"Language and Society" paper

(

Communicating Gender

lfA 1999

Suzanne Romaine Oxford University

LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS ~ .

Mahwah, New Jersey London

90 CHAPTER t ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SUGGESTIONS

FOR FURTHER READING

A good overview of the linguistic issues concerning gender as a grammatical category can be found in Greville Corbett's (1991) book. Istvan Fodor's (1959) article deals with the historical origins of gender in the lndo-Euro- pean languages. Deborah Cameron's (1985) article and Suzanne Romaine's (1997a) article present a feminist perspective on gender systems. The Dyirbal system of noun classification is discussed by R. M. W. Dixon (1972) and George Lakoff (1987). The examples relating to the personification of Gaia as female are from James E. Lovelock (1985) and Norman Myers (1990). Examples of the myths and metaphors of the British Empire can be found in Robert MacDonald's (1994) book. Suzanne Romaine's (1997b) article on the Use of metaphor in environmental discourse gives further examples of the link between femininity and nature. The examples from Robert Louis Stevenson are contained in the collection The Lantern Bearers and Other Essays (1988). Articles by T. H. Svartengren (1927) and M~ Mathiot and M. Robert (1979) discuss upgrading and downgrading. Information on experiments concerning the connotations of gender can be found in articles by Susan Ervin (1962), M. A. Clarke, M. D. Losoff, M. D. McCracken, and]. Still (1981), A. Z. Guiora, B. Beit-Hallahmi, R. Fried, and C. Yoder (1982), Toshi Konishi (1994), Piiivi and Marc Tukia (1987), and David A. Zubin and K. M. Kopcke (1981).

For a discussion of French feminism and the issue of language reform see Helene Cixous (1975/1986) and Susan Sellers (1991). John Lyons (1968) and Suzanne Fleischman (1994) have discussed the problem of gender clash in French masculine occupational titles used in reference to women. For a popular discussion of the issue, see the article in Newsweek, "What is 'le mot juste' in an age of feminism?" (May 28, 1984, p. 23). I have based the exercise from the Sevarambian language on· the examples given in Marina Yaguello's book (1991, Appendix2, pp.162-166). I have, however, simplified things somewhat because nouns should also have case endings, as in Latin, which I have omitted.

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CHAPTER

4

English-A Man-Made language?

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, male, master ;On his lips and on mine! J. cai:n:ot . speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language,.so.fanuliar and so foreign, will always be'for me a~ acquired speech. I have not.made. or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (Joyce, 1917, p. 189)

James Joyce's character, Stephen Daedalus, was not of course speaking here about gender bias in the English language, but inst'."'d about the _effects of having been colonized by the English language, which replaced lnsh as the medium of everyday communication in Ireland after England's conquest. Nevertheless, iii' line with the connection I noted in the previous chapter between colonized peoples and women, a woman might well express these general sentiments. Gender scholars such as Dale Spender argue that English is a language made by men for men in order to represent therr pom~ of view and perpetuate it. In this world view women are marked as devt_ant and deficient, or made invisiSle. Thanks to the women's movement, sexism in language became a political issue. This .so-called _"sexism in l~nguage" can be demonsttated with many different kinds of evidence. In this chapter and the next I look at the main areas of linguistic bias against women and some of the reasons why people have claimed English and other languages are man-made.

The first type·.: of evidence involves asymmetries between pairs of gen- der-differentiated terms such as bachelor and spinster, sir and madam, and so on. The female term has negative associations, while the male term is

CHAPTER 4

either neutral or positive. Discrepancies in grammatical forms reflect the tendency for men to be active subjects and women to be passive objects, or simply not mentioned at all Another piece of evidence is the existence of many more derogatory terms and names for girls and women than there ate for boys aQd men. Finally, I discuss the use of masculine forms such as he, man, and compounds such as mankind in a so-called generic sense to include women.

SPINSTERS. ·oLl:i MAIDS, HAGS, AND THE WORD THAT RHYMES WITH RICH:

HOW WOMEN ARE SPOKEN ABOUT

Many words for women have negative connotations, even where the cor- responding male terms designate the same or similar condition for men. Thus, spinster and bachelor both refer to unmarried adults but the female term h_as ~egative ov:r1ones to it. Such a distinction reflects' the importance of s~aety s expectations about marriage, and, more importantly, about mamageable age. The Pope is also technically a bachelor, but by convention, he IS not referred to as o~e since he is obliged not to marry. A spinster is also unmamed but she 1s more than that: She is beyond the expected marrymg age and therefore seen as rejected and undesirable. Like the old grey mare in the song, "she ain't what she used to be." She is an "old maid," an image popularized in a children's card game that carries that very name. No one wants to be stuck holding the card with the picture of the old maid.

These cultural stereotypes about old maids being losers in card games and the marnage market also affect the term maiden, as in maiden aunt or maiden lady, and notably even expressions such as maiden horse to refer to a horse that has not won a race. The Oxford English Dictionary entry. on fi~;~tlv~ uses of the term maiden defines them as sharing the meanmg of y1eldmg no results." Woman who have not caught a man have lost the rac~. Other figurative uses such as maiden voyage, maiden speech, maiden flight, and so on, referring to the first occasion or event of a kmd,. relate to t~e stereotype that women should be virginal, inexperi- enced,_ mtact, untned, and fresh in worldly as well as sexual matters. Conta1ne1:5 of olive oil claiming to be "vir~," that is, from the first pressing of the fruit and therefore of the highest quality, often show young maidens (see chap. 9 on the use of female images in advertising).

Although some have speculated that the word spinster may be dying out,_ women such as Mary Daly (1973) have been trying to revive it in its ongmal m~nmg of a woman engaged in spinning (see further in chap 10). Because these wqmen spinners were often Wim.arried, this connotatio~

1 _

ENGUSH-A MAN-MADE LANGUAGE? 93

eventually ousted the original meaning and became tbe primary sense_ of the word. In the 17th century the term spinster became the legal designation of an unmarried woman. Although there are no instances of the word in the Brown Corpus of American English (the first computerized collecti~n of texts compiled in the 1960s), it appears to be still in common use m British English, as can be seen in the British National Corpus (1ust released in 1995), where I found 156 instances in a sample of o_ne hun~r:d ~!hon words. By comparison, the word bachelor occurs 479 nmes~ md1ca~mg the general tendency that I discuss later, whereby men and the1t activities are more talked about than women and theirs. Interesting, the term bachelor girl (presumably a young spinster?) occurred three times. · .

If people have any doubt about the negative connota~ons_ o_f spinster, all they need to do is look at the range of words with which 1t 1s used, or what linguists call its collocations. Although there are some neutral de- scriptive adjectives used with the word, such as _66-year-old, d1Sabled,_ or American, the majority of words collocating with spinster are negative. They include the following: gossipy, nervy, over-made-up, ineffective, 1eal- ous, eccentric, love-/sex-starved, frustrated, whey-fa_ced, dried-up old, re- pressed, lonely, prim, cold-hearted, plain Jane, atrocious, _an_d despise~ .. By comparison, the collocations of bachelor are largely descnpnve or positive, with the. exception of one occurrence of bachelor wimp. .

This example shows how the connotations of words do not anse from words themselves but how they are used in context. The meanmgs of words are constructed and maintained by patterns of collocation. Collocati?ns transmit cultural meanings and stereotypes that have· built U:p over t1me (see also chap. 8 for discussion of how the media influ~nces our perce~t1ons of rape victims by appealing to the contextual assoaations of collocat1ons). This sort of bias in the connotations of words for women is far-reaching arid applies evep to our associations of the basic terms man versus woman, about which I say more in the next chapter, where I also look at mor_e collocations. No insult is implied if you call a woman an "old man" (1f indeed this makes any sense), but to call a man an "old woman" is_ a decided insult. Because the word woman does not share equal status with man, terms referring to women have undergone a kind of semantic down- grading or pejoration. .

