According to Susan Basow, in her book Gender: Stereotypes and roles. From the first moment a child begins to understand the spoken word, she or he also begins to receive messages about the way society views the sexes. Language has and still does play a major role in defining and maintaining male power over women. She believes that sexism in the English language takes three main form: ignoring, stereotyping and depreciating females.
According to Basow the most striking way that the female of the species is ignored is through the use of the masculine gender in referring to human beings in general, for example chairman , the working man and everyone should do his best . The use of the masculine pronouns as a generic term for all makes maleness appear to be the norm and femaleness the exception. Basow believes that people do if fact perceive the masculine generic to refer to predominantly males, backing up this claim with studies from numerous researches. For example Hyde (1984) asked students from first grade through to college, to make up a story about the average student in the school. Only 12% of those who read the pronoun he in the instructions told a story about a female student. When the pronoun they encountered was they only 18% told a story of a female, but when it stated he or she 42% of the stories told were about females. Basow says that this shows that the pronoun he is not sex-neutral, and that children in primary schools don t realise that when it says he the term is supposed to include women. Therefore the generic he allows many to ignore half of the population, the female half. Even the neutral pronoun they may connote mainly males as , apparently, do other gender neutral terms such as he/she , person , and adult . (Concluded from research by Gastil 1990; Hamilton 1991; Wise and Rafferty 1982) these result seem especially pertinent for male listeners who appear to have difficulty remembering there is another gender on this planet.
Henley (1989) outlines research which shows that the use of the generic he can affect a reader s comprehension, memory and career perceptions. For example when a job is described using only male pronouns, elementary and college students rated females as least able to do that job. Basow concludes that as this example shows the sex which suffers the most from the use of male pronouns are females. Although females are less likely to perceive he as solely male, most still do. Therefore, she says, the use of he is not an arbitrary custom, but a continuing statement about the social roles of women and men.
Susan Henkman in her work The Feminist Critique of Rationality has written that concepts formed from a male point of view create a male reality which renders the female invisible. She argues that although men would have women believe that the term man is generic, that it includes both the experiences of men and women, a simple statement proves this false: man has difficulty in childbirth this statement is nonsense and therefore proves that man can not be a generic term
Language also defines women by labelling what is considered to be the exception to the rule, for example lady doctor or career girl reinforcing gender stereotypes.
Trask (1995) explains that the word nurse is just one of a number of professional nouns which have become gender specific. He specifies that sailors, doctors, taxi drivers and judges are still, to a greater extent, associated as jobs for men. Nurses, models au pairs, secretaries and even prostitutes are labelled as jobs for women, and that some of these jobs are a cover for further exploitation of women; especially prostitutes and even models.
Today we have male nurses and male models but as with the terms career girl or lady doctor they seem to be the exception which proves the rule.
There are still the explicitly sex marked terms such as chairman , postman and milkman , which women, especially feminists, have argued over. As on the other hand, females have cleaning lady and tea lady , to which feminists have objected. I can see their point on this issue as the titles for women refer to labour and doing housework, implied strongly in their titles. Many feel that we are verging on the brink of older days when a woman was confined to the kitchen to take care of her husband with regard to keeping him fed and watered and clearing up after him.
Holmes points out that many words in use today reflect a view of women as a deviant, abnormal or subordinate group. For example, English morphology generally takes the unmarked male form as its base and then adds a suffix to indicate female , i.e. lion/lioness, count/countess, actor/actress, usher/usherette etc. The male form, being unchanged is indicative of the norm whilst the female form conveys a message of deviance and abnormality, even, to an extent, of lesser importance.
This morphology also helps in the deprecating of women, so says both Holmes and Basow. They both believe that the female form of certain words trivialises them i.e. poetess and authoress carry the connotations of a lack of seriousness, something poet and author doesn t do.
Basow shows that another way to deprecate women is to sexualise them. For example dame and madam have double meanings where as lord and sir do not.
Studies from Fromkin and Rodman analysing the language that has been used by men referring to women (often having sexual connotations) stretch back in history, have entered our language with no pejorative meanings but have gained them over time. They say that from the Old English huswife (housewife) came the term hussy , a contemporary derogative term. According to their original meanings, a laundress merely made beds, a spinster tended the spinning wheel, and a nurse cared for the sick, but all of these women acquired secondary duties in some households, because according to Fromkin and Rodman, all became euphemisms for a mistress or a prostitute at some point in existence.
They also point out that while a governor governs a state, a governess take care of children; a mistress is not strictly a female master and nor is a majorette a woman major. This helps to prove that the male form is that of command, power, whilst the female is trivial in comparison.
