? Women might feel sexually healthy-and autonomous-but again, there are no words that can carry the weight of this meaning.
Men have validated their own sexuality with virility and potency, but there are no equivalents for women; women are offered a choice between the equally offensive terms "frigidity" and "nymphomania" (and it is signi ficant that there are no semantically equivalent terms for men). With no means of symbolizing a positive, healthy sexual ex- istence, why should women not doubt their own authenticity, par- ticularly when almost every aspect of social organization reinforces their lack o f authority. The list could go on and on.
It is not an accident that I have chosen to include autonomy in both the examples cited; this is a fundamental aspect of the negation of women, fo r they are defined in our society, in relation to men, as a derivative o f men (even to the extent of deriving from Adam's rib). Linguists have categorized them in this way; in his componential analysis of the English language Geoffrey Leech (1969) divides nouns into ( + male) and (-male) indicating the semantic dimensions of the language, as he sees them. As Julia Stanley (1977: 48) says, women are defined negatively:
[O]u r behaviour is that which is not masculine. The definition of the word mannish explains to us that women who possess such attributes as strength, fortitude, honesty, courage, directness and bravery are "aber- rant."
Women can only aspire to be as good as man; there is no point in try- ing to be as good as a woman.
Shirley Ardener (1975) has used the terms "dominate" and "muted " to designate the different relationship of the sexes to langu age and reality. Males, as the dominant group, can impede the free expression of alternative models of the world which women, as the muted group, may express; she suggests that males may even in- hibi t the generation of models from the muted group, who, for exam- ple, may become so convinced of their dependence that they cease to generate any notions of independence for themselves. It may be, says Shirley Ardener, that the muted group is even relatively less articulate because they are required to express themselves through an idiom not of their own making; it may be that they "are silent on matters of
202 LANGUAGE AND POWER . special concern to them for which no accommodation has been made" in the idiom of the dominant group (S. Ardener, 1975: xii).
For women to speak on the issue of women's silence in language and culture is to invoke many of those penalties that have helped to keep women silent on this matter; for, while this representation of ex- perience may "ring true" for many women, it may remain "meaning- less" for men. Within the legitimated frame of reference in which we operate, it would be perfectly consistent for men to dismiss this issue as nondata, as trivial or insignificant. It would be predictable if they were to claim that the substance of this argument escapes them for, as Joan Roberts has said,
Because of female exclusion from thought systems, the hardest thing for a man to know is what a woman thinks. But it is harder still for him to listen and to accept her thoughts because they are certain to shake the foundation of his beliefs [Roberts, 1976: 19] .
What are the implications for a male when a woman asserts that there is "something wrong with a man" who cannot accept the authenticity of a woman's view of the world? What are the implications for men when women insist that men and male power are a problem ; when to men it does not feel as though their sex and their power are a problem? They may be discomfitted by this assertion, they may be confused, they may even feel that they are being confronted with a doub le bind; for, if they accept the authenticity of women's experience, then they accept that their sex and their power constitutes a problem . Yet, if they deny the validity of women's assertions and dispute that their sex and power is a problem, they are doing nothing other than demonstrating that they are the precise problem that women's ex- perience encodes; they are acting as the dominant group incapable of granting legitimation to experience outside their own.
A no-win situation? Certainly-and one constructed when someone with experience other than their own assumes the right to name the world. And if men feel the constraints of this double bind, if they feel damned if they disagree, then I am sure that the sympathy of many women will be with them. For let me assure them that, while this maY be an isolated and novel experience for men, it is the daily reality of women's lives. Women can know what it is like to be damned if they agree with the prevailing definitions of womanhood, and dam ned if they disagree.
This is the unfortunate outcome of a structure that permits only one perceptual order. I could stop here. I could say that for centuries men have imposed their view on women; now it is time for women to
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have a turn and impose their view on men so that we can retain a uniform perceptual order but simply change the sexual origin of the world view. But I have reservations about this stance.
I have no compunction about using such reversals to make a point, no reluctance when it comes to providing a learning experience for men. But replacing the tyranny of one sex with the tyranny of the other is not for me a long-term solution: I do not want to insist that equality between the sexes depends on women's meanings pre- dominating ; I do want to insist that women's meanings should be allowed to coexist, that they should be accorded equal validity. In other words, I am seeking a radical solution: I want a woman's word to count as much as a man's, no more and no less. Then neither sex will have their reality circumscribed by the experience of the other; neither will have their existence structured into a double bind.