We can also see how the female terms may start out on an equal footing, but become devalued over time, if we examine some more pairs of gender. marked terms such as lordllady;baronetldame,sirlmadam,:master/mistress, king/queen, wizard(warlock)lwiteh, and so on. Lord, for instance, preserves its original meaxiing, whereas la4y is no longer used exclusively for w~men of high rank. In the 17th century it became a synonym for a prostitute. So did courtesan, which originally meant a female member of the court. Baronet still retains its original meaning, but Dame is used derogatonly,

94 CHAPTER 4

especially in American English. Sir is still used as a title and a form of respect, whereas a Madam is one who runs a brothel. Likewis.e, master has not lost its original meaning, but mistress has come to have sexual conno- tations and no longer refers to the woman who has control over a household [see chap. 3 for discussion of mistress as a title). There is a considerable discrepancy between referring to someone as an old master as opposed to m old mistress. In Italian the related word maestro can mean a 'school- :naster' as well as a 'great teacher', whereas the .feminine form maestra :efers only to a 'schoolmistress'. In the next chapter I examine in more ietail the use·of titles such as Mrs., Mr., Miss, and Ms; . Both hussy and ho~ewife·have.their origin in Old English huswif, but 'ussy has undergone semantic derogation. Wife has negative connotations n. expressions such as' an old wives' tali, fishwife, old wifie, and so forth. 'mg _has also_ kept its meaning, whereas queen has developed sexual con- 1otat1ons. Wizard has actually undergone semantic amelioration or up- ;rading. To call a man a wizard is a compliment but ~ot so for th; woman ;ho is branded (or in m~dieval times burned) as a witch. Similarly, in 'rench we have chef, which might mean male cook, or chef d'etat, head >f state, to which the female counterpart is cheftaine. But cheftaine means ;irl Scout leader. An analogous English pair would be governor compared o governess, where the male term refers to a ruler, and the female term o someone who looks after children. The same asymmetry in status is ound in Italian. In chapter 10 I discuss the problems these. discrepancies >ose for language reform. Likewise, other words such as biddy and tart ia ve changed dramatically since they were first used as terms of endearment. cart meant a small pie or pastry and was later extended to express affection. . hen it was used to refer to a woman who was sexually desirable and to . "woman of the street," that is, a prostitute. Biddy was a term for a hen .nd was subsequently usea in colonial America to refer to an Irish maid: ervant, and a gossiping woman. I say more about the wider semantic ssociations of these terms later in this chapter.

Historically speaking, we can see the following three trends. First, terms hat re'.er to women gain more negative senses over time. Second, male erms either retain their original meaning or become more positive. Third erms that were originally generic (such as girl) or neutral such as tart o; •iddy, gain more negative connotations whel! they are sp;cialized to refer o· females only. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word ·irl, for instance, i'.' the 13th and 14th centuries was used generically to efer to a child of either sex, usually in the plural form to refer to children n _general. Females were called gay girls and boys, knave girls. The spe- 1fically male word boy appeared slightly later. Jespersen (1949, p. 195) 1bserved that the word child too, although it can be used for either sex v~s sometirp.~. used to mean a female child, as in Shakespeare's A Winter';

ENGLISH-A MAN-MADE LANGUAGE? 95

Tale (Ill.3.7): "A'very pretty barne: A boy or a childe I wonder?" He added that he has never found a single instance of words originally designating female beings made into names either;Jor both sexes or specifically Aor · males, just as there are no reported cases ,of girls' names being appropriated for boys. The same is true, he said, f(lr endings: No endings first used to · derive feminine forms are later used to derive masculine ones (see chap. 5). These trends need to be taken into account by language reformers (see further in chap. 10).

Similar asymmetries in meaning between male and female terms can be found in other languages not related to English, like Japanese, where certain adjectives take on a more negative meaning when applied to women. Con- sider the following examples:

Adjective

kareta kurooto-no zidaraku-na

Applied to Man

mature professional slovenly

Meaning

Applied to Woman

withered prostitute slut

As in English,, we see that the concept of a mature woman is associated with a woman beyond her prime. Likewise, to call a woman a professional is to call her a prostitute in Japanese as well as in French and English. The observation that a slovenly woman becomes a slut is paralleled in English by a number of synonyms for untidy person listed in Roget's Thesaurus. Most of them are words for women such as slut, slattern, {rump, trollop, bitch, and so on .

MOTHERS AND WORKERS BY OTHER NAMES: THE HOUSEWIFE, THE WORKING MOTHER, AND THE PROBLEM CALLED HOUSEWORK

There are asymmetries in the meanings of terms such as mother or father, as well as in their collocations, which reflect the fact that the sexual division of labor in our society has placed women in much closer contact with children. As I noted in chapter 2, this reinforced theories about the biological naturalness of the maternal instinct. To say that a woman mothered her children is to draw attention to her nurturing role, but to say that a man fathered a child is to refer only to his biological role in conception. The notion of mothering can be applied to other people and children other than one's own, whereas fathering cannot. More recently, the term surrogate mother has been used to refer to a woman in her biological role as mother.

96 CHAPTER 4

In the early. 1990s such a surrogate mother was the first' woman to give birth to her own grandchildren. Now there are many kinds of mothers, as can be seen in the cartoon in Fig. 4.1. We have biological mothers, surrogate mothers, unwed mothers, single mothers, teenage mothers, welfare mothers, birth mothers, gestationar mothers, incubator mothers, adoptive mothers, and, of course, working mothers, and even natural mothers. In the famous Baby M case references to the baby's father (i.e., its "natural" or "biologi- cal" father) were set against the term surrogate mother, suggesting that the woman who bore the child was not as much a mother as the man who provided the sperm was a father. The fact that these notions vary from our cultural stereotype of housewife-mother is signaled linguistically by

FIG.·4.1. Contemporary motherhood. Drawing by D. Fradon, © 1995, The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

/~1 ·1

ENGLISH-A MAN-MADE LANGUAGE? 97

the use of special terms to refer to them. The real liberation of women is inseparable from the creation of different ways of caring for children, a theme played out in feminist speculative fiction portraying worlds where technology or evolution has freed women from their reproductive function (see chap. 11 for discussion of different notions of motherhood).

Then there is the dilemma of what a child of gay or lesbian parents should call the parents. When an interviewer for Newsweek magazine (November 4, 1996) asked entertainer Melissa Etheridge and her pregnant · partner, Julie Cypher, how they wanted the child to refer to them, Etheridge replied "she's the birthmother, but I am also the mother. We haven't come up with an answer."

We make inferences from terms such as working mother or from the absence or rarity of others such as single father in our thinking about men and women (see chap. 10 for discussion of gaps in our vocabulary for referring to women's experiences). The Virginia Supreme Court in 1995 niled that Sharon Bottoms was an "unfit parent" because she was a "lesbian mother." She had to sur'render custody of her 5-year-old son to her mother. In 1996 the Florida state appeals court ruled that John Ward, convicted of murdering his first wife in 1974, was a more fit parent than his ex-wife Mary, a lesbian. Here the existence of a term lesbian mother and its associated steteotjtpes"can be contrasted with the lack of a term.such as killer father. · · ·" ·

There is no term working father hecause it is redundant. W~:gerlerally only single out for special emphasis or marking things that are uriusiial or unexpected, such as the working mother. There is a women's magazine carrying the title Working Mother, but not surprisingly no new men's magazine called House Husband or Working Father. The paradox of house- work not counting as "real" work and the myth of the "happy housewife" are at the heart of what Betty Friedan (1963) called "the problem that has no name." Because housework doesn't count, it is possible to say that a woman at home doesn't "work." She is included among the "unemployed," a "dependent" for tax purposes, although everyone else in the household is in fact dependent on her. "She's just a housewife" is a familiar refrain, despite the fact that many housewives with children work 90-hour weeks .. In 1979 a newspaper article about men who were full-time "homemakers" was headed "The Non-Workers," further reinforcing the misconception that work done at home is not "real" work. A "working mother" does her ,"work" outside the home. Here we see a double bias against women; a woman who works is marked as deviant with a sp~cial name, as is a mother who works. Then of course, there is the "career woman" (a.k.a. "superwoman") discussed in chapter 5.