It is claimed that we can speak of unwed mothers but not unwed fathers , of a career woman but not a career man as there has arguably been no stigma for a bachelor to father a child, and men are supposed to have careers. The double standard in our language helps to keep alive the aura of female as being deviant to males.
Another way of deprecating females is to insult them. Stanley (1977) found 220 terms for a sexually promiscuous female, compared to only 22 terms for a male. (I was surprised he found that many, when I can only think of about 2.)
Animal imagery is another example where images of women seem less positive than those of men. Females are often likened to birds, i.e. chicks. Holmes illustrates this bird obsession by telling the life of a female through chicken metaphors:
The chicken metaphor tells the story of a girl s life.
In her youth she is a chick , then she marries and begins
feeling cooped up, so she goes to hen parties where she
cackles with her friends. Then she has her brood and
begins to hen-peck her husband. Finally she turns into
an old biddy .
Birds are widely regarded as feather-brained and flighty, hardly flattering. Then one must consider animal imagery of a male; wolf, stud. These both give a positive impression of male, carrying connotations of sexual prowess or wiliness.
There are more positive images of women, through use of terms such as kitten or chick, but then these are sweet but helpless pets who need looking after.
It is not just animals women are compared to but also food, which is equally as insulting. Saccharine terms such as sugar, sweetie, and honey are mainly but not exclusively used for addressing females. Less complimentary terms such as tart or crumpet are definitely female only. Terms which were originally meant as neutral or affectionate have evolved into insults for women, their meanings focusing on women as sexual object. Holmes argues that by contrast there is little food imagery referring to males only, although, as she points out, there are the negatives of veg and cabbage. (Where I come from both can be applied to girls though!)
Even the American Sign Language, says Basow, reflects gender stereotypes. For example references to men and masculine pronouns are signed around the top of the head. This part of the body is also the reference point for signs depicting intelligence and decision making. References to women and female pronouns are signed around the lower of the face, the part associated with emotion and feelings.
As previously stated, some jobs have become gender related and as Fromkin and Rodman, have stated, if someone was to say my cousin is a nurse , then the likelihood was that the cousin would be a woman. They say, however, that it is less evident why the sentence my neighbour is blond is understood as referring to a woman. Their conclusion on this issue is that physical characteristics of a women in our society assume greater importance than those of the men because women are very often exploited as sexual objects.
This is a point which is drawn upon by Basow too. She believes that women are described by their appearance, while men are not, the implied message being that looks are more important for women and also the cause of their circumstance. She says that when an newspaper runs the headline Blonde Found Murdered , the reader knows the corpse is a female, (men are rarely described solely by hair colour) and one receives the impression that her hair colour had something to do with her death. (If blondes have more fun are they also more likely to get murdered?) She also claims that the in the statement the doctor and his pert assistant it is observed that the assistant is assumed female, males do not tend to be described by appearance, especially by words such as pert.
Basow also suggests that females are defined by the group to which they are linked. For example the frequent grouping of women and children suggests a similar dependency. Women are often viewed as possessions i.e. the pioneer moved west taking their wives . This view was asserted by the faculty at Oxford University, who passed a ruling that if reference to spouses, no one was allowed to say my partner, they had to use the article the instead. I.e. The wife . Personally I think this sounds a lot more derogatory than being referred to as a possession.
Basow points out that a females place in society is reflected by the order in they are usually referred to; boys and girls , man and women . Females always come second, suggesting inferiority.
Women are predominantly referred to by relationships, says Basow: Jane Doe, wife of John Doe, and daughter of Mr and Mrs Joseph Smith When women marry they generally lose their name and take on that of their husband and are thereafter often referred to as Mrs. John Doe. (I once asked my mum why a letter was addressed to Mrs Brian Ross, instead of using her name, and she merely replied, because this is how it is! )
As Basow says, even the fact that women are referred to as either Miss or Mrs indicates marital status is more important for women than men. In fact, women who use Miss or Mrs are perceived as having lower instrumental traits such as leadership and competence, but stronger in expressive traits and are apparently more likeable than those who use Ms.
This change in the language appears to be threatening to males invested in traditional patriarchal roles. Basow gives the example of a judge in a Pittsburgh in 1988. The judge insisted upon calling a female lawyer by her husband s name,(with Mrs before it,) even though she had not changed her name and preferred the title Ms . Her co-counsel defended her actions only to find himself in contempt of court. This shows that even if women try to shrug of patriarchy oppression, there will always be someone older and more powerful there to oppose her.
Fortunately for women society is changing, trying to move away from sexism in language. In their publication An introduction to language , Fromkin and Rodman claim that there are changes in the English language which reflect the feminist movement, and the growing awareness, by both men and women that language reflects attitudes of society and reinforces stereotypes and bias. They show that the word people is increasingly replacing the word mankind , personnel instead of manpower and nurturing instead of mothering .
