Innovations and Challenges: Women, Language and Sexism

Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429649349
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Innovations and Challenges: Women, Language and Sexism brings together an outstanding collection of essays from internationally recognised researchers to recontextualise some of the questions raised by feminist thinkers 40 years ago. By taking linguistically mediated violence as a central topic, this collection's main objective is to explore the different and subtle ways sexism and violence are materialised in discursive practices. In doing so, this book:

• Takes a multi-stranded investigation into the linguistic and semiotic representations of sexism in societies from an applied linguistic and semiotic perspective;
• Combines critical discourse analysis, multimodality, interactional sociolinguistics and corpus methodologies to look at language, visuals and semiotic resources in the context of consumerist culture;
• Examines the conflicted position of women and the discourses of discrimination that still exist in every strand of modern societies;
• Contextualises pervasive gender issues and reviews key gender and language topics that changed the ways we interpret interaction from the early 1970s until the present;
• Focuses on institutional discourses and the questions of how women are excluded or discriminated against in the workplace, the law and educational contexts.

Innovations and Challenges: Women, Language and Sexism revisits the initial questions posed by the first feminist linguists – where, when and how are women discriminated against and why, in postmodern societies, is there so much sexism in all realms of social life? This book is essential reading for those studying and researching gender across a wide range of disciplines.

PART I

Language, discourse and gender violence

1

WOMEN, LANGUAGE AND PUBLIC DISCOURSE

Five decades of sexism and scrutiny

Alice F. Freed

MONTCLAIR STATE UNIVERSITY, USA

Introduction

In 1973, the year that Robin Lakoff (1973) published “Language and woman’s place”, the United States was coming to terms with the tumultuous civil rights movement of the 1960s, was facing the final years of intense anti-war activity related to the unpopular war in Vietnam, and was confronting the demands of second wave feminism, or “women’s lib” as it was mockingly called. This combination of events produced a level of social upheaval not seen in the United States since before the Second World War. The Watergate scandal of the same years led to the momentous 1974 resignation of Richard Nixon (37th President of the United States). CBS’s All in the Family was the number one prime-time television programme (Top-rated United States television programs of 1973–74, 2017), a show that broached topics until then rarely heard on network television, “racism, …, homosexuality, women’s liberation, rape, …, abortion, …, the Vietnam War, menopause, and impotence” (All in the Family, 2019). It was in this social and historical context that Lakoff’s article emerged – a publication credited with forging a new field then known as “Women and Language”.

Early Women and Language research relied on introspection or limited speech samples collected from homogeneous groups of speakers; details about the speakers’ lives were seldom investigated and little interest was paid to the context in which the speech occurred. Narrow findings were repeatedly generalised to the broader population of “women” and “men” and particular attention was directed at superficial speech differences found when comparing women’s use of language to men’s; these differences were then said to confirm that these two unexamined groups of people, women and men, used language differently. Theories of male–female difference and male dominance ruled the field (Lakoff, 1975; Thorne and Henley, 1975).

By contrast, in the twenty-first century, researchers no longer view women or men as homogeneous groups but instead investigate speakers according to their relationship to class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, and community of practice. Language is examined in the specific social/institutional/geographic context in which it occurs. The focus on “sex difference” and “male dominance” has receded, the use of empirical data has replaced linguistic introspection, context and participant interaction are deemed critical (especially to qualitative research), and the study of discourse increasingly takes precedence over lexical analysis (see Holmes and Meyerhoff, 2003; Ehrlich, 2008; Ehrlich et al., 2014).

What has remained fairly constant is the consideration of how women are individually and collectively represented – how people talk to and about women – whether in face-to-face encounters, in print or broadcast media, in courtrooms and in boardrooms, on blogs, in tweets, and in Facebook posts. In a word, what continues to plague us is the persistence of sexism in language. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminists (and feminist linguists) filled volumes with discussions and suggestions for “fixing” sexist language (see, among others, Bodine, 1975; Miller and Swift, 1976; Spender, 1980; Kramarae et al., 1985; Frank and Treichler, 1989; Cameron, 1992). While some progress was made, the efforts were uneven. “How … sexist and androcentric ideas [are] encoded in language and how … such encodings produce and reproduce gendered inequalities” (Ehrlich, 2008: 14) remains a critical question (see Pauwels, 2003; Ehrlich, 2008: 14–27; Mills, 2008).

In this chapter I trace the pattern of negative sexist commentary that persists despite the otherwise positive effect that feminism has had on our lives. The chapter provides examples of successful modifications and reforms that have taken place and contrasts these with examples of prejudicial language practices that endure and continue to negatively affect women. The topics are organised to highlight examples of “success” in terms of progress towards non-biased language use juxtaposed with language that shows relatively little relief from the influence of androcentrism. Two general areas of language are examined:

1.Sexism and specific lexical or morphological form:

a.New words and occupational terms.

b.Pronominal usage: generic he and singular they.

c.Titles: Miss, Mrs and Ms.

2.Sexism and discursive practice:

a.Topic/content.

b.Interrupting and silencing.

c.Monitoring women’s speech.