Conversely, we do not normally talk of single or unwed/unmarried fathers, for example, because there is no stigma attached to this status for men (see. chap. 8 for discussion of a rape case where an unwed mother was cast as a bad mother). The British National Corpus, for instance, contains 153

CHAPTER 4

instances of the p/u,:ase single mother and only 2 instances of single father. There are 68 occurren.ces of unmarried mother {plus 2 of unwed mother), but only 6 of '!-nmarriedfather {and none of unwed father). We can also compare 59 occurrencces of teenage mother with only 2 of teenage father. Similarly, there are 81 ,cases of working mother and none of working father. New gender-neiltral terms such as caretaker/caregiver, parenting, and so on are more recently being used to try to avoid the stereotypical association of women with child care. Yet even the magazine called Parenting, which claims to address contemporary parents, displays mothers almost exclusively (Schwartz, 1996). When men are portrayed, they are shown more often in :he r_o}e of husband rather than father (~ee chap. 9 for sex stereotyping in the ned1a). I discuss the implications of the linguistic strategy of marking of vomen with special titles.in the next chapter. ·

Other languages show asymmetries between the meanings associ~ted vith the terms mother and father. In the African language Ewe, for example, he word for 'father' {t6) also means 'owner', and the word for 'mother' 'ZO} means 'someone suffering from something,. Thus, a 'rich person' is a ~-t6 ('money owner'), a compound formed from the words ga ('money') nd t6 ('father'). A 'sick person', on the other hand, is literally a 'diseased tother' because the word is compounded from do ('disease') and no mother'). Similarly, a 'blind person' is literally an 'eye die mother' (ng- 1-no) and a 'deaf person' is an 'ear die mother' (to-ku-no). , In other languages, however, terms meaning 'mother' have been extended more positive ways. For example, in some Southeast Asian languages like 1ai and Malay the word meaning 'mother' has been extended so that it refers something large or the main/most important thing. For example, when the alay words for 'mother' (ibu) and 'house' {rumah) combine in the com- und rumah-ibu, the term refers to the 'main part of the house'. Likewise, ten the Thai words for 'mother' and 'army' combine, the resulting npound means 'general'/'commander-in-chief. James Matisoff (1991) >wed how the semantic development has proceeded from the meaning of Jther' to 'origin'rsource' to 'big'/'main'/'most important'. We have a tilar metaphor in English expressions, such as 'the mother of all battles', 'mother board' of a computer, and so on. However, many other languages scuss next heap ritual abuse and insults on mothers. V

WHORES, SEX KITTENS, SLUTS: WOMEN AND BAD WORDS

lish has many more terms to refer to a sexually promiscuous female than sexually promiscuous male. According to one count made by Julia Stanley 77), there are.220 ":'-9I;ds.for such women, and only 20 for men. Pierre :aud (197S)''docurricl:ited about 600 terms in French to refer to a

ENGLlSH-A MAN-MADE LANGUAGE? 99

prostitute. He also found 50 terms to refer to male orgasm, but only 9 to female orgasm. Some of the more common derogatory terms applied to men, such as bastard, mother fucker, and son of a bitch, actually degrade women in their role as mothers. They are insulting when used to men precisely because they are female words. Being a woman is the worst thing a man can thmk of. Labov's (1972b) early work on so-called Black English vernacular spoken by membffs of Harlem teenagers revealed a system of ntual msults. called sounding, signifying, and playing the dozens, which included insults directed at mothers, such as your momma got shit on, your mother so old she got spider webs under her arm (see also chap. 7). . ..

Jn a cross-cultural study of insults in 103 languages, Edgar Gregersen {1979) found that in 66 of the languages the most abusive curses were those involving mothers. Only 20 languages had father insults. Insults directed against mothers are highly shocking because they heap abuse on one of the roles for which women are otherwise revered m many cultures. The curses directed against mothers are so common that m Span~sh-speak1?g culture even the word mother (tu madre) suffices as a grave msult on Its own, possibly because it alludes to one of the roles in which women. are most positively and powerfully active, namely, biological reproducnon. Women are the source of life itself. By the same token, however, ~s I pointed out in chapter 2, it is this power that men have feared. In American English something similar has happened to the word mother m express10ns such as "what a mother," which is possibly a short form for mother fucker. S"milarly the term bitch has been extended from its use to refer tp an u~pleasa~t woman to anything unpleasant, such as I had a bitch of a day. Because the terms tomboy and sissy, which I discuss in chapter 7, s_how many of the asymmetries associated with pairs o~ gender-differentiated terms like witch and wizard, it is a much greater msult to call a boy a sissy than to call a girl a tomboy. .

Studies of adolescent talk in Britain revealed the tendency for girls to be called names that categorize them according to their sexual attractiveness and availability, such as dogs, horny birds, whores, a~d slu:S- Girls were aware that they had to walk a fine line betwe~n bemg stigmatized for sexual coldness, or being thought of as a tight bztch on the one hand, or too -loose or a slag on the other. These terms ~gain reflect the _view of women as sexual commodities: a loose woman is too ~sily ~vailable; a tight bitch is not available enough; and a kept won:an IS one m bondage to a man. One girl commented that there w~re sunply not very. ~n?' insulting names you could call a boy .. Terms hke Rrzck or wanker didµt · seem to have the samefqrce, ,and,th'\r.e were np. derogatory t.erms lPr' promiscuous boys. Theie 3'.fe, 'hOweVer.; a few terms such ~s gigolo and toyboy to indicate a man kept by a woman as a lover._ This re~ects the double standard for evaluating male versus female sexuality. Mens sexual

100 CfIAl'TER 4

activities are highly evaluated, but womeu's are sanctioned. Being a stud enhances a boy's reputation (see further in chap. 7).

The apparent lesser stigma attached to prick .as an English term of abuse for men is reflected in the fact that it. was included in the Oxford English Dictionary, whereas cunt and fuck were excluded. Yet among the Gurindji Abongmes of Northern Australia the worst possible, but nevertheless fre- quent, insult. 'is for one man to call another a stinking prick. If a woman were to say this to a man, she would be. speared . . It should n.ot be surprising that in-group private usage of language is

different from what is acceptable in public cross-gender usage. Even in ancient Grec;i:e women evidently did swear, although their swear words we_re different fron:f:those used by men. In the play The Ecclesiazuae by Anstophane~ (393 B.C.), a woman who intends to pose as a man as part )f a plot fpr women to take over the world reveals herself as a woman by ;wearing ';by the two goddesses [Demeter and Persephone]." This was •pparentlY:'the favorite oath of Athenian women. Ancient Greek men ap- Jarently ne:ver:swore by goddesses. Modern scholars have reported a tend- !ncy for women to u.se different sorts of swear words than men. Stenstrom 1991), for <;xample, compared men's and women's use of expletives in the :.Ondon-Lund corpus of spoken English. She found that women used more nstances cif :(good) heavens, gosh, and blimey, whereas men made &<eat(!! ise of bastard, damn, and devil.