Basow shows that a positive sign of change is that in the 1982 edition of Roget s Thesaurus , there had been an elimination of sexists words i.e. mankind replaced by humankind
Some gender specific occupational titles have resulted in such an outcry that they have been changed, so as not to cause gender bias. Job titles which have undergone this transformation have included: fireman to fire-fighter , postman to postperson or deliverer of mail and dustbinman to refuse collector . Their are some titles which have mutated even further: first there was chairman , this changed to chairperson and now one must say he/she is the Chair . Cameraman underwent a similar transformation instead of cameraperson we have camera operator .
According to Sunderland university s language policy, if there has been some way of denoting gender through the form of a word or through a combination of words, one must choose the base form of the words; i.e. not Peter is a male nurse but Peter is a nurse . This helps to expel the reasoning that men such as Peter are the exception that proves the rule.
In order to deflect the argument that the suffix, ess , for women diminishes the seriousness of the position language policies today ask that it be dropped; i.e. women are now actors , poets , and authors as well as men.
There are, however, in our present day, argues Trask, a few problem words which we, at the moment, are unable to modify without seeming to be lacking in seriousness; words such as manhole and man-eating shark . He believes that to replace man with person would seem to suggest that they being derogatory
In the early seventies,describes Talbot, a debate took place in the letters page of the Harvard Crimson over the use of he , mankind and man as generic pronouns and nouns. It began with the linguistic faculty critising an attempt by a theology class to eradicate sexixt language from its dicussions. The faculty stated:
The fact that the masculine is the unmarked gender in English………
is simply a feature of grammar. It is unlikely to be an imediment to
change in the patterns of sexual division of labor towards which our society
wish to evolve. There really is no cause for anxiety or pronoun-envy
on the part of those seeking such changes.
They were claiming that it was merely a feature of grammar and unrelated to the issue of discrimination. There was a response from some linguistic students who posed this hypothetical situation:
In culture R the language is such that the pronouns are different according
the colour of the people involved rather than the sex… The unmarked
pronoun just happens to be the one used for white people. In addition
the coloured people just happen to be the oppressed group. Now imagine
that this oppressed group begins complaining about the use of the white
pronoun to refer to all people. Our linguists presumably then say,
Now, now there is really no cause for anxiety or pronoun-envy.
The R she explains presumably stands for racist . The implicationof this reply seems to be that instead of being a mere feature of grammar, the use of the masculine pronoun as a generis term for everyone, is actually an aspect of society s sexism.
Unfortunately, according to Talbot, the media picked up on this debate and it was ridiculed in Newsweek under the title Pronoun-envy .
Fourtunately there is a search on for a gender neutral pronoun to replace the generic he . Many researchers have suggested that they the pronoun most favoured at the moment, is not neutral and still gives the impression of males, rather than females. Trask, claims that the choice is not a straightforward one. He states that some people have gone so far as to propose a new pronoun, unmarked for gender, such as herm (a combination of her and him ) or han (borrowed from Finnish.) He does say, however, that little enthusiasm has been displayed fro these innovations as they do sound odd, but states that to the present day there has been no indication of an agreed upon solution. For the most part people try to avoid he and replace it with they . The pronoun is not the perfect solution but it is the best one we have as yet.
There has, however, been some restistance to change as pointed out by Talbot. The primary resistors have been the media. Their negative publicity over the strive for inequality in language has not helped the cause. As cited by Talbot, the British press had a field day when staff in a local supermarket changed the labels of their Gingerbread men to Gingerbread persons . The newspapers ridiculed this action, showing their ffeelings through headlines such as Gingerbread person takes the biscuit.
Talbot also states that there have been struggles within the realms of jornalism itself. The NUJ (National Union of Jornalists) printed an equality style guide . This however was met with resisitance and wasn t pushed by the NUJ for fear that they may appear to be censors.
In drawing an overall conclusion we have found that language itself is not sexist, but has been used by a male dominated society to oppress and denigrate females. Slowly but surely through a wave of feminist movements, this fact is being recognised. Steps are being taken to try and correct this and to give females a chance at being equal and not second class citizens. The more we became engrossed in this assignment the more we realised (being female) that we are being belittled by men s use of language. It is true that many women apologise for their existence (as we have found ourselves doing) when conversing in general but more especially when interacting with men. This appears to be due to a general feeling of inferiority or lack of confidence.
When society itself institutionalises such attitudes, the language reflects the bias. When everyone in society is truly created equal and treated as such there will be little concern for the asymmetries that exist in the language.