“Sexism in language” thus encompasses both (1) lexical (and morphological) forms of sexism, sometimes known as overt, direct (Mills, 2008), or word-based codified sexist language (Ehrlich, 2008); and (2) language use that exemplifies covert or indirect sexist language (Mills, 2008) manifested through discursive practices and rooted in male-dominated belief systems (see Cameron’s conclusion in Chapter 2.) As I used to explain to my students, sometimes language is sexist and we can suggest changes: e.g. “She’s the best man for the job” → “She’s the best person for the job”. Sometimes language traditions and practices are sexist and we can offer improvements: e.g. “I now pronounce you man and wife” → “I now pronounce you husband and wife” → “I now pronounce you married”. But sometimes it is the ideas and attitudes that are sexist and for that we need considerably more than linguistic reform: e.g. women talk too much; women are bad drivers; women are not suited for combat. As Deborah Cameron (1992: 125) wrote, “we cannot root out prejudice … nor make sexism disappear just by exposing it … In the mouths of sexists, language [will] still be sexist.”

What is presented below illustrates that while lexical level reform has been somewhat successful, language use that contains anti-female comments and sexist beliefs (e.g. “Look at that face! Would anybody vote for that?”), offensive communicative styles (e.g. persistent interruption of women by men), and various attitudes of contempt (e.g. discounting women’s claims about sexual violence) are a common aspect of public discourse in twenty-first-century America.¹

Sexism and specific lexical or morphological form: new words and occupational terms

There have been some meaningful innovations in the area of lexical change and non-sexist language reform, many of which are modifications that feminists suggested early on. Notable among these changes are: (a) the introduction of words for “phenomena that have previously gone unnamed” (Ehrlich and King, 1994: 61); and (b) terminological reforms used for occupational roles. Some of the new terms – words that reflect a feminist perspective – are now well established in English. Prominent among these, with approximate dates of when they were coined, are: sexism (1965), rape-culture (1970s), date-(acquaintance) rape (1975), sexual harassment (1993), #Metoo (2006, 2017), and mansplaining (2010). The extent to which each of these has preserved its intended meaning has not been taken up in this chapter. (For a discussion of the earlier terms see Ehrlich and King, 1992, 1994.)

Words that name and rename professions encompass terms of several kinds: (1) male-marked terms that were used generically for men or women, designated as generic by self-appointed language authorities who claimed that man included both men or women; thus mailman, policeman, weatherman, chairman were said to refer “appropriately” to either men or women who held these positions; (2) terms that were grammatically marked for gender but where the male form of a pair carried greater prestige: actor: actress; waiter: waitress; poet: poetess; hero: heroine;² (3) terms which, while grammatically gender-neutral, were nonetheless treated as signalling “maleness” (or “femaleness”) ostensibly because of the traditional scarcity of either women (or men) in these positions: doctor, lawyer; soldier, president (or nurse, secretary, receptionist, school teacher).

Most of the proposed solutions focused on the use of “inclusive language”. Deborah Cameron (2016) points out that while inclusive language is “a reasonable strategy for countering sexism” it “tends to obscure the structural inequalities that were foregrounded in feminist analysis”. For example, the phrase “gender-based violence” wrongly suggests that men are as likely to be victims of sexual violence as women (Cameron, 2016). Nonetheless, the movement that advocated for inclusive terminology and contested the “male” reading of gender-neutral terms gained ground. The examples below highlight the successful change of at least some lexical forms. Again, whether these newer terms have entirely replaced the earlier forms is not known; in some cases, the newer and the older words appear to coexist:

policeman → police officer

fireman → fire fighter

chairman → chair³

waiter, waitress → server

airline stewardess → flight attendant

seamstress → tailor; dress maker

For the words in category (2), many women simply embrace the formerly male-marked term and call themselves actor, poet, hero, etc. For words in category (3), however, where grammatically gender-neutral terms were traditionally used to refer to men, semantic disparity between women and men (to say nothing of social and pay disparity) continues. For these words, there is no obvious lexical reform. People (and institutions) often add the word woman, used as an adjective, creating what to many is a less prestigious sub-category of the profession, thus woman doctor, woman writer, Women’s Soccer, woman scientist.⁴ The derogation is achieved through the addition of woman, where woman becomes a label of primary potency (Allport, 1954) detracting from the professional category by bringing unnecessary attention to the sex/gender of the individual(s). For this set of gender-neutral terms, when the word is only used for men, maleness remains the norm; this usage thereby simultaneously reflects and reproduces gendered stereotypes. Only a few equivalent examples exist in reverse, the most conspicuous of which may be male nurse. The resistance to using words such as doctor, scientist, etc. without gender designation appears to be related to the prestige of the position. For the most part, the terms most successfully reformed name relatively lower status positions.

Sexism and linguistic/lexical form: pronominal usage

Another significant shift away from sexist reference, also at the level of lexical form, is the change in the use of the third person generic pronoun he to the third person pronoun they. (Some people initially preferred he or she as a replacement for he.) The problem of generic he, traditionally prescribed as the appropriate referential pronoun for agreement with singular unidentified antecedents whether male or female, was raised by feminist linguists at least as far back as 1973 (see Bodine, 1975). Although speakers of English often ignored the prescription, the topic remained one of academic debate. In 1973, Lakoff expressed pessimism about our ability to bring about change in pronominal usage:

My feeling is that this area of pronominal neutralization is both less in need of changing and less open to change than many of the other disparities that have been discussed … and we s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Epigraph
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PREFACE
• PART I Language, discourse and gender violence
• PART II Sexism and institutional discourses
• Index