Onr more limited understanding of womeu's use of derogatory terms foi nen may well reflect a problem in the methods used for data collection >ecause society places different constraints on men's and women's reporting >f such words. Although the whole domain of sexuality is a taboo area, the :xpectation that good girls and ladies don't swear or use "bad" language nakes it much more difficult to collect female usage, particularly if the nvestigator is male. Gregersen, for example, asked only men for their insults. nsulting terms for males are much more likely to appear in all-female private lisconrse. Barbara Risch's (1987) study of young women's "dirty words" for nen revealed 50 terms in use among university students. She classified the erms into eight categories: birth (e.g., son of a bitch), ass (e.g., dumb ass, 2ck ass), head (e.g., shit head, jock head), dick (e.g., dick, prick), boys (e.g., 1ama's boy, pretty boy), animal (e.g., stud), meat (e.g., hunk, juicy steak), nd other (e.g., jerk-off, jock strap). There is some overlap here with terms .sed to refer to the penis, which I discuss in chapter 8.

In her study of slang in South African English, Vivian de Klerk (1995) Jund few overall differences between male and female teenagers in terms f the numb.,r of words known. Whether the terms were positive or nega- :ve, each sex r.eported knowing more pertaining to th~ opposite sex. She uggests that although bias toward females may exist in the English vo- abulary atlarge, individuals may be familiar with only a limited range of

ENGLISH-A MAN-MADE LANGUAGE? 101

words (see further in chap. 6 on the connection between males and slang and women and standard speech).

Another productive category of names applied to women and men·:that are often abusive and derogatory are .animal terms such as bunny, chick, fox, kitten, pig, wolf, and so on. In French many of the feminine forms of animal names are used derogarorilY: to: refer to women; guenon, the long- tailed monkey, l).as a colloquial meaning of ugly old woman. The association of geese in particular with women, such as through the figure of the sto- rytelling Mother Goose, probably led to the sexual overtones and images the word goose took on. In the 17th century it referred to venereal disease and the goose month was the period of a woman's confinement before child birth. The use of duck (and hen) as a term of endearment in British English may be part of this network of associations, as well as the expression goose and duck in Cockney rhyming slang, meaning fuck, and the Korean custom of giving the bridal couple a brace of ducks. The duck has her beak tied, while the drake's is free.

Waterfowl like the goose, swan, and stork are symbols of sexual knowl- edge, as can be seen in Yeats's poem "Leda and the Swan," where the god · Zeus in the form of a swan rapes Leda. Yeats asks, "Did she put on his knowledge with his power before the indifferent beak could let her drop?"

In English the names used for women are usually those of small animals, for example, those kept as pets or hunted as prey. The underlying metaphor motivating this extension is man as hunter in search of (sexual) prey to consume. Thus, the traditional gathering that men throw for the bridegroom before the wedding is a stag party. A similar women's celebration is a hen party (see also chap. 6 on the image of gossiping women as hens and other birds). The fear of being devoured by hairy beasts, bears, and wolves, represents one of the many guises, often the darker side, of male sexual appetite for the female body in fairy tales ranging from that of Little Red Riding Hood, to Goldilocks, to Hansel and Gretel. Early versions of "Beauty and the Beast" assumed a female audience who understood the terror of being given in marriage by their fathers to men who were potential monsters or beasts. The beast represents the mysterious unknown, the danger of sexuality.

The consumption aspect of the sexual hunting metaphor is further played · out in terms for food used to refer to men and women as the objects of

intercourse, such as cheesecake, tart, honey( bun), and sweetie(pie). In chap- ter 8 I discuss some more cases where male sexual organs are conceptualized as food items. Women in the guise of sex objects are associated with sweet food items, especially desserts like cakes and pies. Similarly, "loose women" are easy as pie to seduce; cherry pie was used colloquially in the 19th century to refer to an attractive young woman. Places where such baked goods are sold, the cake and tart shop, are also metaphorically extended as slang terms for brothels. Even little girls, according to the nursery rhyme

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102 CHAPTER 4

[ quoted at the beginning of chapter 2, are made of "suga,r and spice" and :herefore thought of as saccharine as in the stereotype of the "sweet young :hing." The metaphor is also present in terms of address such as sweetie md honey, discussed in the next chapter, or expressions such as give me ;ome sugar.

Rachelle Waksler (1995), however, found evidence that some abusive vords may be losing their gender-specific connotations. For example, bitch md dog(meat) may be used to refer to men as well as women, and dick nay be used to refer to women, as in the slang term honorary big swinging lick used by ·London financial traders (the "City Lads") to refer to a uccessful woman trader.

ONE MAN IN TWO IS A WOMAN

ignificant consequences follow from the linguistic fact that certain male erms in English are by convention taken to include females. Grammarians ell us that words such as mankind, manpower, man-made, and, of course, ven man, as in prehistoric man, encompass women. Feminists argue that ' such terms were truly generic, we would not find sentences such as these ·dd: Man, being a mammal, breastfeeds his young. "Every woman, td a i.an, became a fierce advocate of admitting women to the suffrage" (an xample from 1906 .cited by Jespersen, 1949, p. 185). French feminists ave seized· upon the shock value associated with unexpected usages in 1eir slogans un homme sur deux est une femme (One man out of two is woman), and cinquante pour cent des hommes sont des femmes (Fifry

ercent of men are women). If the male generics were truly generic, we would expect them to be used

onsistently across the board. It should therefore not sound odd to say, A urse should make sure he gives his patients the best p~ssible care. However, 'e can see that speakers do make assumptions about the likely sex of certain ,ferents. Unless otherwise stated, it is assumed, for instance, that kindergar- :n teacher&<llid nurses are female because most in fact are women.

Historiaris have obscured the contributions of women when they discuss'. . .vilization ill terms -Of "the family of man," "the history of mankind," founding fathers," a.nd so on. The cartoon in Fig. 4.2 shows how generics 'nder the female half of the human race invisible by describing our achieve- 1eni;s as if they were· those of men alone. Stephen Jay Gould deliberately tied his historical sarvey of the racist and sexist bias in certain' areas of :ience The.Mismeasure of Man (1981) in order to draw attention to.the let that European males were taken as the standard of measurement against 'hich other groups were unfavorably measured. When humanity is equated 'ith being male, women become insignificant Others.

ENGUSH-A MAN-MADE LANGUAGE?

011>11-IEY 1-fAVE WOMeN IN~

. ..,...,:s"'{JL .... -DAYS ? =- -~

FIG. 4.2. Stoneage man.

103

As I noted in chapter 1, even· neutral terms are often used in this ·gen- der-specific way, as in this example: "To make love, a dinosaur had to get his leg over. Even if he happened to be a 160 ton. brontosaurus, the fe:naie could bear his weight" (Guardian, August 29, 1987). Where gender-differ- entiated pairs of words exist, such as dog and bitch,_ the male .t~ID. can generally be taken to include· the female. As I show m the next' ch~pter, names marked with endings.such.as cess, such as lzoness and actress, a:nd other suffixes like -ette can only be female. The unmarked forms are used either generically or for males specifically. . . · .

Grammarians' arguments about the mclus1veness of words hke man and mankind have been applied to pronouns too. The assumption that the average person is male is reinforced by the use of the male pronoun. Rob_ert Louis Stevenson, for example, wrote that "an intelligent person, lookmg out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many anoilier in a hfe of heroic vigils." How do we know when generics include or exclude wo~en?

When Thomas Jefferson wrote that "all men are created equal, '~prob­ ably did not occur to him. to question whether an_yone would thmk he intended the word men generically or gender-specifically. Women at that time were not allowed to vote. By the middle of the 19th century most people in Britain and di~ United States evidently _agreed with hinl th_at man

"was equivalent to male, at least with respect to its legal mterpreta_non. As I showed in chapter 1, male suffrage in fact really meant White male suffrage at that time.