What I want to do now-very briefly-is to (a) acknowledge the partial·nature of my view, and (b) suggest appropriate generalizations that might be made from it. I think the marginality of women can be productive; I think this experience of women as a negated, deviant, deficient group can be utilized to provide insights into the operation of language and power in society and can help to eliminate those divi- sions between dominant and muted groups. It is my contention that tyranny emerges only when one sex (or group) has sole access to the legitimation of experience and that (at the risk of oversimplification), if it could be accepted that there is more than one way of looking at the world, the current male monopoly could be undermined. It is a multiplicity of meaning rather than monodimensional meaning (Daly, 1978) that needs to be cultivated. Perhaps because they have had more experience in dealing with multiple realities (their own as well as that of men), women are in a more advantageous position in this respect and can help to lead the way.
Gender , of course, is not the only dimension along which we divide the world into unequal parts; class and ethnicity are also used in this way. The case for the negation of experience could be equally ap- plicable for working-class or Black people who are also outside the white, middle-class, male, legitimating circle. (The coinage of "Black is beautiful" was surely an attempt to subvert the legitimated mean- ings.) But the list is not complete with the nomination of sex, class, and ethnicity; they are not the only bases for the criteria for entry to that circle in which reality is defined. "Others" are those who-to name but a few characteristics-are not white, middle- or upper-class, middle-aged, heterosexual, able-bodied, or male. It would seem that those who are the legitimators have indeed only a partial view of the World!
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Frequently it is the context that determines the structuring of dominant and muted groups . In my own work within education, for example, I can characterize teachers as the dominant group with the power to define the reality of the classroom, and students as the muted group who consistently have their experience negated. T he spectacle of teachers as decreeing that their view of the world is the view of the world-while the experience that the students have (and that is dif- ferent from the teacher's) is declared nondata-is not an uncommon one. I have listened to tapes in which teachers have systematically con- structed the dependence of their students by insisting that they de ny their own experience and accept as valid only that which the teacher presents. I have listened to myself doing this!
Obviously, in a hierarchical society, people find ways of construct- ing stratification . But there has been no extensive work undertaken on the part played by language in the construction of inequality,3 and on the ways that the negation of women's experiences and words dif- ferentially structures women's and men's linguistic resources and ar- guments for the expression of personal power. Terms such as "role playing," "internalization of oppression," and "conditioning" have been coined to label this phenomenon whereby people come to believe in and accept their own inferiority/superiority, dependence/inde- pendence, but there has been no real focus on how this process works. If this had been an issue in language study, then it is possible that language researchers would be displaying great interest in women who are involved in the modern women's movement, that they would be looking to such women as a source of data and would be inspecting the cultural factors that enhance or suppress the power of individual speakers. I think it highly significant that virtually no research has been undertaken on consciousness-raising, despite the fact that it has been an activity in which thousands of women have been engaged, and in whic}l many of the conventions of language and power, as they have been outlined here, have been repudiated.
Joan Cassell (1977) has stated that through consciousness-raising, women "switch world"; Mary Daly (1973) has stated that they begin to recycle the symbols for the structuring and ordering of experience; Jo Freeman (1975) has stated that they experience a growth in self- esteem and confidence. I would argue that they cease to operate as a muted group, that they begin to validate and authenticate their own meanings, which frequently contradict and subvert the legitimated meanings. They cease to role play, to internalize their oppression; they become "resocialized" (Cassell, 1977). They begin to define them- selves and to negate the negation of their experiences. The "effects
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contrary to their interests" can no longer be relied upon to take place.• That this change is occurring at the moment is incontestable; that it is not the substance of "serious" research in language and power is un- fortunate-but understandable. To start looking at women as a source of data in this way could well begin to establish them as representative
of humanity.
N OTES
1. A forth co mi ng issue of Women's Studies International Forum devoted to this topic is entitled "Gatekeeping: The Denial, Dismissal and Distortion of Women."
2. While " I ' ll be home after supper, all right?" is a tag question, the British "We don't want any wo men in the club, all right?" is not a tag question, despite the fact that
they possess comparable linguistic features. 3. There have of course been descriptions of language and inequality. See particular-
ly the work of Labov (1972a, 1972b). 4. There is still a long way to go, and women frequently acknowledge the resistance
of the language to their efforts to change it; there is still no word in general circulation for women 's strength, for example. But there are new words that do "alter the balance of power" and that women have coined (see Daly, 1978; Spender, 1981).