Charlotte Stopes demonstrated that 19th-century lawyers were willing to admit man as a gender-neutral term only under conditions that wc:re favorable to men. In Britain it took an Act of Parliament in 1850 to clarify

104 CHAPTER 4

the generic man and he so that "words importing the Masculine Gender shall be deemed and taken to include Females." In the following year, however, John Stuart argued for the repeal of Parliament's Abbreviation Act for fear that it inight inadvertently give women rights they should not have, such as the right to vote. My own college at Oxford recently inserted in its by-laws a statement siinilar to the Abbreviation Act to avoid a more complete reform of its sexist language. Yet declaring women's inclusion in this way does about as much to combat sexism as a sign saying "Negroes admitted" would do to combat racism (see Miller & Swift, 1991).

The case :of Susan B. Anthony, in. the vanguard of the first wave of feininism and instrumental in obtaining the vote for women in the United States, showed how the male pronoun has been used both specifically and generically· to discriminate against women. In 1872 she cast a vote to test· the use of generic he in U.S. laws defining citizenship and the right to vote. She was convicted and fined $100 on the grounds that women were ex- cluded ftom voting by a statute that read, "if any person shall knowingly vote without his having a lawful right." Anthony then argued (cited in Hill 1986):

The Use of the masculine pronouns be, bis and bim in all. the constitutions and laws; is proo£ that only men w~e meant to be included in their pro\Tisions. lt you insist on tbis version of the letter of the law, we shall insist you be consistent and accept the other horn of the dilemma, wbich would compel you to exempt women from taxation \or the suppott of the government and from penalties \or the violations of laws. There is no sbe or ber iu the tax' laws and tbis is eq_ua\l.y true of all the criminal laws. \p. 61)

Noting that the law that was being used against her as well:. marshall's warrant served on her referred to his and not her, she ' clerk of the court prefixed an s- to the he and made her out of him. She insisted that "if government officials may thus manipu pronouns to tax, fine, imprison and hang women, it is their duty.-.; change them in order to protect us in our right to vote." In anQth instance, Lavinifl Goodell was denied adinission to the bar due to a. that referred to attorneys as "he." In her appeal she drew attentio fact that an earlier section of the law contained a rider about the m gender extending to and including females, but the court denied her pe

'

PRONOUNS AND PICTURES

Linguists call Iruile terms used to include females androcentric ge . Grammarians have long insisted that everyone should get his hat uJ .'.' leaves the room is supposed to refer to both men and women, despite th.

ENGLISH-A MAN-MADE LANGUAGE? 105

of the masculine pronoun his. In informal English, of course, the alternative that uses the plural forms of the pronouns, which are not gender-specific, everybody should get their hat when they leave the room, exists, even though it has been condemned for some time as nonstandard. Grammarians.argue that the plural is ungrammatical because a singular referent or antecedent such as everyone or someone requires a singular pronoun to agree with it. However, many English speakers have seen the plural forms as more elegant replacements for masculine pronouns than using both he/him/his and she/her/hers, that is, everyone should get his or her coat when he or she leaves the room. This solution is more cumbersome for languages with grammatical gender, because both singular and plural pronouns as well as a range ofnouns and other forms would have to be repeated in both masculine and feininine forms. Consider, for instance, Spanish: Ella/el es bastante buenalbueno al tennis, She/he is quite good at tennis.

In a study of contemporary American English discourse from television interviews and talk shows, Michael Newman (1996) found that speakers used the plural forms they/them 60% of the time to refer to siµgular antecedents of indeterininate sex like person, everyone, and anyone. The male pronoininal forms he/him were used in only 25% of such cases. The use of he/him occurs with items that are stereotypically associated with males, such as lawyer and plumber. Newman also found,· however, that

. reference to women in any fashion was much less frequent than reference

. ·•,Jo ,males, confirming a trend that other investigators have found: Women . ot often the subjects of discourse.

feminists have suggested new gender-neutral singular pr~n?uns :~ch _place she and he, or combining them as slhe. French fennmst Helene '·sensed in her writing a new plural pronoun zlles (th_ey) fused from

masculine ils and feminine elles plural forms, but 1t. ~as not been · .. ed. Others such as Cameron want to practice pos1t1ve d1scr1~­ " seshe/hergenerically. I will look at some more of these mnovanve

''omen's speculative fiction in chapter 11. According to one count, proposals have been made for replacement singular pronouns m

'ut none has caught on (see Baron, 1986, ~~· 2?5-~09 for a 'gy of some of these). This should not be surpnsmg m view of the fcthe plural forms are already well established. Moreover, few 's,of the world have such a pronoun, although the Za~de hmguage :jsapparently one such and has a separat.e ~ro~o.un disnnctfromrhe ···,·ersonal pronouns used when;.no spec1£1c 1nd1vidual is ~i;it~~d~q. or

> .is unknown. At the moment English usage is very m,u,<f l!l:fllD<, tematives such as he/she, (s}h~; and he or she being· symbo\1c ,of tvalues and attitudes (see chap.10). ' . . . . ' h'•androcentric generics actually influence the way. we ,conceive of

;ties they refer to? Linguists such as Indo-Europeamst Calvert Wat- • '

106 CHAPTER 4

kins claimed that women suffered from "pronoun envy" needlessly because generics were simply a feature of grammar-moreover, a "natural" one, too. At the time Watkins made the pronouncement he was head of Har- vard's Linguistics Department. He and his colleagues wrote a letter to the student magazine in response.to a·protest in 1971 led by women at the Divinity School, who objected to the use of masculine pronouns specifically in reference to God as well as generically to human beings. Watkins and his fellow linguists dismissed the debate because it was simply a matter of markedness that the masculine forms had generic uses. His use of the term pronoun envy is, as Brawn (1995, p. 2) pointed out, "wonderfully dismis- sive" because it tries to put an end 'to the debate by declaring the premise ludicrous. To envy the generic use of the masculine pronoun is as foolish, and pointless as to envy a man his penis. This attempt to defuse the debate overlooks entirely the ideological dimension of markedness, in particular its dependence on unequal power relations for its maintenance (see also chap. 5).

Even in languages with grammatical gender, masculine forms are used generically. For example, in Russian in cases where the person referred to must .be one of a group of women (e.g., who did this?), masculine forms of pronouris and agreement markers are still used. The problem disappears in the plu~al', however; because genders are neutralized in the plural, a; they are in English too with the pronoun form they. In related Slavic languages such as Serbo-Croat there are male and female plural forms, and the male ones are used generically for referring to mixed groups.

Still, we must exercise caution because there are some Aboriginal Aus- tralian languages in which the unmarked gender is female. Unfortunately, we do. not have adequate information about the social groups in which these languages are spoken. In the Maasai language of Africa the masculine form of the pronoun is used only when it is certain a male is involved. The feminine is used either when a female is involved or when the sex of the person .involved is unknown. In the Native American language Seneca and other Iroquoian languages the feminine is used for indefinite reference to people in general. There are a few other reported cases of this type in'" non-Western languages.

For example, in Nauman, a Micronesian language spoken on the island of Nauru, even when only one woman is among a group of men, the feminine is used, although the language does not have grammatical genderf Thus, as Alois Kayser, a Christian missionary who wrote a grammar of the language, commented (1936/1993, p. 200), "even one little girl amongst. a great gathering of men (public meeting, large congregation in the Church) · will cause. them all to be referred to in the same way: i.e., women.'.' Strictly speaking, this means that certain utterances will be ambiguous in Nauman because a .statement such as these two women are in the church can refer

ENGLISH-A MAN-MADE LANGUAGE? 107

to two women or to a man and woman who are in the church. It is even possible to say these tWo women are married when referring to. }~1US~an_d and wife. Kayser (1936/1993, p. 200) concluded his observations o~ the subject by noting that "This way of speaking is strictly and ~op:ectfy for women only and used as to include inen it must be considered as a pure Nauruism." I am nbt' sure what. thfs· conunent means, but ·th~ language deserves further exaffiiriation. In Na.uruan the female member of a pair takes precedence in 'order, leading' to expressions such as Eve and Adam and Mary and Joseph.

There are also other languages where a mixed group of people is referred to with a feminine plural pronoun, but in at least one of them, the feminine form is used because the presence of even one woman in a male group is enough to contaminate it, and therefore a marked pronoun must be used. From all these examples we can conclude that grammatical categories may lead us to perceive things in certain ways, so that women are in effect contaminated by their association with fire and dangerous things in Dyirbal, as well as in English, where terms marked as female may be used to express or create negative views of women.

Despite the insistence of some granunarians on the genericness of the masculine, experiments have shown that women feel excluded when they read texts with generic he and man. When we read sentences such as Man has the capacity to adapt to his environment, we think of men, not men and women. When people are asked to make drawings to go with such texts, they tend to draw men. One study involved more than 500 high-school students who were asked to make drawings of prehistoric people based on statemenrs that described them. One group received statemenrs with generic nouns and pronouns, such as Prehistoric man left behind images of himself in his artwork. Another group was given gender-specific and gender-neutral statements such as Piehistoric people left behind images of themselves in their artwork and Prehistoric men and women left behind images of them- selves in their artwork. A higher proportion of studenrs confronted with the generic statemenrs drew male images.

Mira Ariel (1988) reported that when Israeli schoolchildren are. asked to give a name to a character referred to generically as adam (Hebrew for human), they tend to give a man's name. Only one child g~ve a female name. Similarly, Ole Togeby found that when he asked Damsh people to make drawings of a teacher, a social worker, and a worker, roughly half of the men and women drew figures that were clearly male. Only 2 7% were female aU:d 25% unisex. Men, however, drew mostly male figures ( 69%) and few unisex figures ( 6% ). Women drew more unisex figures (32%), even though they too drew mostly male figures (49%). . . .

At least two things are striking about such experimenrs. One ts that we do not seem to have strong mental images of androgyny to match -gender-

108 CHAPTER4

neutral terms. Another is the fact that even though most teachers and social workers are in fact female, the terms themselves, even though not formally marked for gender, evoke primarily male images. It is less surprising that apparently gender-neutral terms such as surgeon should evoke male mental images. I can remember hearing a number of years ago a popular story that presented a paradox for many listeners. A father and son were involved in a car crash in which_ the f;ther died. The son was taken to the hospital, where a surgeon exclarms, I can't operate on this boy because he's my son." It would be interesting to see if there are still listeners who cannot imagine the surgeon as a woman.

An even more telling experiment modeled on a 1973 court case involved a. woman accused of killing a man. The defense argued that she had shot him m self-def~se because she suspected him of trying to molest her young son. In the ongmal case, defense attorney Elizabeth Schneider successfully argued to the Supreme Court in the state of Washington that the jury may have_ been unable to consider adequately the defendant's plea of self-defense due m part to the masculine generics used in the judge's instructions to the JUry about self-defense. The judge asked the jury to consider whether "he [the person claiming self-defense] has a right to stand his ground." Schneider claimed that the male generics prevented the jury from seeing the circum- stances from the defendant's point of view.

In the experiment, a group of students were given the facts of the case along with the jndge's instructions and asked to make a decision about whether the defendant had acted in self-defense. Three versions of the j udge'_s instructions were used: the original in the masculine generic, another m which he/she, his/her were used, and a third in which feminine pronouns were used. The results showed that when people were given the masculine version of the instructions, they were less likely to accept the defendant's clarm ~f self-defense. Those who had been given the instructions with both masculine and feminine pronouns were much more likely to decide in favor of self-defense. The same result was obtained when only the feminine pronoun was used, although the effect was not as strong as when both pronouns. were used. r·

Results such as these show that the structure of language can affect thought processes. They point to the psychological cost many women ex- penence at bemg nonpersons in their own language and the damage they ~ay suffer when they are compared to a male standard on the legal system w om~n are at the mar_gins of the category of human beings. Just as whe~ l e think of a protoryp1cal bird, the chicken does not readily come to mind t is somehow less of a bird than a robin or sparrow. .

One reason why male · . r . _ _ images come to mind more readily can be seen in mgu1suc pract1:. ~en and their activities are more often talked about than are women an theirs. What is more frequently used, is more easily and

:~

ENGUSH-A MAN-MADE LANGUAGE? 109

readily accessible. A very simple indication of this imbalance in reference to women and men can be found by doing a word search for the pronouns he/she in the many computer corpora available for English and other languages. One such count in the Brown corpus of American English containing just over 1 million words yielded a total of 9,543 occurrences of he compar!!d to 2,859 of she. Generic usages do not account for the great discrepancy. Men are referred to three times as often as women (see the next chapter for frequencies on man, woman, and other words). There were some interesting differences among the different text types included in the corpus. Romance and love stories, for instance, include a greater number of occurrences of female pronouns than does science fiction. Not surprisingly, women are seldom referred to in texts with religious subject matter. .

One of the newest corpora, the British National Corpus, may provide evidence of women getting more discourse time. l did a search of be and she in a 3-million-word subcorpus, which revealed a total of 352,239 occurrences of she and 652,54 7 of he. If these rather gross statistics are indicative of changing usage over the past 30 years, it appears that men are referred to only twice as much rather than three times as much as women! Donald MacKay has estimated that Americans are exposed; to generic he a million times in a lifetime. · ; · ... · ,.

Similar evidence of a lessening gap between reference to men and \V9men has emerged from R9bert Cooper's sm_.:ey of American Engli~h, usa~e !:>~' tween 1971 and 1979 (see Cooper, 1984). The. frequency otrefeJ:ence to he and man fell from a~ound 12 occurrences per 5,000 words, to. ai:fout "4. Women's magazines shdwed the'steei>¢st decline, followed by sciencernaga- zines, with newspapers further behind, and the U.S. Congressional Record last of all. As I show in chapter 10, however, such statistics reveal only a superficial view of language reform.

MALE SUBJECTS/FEMALE OBJECTS

Until quite recently, grammar books reflected the view that the male. was. the species and female, a subspecies. In this fashion, women are defined as the negative opposites of men instead of as different but equal. Such ways of talking also seem to equate what is universal with maleness. This bias is at the crux of French feminists' claims that women as sub1ects need to change their place in discourse, as l observed in chapter 2 (see also chaps. 10 and 11).

Although linguists have generally .insisted on the basic arbitrariness of grammar, it is not just words that may be used as rhetorical resources for' creating a social reality in which women are subordinate. Gramm_aucal forms are also powerful tools in which linguistic subjects become c'\ns.ututed

10 CHAPTER 4

s social agents. Until quite recently when linguists cite examples to illustrate ' b.eir theories, more .often it is male subjects who do things and women 1ho get things done to them. Thus, it is usually John who kicks the ball, isses Mary, a1ld so on. Marie-Odile Junker (1992) has noted how formal rammatical analysis has made use of predominantly masculine imagery rith terms such as dominance, government, command, and so on, to de- :ribe syntactic patterns, relations, and constructions. In addition, Julia tanley and Susan Robbins (1976) have discussed the way in which the >-called passive voice is used to suppress the identity of the agent respon- ble for an action, for example, Many women are battered. Here the agent deleted to 4ownplay the fact that men are generally the ones who batter

•omen. Similarly, as I show in chapter 8, the passive voice is used in iscussions of rape ang sexual coercion, thus making the persons who are :sponsible invisible.

Anomalous forms in Japanese arise from the fact that certain things can e said of women, but not men. For example, it is possible to say Taroo ought a woman last night, where Taroo is a male name and the subject f the sentence. It means that Taroo paid a prostitute for sex. It is not ossible to substitute a female name such as Hanako into the same slot as le subject of the sentence, with man as object, for example, • Hanako ought a man. Similarly, one can say There is a daughter for sale in that ouse/Their daughter remained unsold, but not "There is a son for sale in >at house/Their son remained unsold. These asymmetries reflect the male .ew of women as saleable commodities and indicate the subordinate po- tion women occupy in Japanese ~ulture in relation to men (see also chap. for discussion of how advertising's presentation of women as sexual

Qjects makes use of some of these grammatical constructions in slogans). In F,rendi'the verb baiser ('to kiss') used colloquially to refer to sexual (

ttercourse enters into a different type of grammatical construction when 1e subject is male, for example, 'a man has sex with a woman' (un homme 2ise une femme) than when the subject is female, for example, 'a woman had sex with' (une femme se fait baiser). Technically speaking, the gram-

ratical difference is one of transitivity; a transitive verb requires an object > complete its meaning. The verb baiser behaves transitively when the ibject is male. When the subject is female, there is no object. Yet when le subject is male, the object is woman. This suggests the woman is passive nd the male, active. Intercourse is something done to women rather than >mething they actively participate in (see chap. 2, and Stanley & Robbins, 978). Something similar can be seen in English in the way we speak of a 1an taking a wife, but a woman being given in marriage.

Psycholinguists have known for some time that we interpret certain verb ypes in accordance with different patterns of causality. In a sentence con- aining a verb such aS like which describes an emotional state, for example,

ENGLISH-A MAN-MADE LANGUAGE? 111

Jim likes Paul, people tend to see the object of the sentence, Paul, as being responsible. In other words, the reason why Jim likes Paul is that there is something about Paul which makes Jim like hini. With other verbs describ- ing interpersonal actions such as compliment, people tend to attribute cau- sality to the subject. In a sentence such as Jane compliments Alice, people see Jane as the reason for the compliment to Alice.

In a study examining the interaction of gender with verb type, researchers found that when the object of the sentence was female, for example, Jim likes Helen, people were more likely to attribute the cause to the subject Jim, despite the verb type. Thus, a sentence subject is perceived to be more causal when the sentence object is female rather than male. The tendency for women to be discounted was especially noticeable in sentences where a female subject behaved toward a male object, for example, Helen com- pliments Jim, where we would have expected the verb type to bias causality towards the subject Helen. When a male is on the receiving end of the verb's action, he draws attention away from the female subject. When a woman acts or feels toward a man, people perceived the action as being · brouglit about because of the man. Even when the woman is the subject,

·the man is the one who gets noticed. This is the disappearing agent effect. As Virginia Woolf (1928) noted, "anonymous was a woman." ·

Alessandro Duranti (1994, p. 142) has observed how grammar is closely tied to politics. In his study of language in Western Samoa, he found that the fr~quency of certain types of grammatical patterns was correlated with the nature of the event and the political roles of its participants. Transitive utterances in Samoan typically contain a verb and an object rather than a verb and an agent. Those who used transitive utterances with agents as subjects most often were politically powerful persons, usually men with senior status in the community. Even women at home, for instance, when using transitive sentences tended to express the agent much less than men did in more formal public settings (see chap. 7 for discussion of images of "\'omen as passive in children's ·books).

SEXISM: A DELIBERATE MASTER PLAN FOR LANGUAGE?

When the first allegedly nonsexist Bible published in Britain was launched, a press release said that "the revisers have systematically changed expres' sions such as any man to anyone, but have kept the masculine, ~~--p~ci~lly for God, on the grounds that this is faithful to the original" ( Cuardlan,: October 4, 1985). This comment dra\Vs attention to the way iri v;hicli'<"!r mental imagery associated wit~. God ·is, by cultural convention, inascUJilie, at least within the Judeo~ChriStian world view. As I noted in ch3.pt~i 2,

112 CHAPTER 4

the belief that the universe is created by a male God has an impact on how we see the creativity of men and women. No wonder there are few female pronouns in religious discourse. After all, we say God made man in HIS own image! Or was it men who created God in a masculine image? Male grammarians such as James Beattie writing in the 18th century tried to argue for the inherent logic behind this.

Beings .superiour to man, although we conceive them to be of ·no sex, are spoken of as masculine in most of the modern tongues of Europe, on account of their own dignity; the male beiri.g, according to our ideas, the nobler sex. But idolatrous nations acknowledge both male and female deities; and some of them have given even to the Supreme Being a name of the feminine gender.

In chapter 3, I showed how some grammarians had argued for the natural logic behind gender classification in languages with grammatical gender.

For .millennia in other cultures, deities were depicted as female. Today most· Western religions insist that God has no gender but still rely never- theless, quite heavily on male imagery and symbols. As one theologian convinced of the gender-nuetrality of God put it when asked if she thought God was male or female, "Neither, I see him as an absolute Supreme Being." There have been some reported cases of clashes between indigenous feminine conceptions of deities and that of the conventionally masculine Christian Godin attempts to translate the Bible into non-Western langua11es; Feminists such as Mary Daly (1973) urged us to move beyond our notion of "God the Father," the brotherhood of man, and so on, but some religions still refuse to admit women to the priesthood and reject language reform. The Atlanta Presbytery made news in 1996 when it very narrowly upheld the ordination of minister Eric Swenson after he underwent male-to-female transsexual surgery (see chap. 2). .

. Generations of women have been expected 'to accept the use of brother iii t~rijs ~hat served as symbols of universal human kinship. Even Germaine Greer· '(1'971) urged woman to cooperate with one another in "the matri- archal principle of fraternity," a seeming oxymoron better served by the simple term sisterhood. In 1992, a group of Catholic bishops objected to changes in the English mass which they said would diminish the Fatherhood of God (Ostling, 1992). The proposed changes included eliminating man and male pronouns to refer to humanity as a whole, for example, Jesus Christ is the Son of Man. Oxford University Press subtitled its 1995 edition of the New Testament and Psalms "an inclusive version." This version replaces God the Father with "Father-Mother" and the Son of Man with "the Human One."

Because it is men who make the dictionaries and define meanings, they persist'ently reserve the positive semantic space for themselves and relegate

)

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ENGLISH-A MAN-MADE LANGUAGE? 113

women to a negative one. Feminists such as Julia Penelope (1990) argue that English is a language founded in elitism and White male ethnocentricity. It promotes and maintains a misogynist view of women. Ever since Eve was blamed for the loss of Paradise, men have feared and hated women.

The fact that the grammarians who created standard English and set forth its rights and wrongs were male has not gone unnotic~d !Jy 'Yoinen such as Dale Sperider' andJulio, Penelope. Fr()m the beginning, 1?:arnrnars were written priniarily by in en for .in en. A much earlier male cominentator, Elias Molee, repelled by linguistic snobbery, remarked in 1888: ·"It looks to me as if the English language were constructed by some eccentric, rich and learned bachelors who had nothing else to do but hunt up the meanings of words in dictionaries and to spell." Bailey (1991, p. 274), who cites this remark, notes parenthetically that this description applied aptly to Molee's successors, the Fowler brothers.

Penelope, in !particular, draws our attention to the expression "mother tongue" and suggests that men have held up purity as an ideal state for language as well as women. For Penelope, the connection between "proper" English and "proper" women is not a historical accident. It is one of the crucial connections in what she terms a patriarchal universe of discourse (PUD). In George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (and My Fair Lady, the popu- lar musical based on it), phonetician Henry Higgins teaches Cockney flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, to speak "properly" so that she can be a "real lady." Although the plot is conventionally interpreted to be about the British class system and its connection with accent, it is also very much about gender. Higgins makes a bet that once he has "improved" her accent, he can pass her off in the best of society.

Like many other women both before and afrer her, Doolittle submits to remodeling her social and linguistic persona according to male standards. Just as the fashion and advertising industries tell women what they must look like, advice books tell women how they should speak, or indeed whether they should speak at all (see chap. 6). Women have long been targets for elocution lessons. Deborah Cameron (1995) points out that "tinkering with your speech through such practices as elocution is _seen as a 'feminine' activity precisely because it is superficial, merely cosmetic" {p. 170). Correctness in speech has been· associated with both femininity and upper social status.

These links between linguistic purity and a person's social standing have their origins in the rise of standard English and th·e dissemination of an accent which did not betray the social or regional origin of the speaker. In 18th- and 19th-century England, elocution became a public and private pursuit. Mugglestone (1995, p. 4) says that five times as many works .on elocution appeared between 1760 and 1800 than had done so in the years before 1760. Sixpenny manuals with titles such as P's and Q's: Grammatical

114 CHAPTER 4

Hims for the Million and Poor Letter H: Its Use and Abuse under the name of the Hon. Henry H. sold thousands of copies. Phonetician Henry Sweet (1890), who supposedly provided the basis for Shaw's character Henry Higgins, described all too well the anxiety bound up with validating one's social place through accent when he said:

The Cockney dialect seems very ugly to an educated Englishman or woman because ,Pe-and still more-she-lives in a perpetual terror of being taken for a Cockney, and a perperual struggle to preserve that h which has now been lost in most of the local dialects of England, both North· and South. (pp. vi-vii)

While Sweet suggests that h-dropping was social suicide for anyone aspiring to be a gentleman or a lady, he also makes it clear how essential it was for a woman's speech to be above reproach. Figure 4.3 shows the title page of the Hon. Henry H.'s book, where a woman is caught in the act of dropping an fh/, thereby losing her claims to respectable social status.

The need for elocution in present-day Britain is evidently still ~It, as I observed when. a local newspaper in Oxford carried a story about a woman named Mrs. Fairlady who had opened the School of Speech and Social Skills (Hunter, n.d.). Although the article did not say that the school was restricted to or aimed specifically at women, it is implied when the article states that Fairlady, who is described as a "modern-day Professor 'Iggins," "is getting to grips with Eliza Doolittles of the eighties and turning them into proper little madams." Noting that she teaches "deportment, elo- cution and all-round image improvement," the article claims there is "surprising.demand" for her services. The comedic nature of these serv- ices is also commented on when the author refers to people being a "little rough at the edges" and in neecl of "polishing off." Fairlady herself is quoted as saying "In a sense what I do is rather like plastic surgery ... I like to think I am providing a necessary social service." More often than not, Fairlady says that elocution involves teaching people to mind their h's.

John Willensky's (1994) examination of a century's worth of citations in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) from 1884 to 1989 provides additional understanding of the male sources of linguistic authority that have shaped the English language from Victorian to modern times. The editors of the OED invested a select group of writers with the power to define the history and scope of the English language. James Murray's tenure as editor of the OED coincided roughly with the period that historian Eric Hobsbawm 'b.a:s called the Age of Empire (1875-1914). The OED was; in effect, the last gasp of British Imperialism. At the center of this process of national and cultural self-definition is the act of citation. The OED's creators

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116 CHAPTER 4

cjefined themselves as the White, male, property-owning center of a British Empire. The dictionary sets standards by deciding whose words get in- cluded, who gets to speak as part of the language, and who governs the words of others.

By looking at the persons and works most heavily cited, the male bias is evident in a number of respects. While women comprised just over a third (36%) of the readers who voluntarily collected citations, the majority were men. (Interestingly, 64% of these women were designated as Miss.) The Bible is at the top of the list of books cited in the OED and accounts for the placement of its translator Wydif near the top of the authors list. Shakespeare citations amount to nearly 2 % of the total and play a sup- porting role in roughly 14% of the dictionary's main entries. The top 20 authors cited in the OED is a list of famous male literary figures. The OED even contains 55 words for which the only documented source 'is Jantes Joyce, who is seen as holding a special place in the formation of the English language ..

Certainly, it was difficult for the average woman to obtain the education and skills necessary to write, let alone the time to write. Many of those who did write were not able to get their works into print-a fare that guaranteed that the OED would overlook them since it based its citations only on the printed word. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, carried on a considerable correspondence relating to her travels and public campaigning for smallpox vaccinations, but it would have been unseemly for an aristocratic lady to have sought publication. Only toward the end of the 18th century did middle-class women begin to write with the intention to publish. Even though many of these women such as George Eliot, Jane Austen, and others came to dominate and shape the development of the English novel to an extent their male contemporaries did not, they are still

. overshadowed by these men in terms of the number of citations they received in the OED.

It was no doubt due to the industry of one (Miss) Marghanita Laski that women authors received as much representation in the OED as they did. Thanks to her eclectic reading habits, which included not only literary classics such as the novels of Dickens, Eliot, and many other authors, but a~so _domestic arts such as gardening, embroidery, and so on, many more c1tatlons from women authors have made their way into the OED than might have otherwise. She was also an avid reader of crime novels, including the v:ork of Dorothy Sayers, l\gatha Christie, and Ngaio Marsh . . Nmeteenth-century novelist and children's writer Charlotte Mary Yonge

· lS the; only ".'om:m to be included iii the list of the top 20 authors whose ' . • . worh are cited. m tb.e Snl.'\l\ement to the OED. 'this is <lu.e entire\y to thel

fact that Marghanita \.aski was a founmn'E, member ot the Charlotte Yon Society. t\mon'?, the works of Yonge cited in the Supp\ement is Womank.(

ENGUSH-A MAN-MADE LANGUAGE?

a book on improving women's education and c~ea~ng a bet single women. Yonge is resp?nsible for the first atatton of th< making and for 675 other c1tatlons. . .

The Supplement to the OED included entnes for the taboo wo_rds cunt and fuck, establishing a long history of usage m male authors gomg back to the 16th century .and citing in the modern penod the w.orks of D.H. Lawrence, Samuel Beckett, and Henry Miller. While many of the ei:amples illustrate the use of the terms to denigrate women, th~ d1cttonary ignore? feminist attempts at positive redefinitions such as found m Gerrname Greer s essay (1986) "Lady love your cunt." At the same time, howev~r, the editor decided to include a note after some of the cit~tions expr;ssmg. preiudice against Jews to indicate that usages .su.ch as to 7ew down \ to drive a h'."'d bargain') indicating that these express10n.s were now considered offensive.

We can see then that the dictionary is hardly a neutral storehouse of words and their meanings. Meanings are shaped by usage and it is largely men's usage and meanings that are selected for inclusion. The OE~ managed to ignore virtually the entire body of women wnters .until qmte recently and its definitions reflect a consistent social ster~typi':g. of women. The dictionary derives part of its authority and power m defin'."g the language by the process of exclusion of texts and authors. The o!Illss_10n of women makes women's words and meanings invisible. Th_e _exclusi.on o'. women from the dictionary has prompted a variety of fe!Illmst dictionanes, some of which I will look at in chapter 10. A new proiect established at Oxford

U · "ty Press to help keep .the dictionary current has mcluded a few niversi · d · 1 di Lad women on the list of top 20 authors whose works are cite , me u ng Y Bird Johnson, Alison Lurie, and Kate Millett. .

As I will show in chapters 6 and 10, the predonnnantly ma_le .control of the codification of language in the form of grammars .and dictionanes explains why feminist activism for language reform is perceived as an attack on the moral and social order. In the next chapter I rum to some more evidence for the claim that language is man~made.

EXERCISES AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Many companies, newspapers, and publishing houses ha~e tried to adopt guidelines for nonsexist usage. How ~ons1st~nt are they.: Here are two examples I found while traveling. · ·