Language and Oppression

Barbara Stipek takes a look at women and words.

Language has been evidenced to exercise an oppressive power on groups that fall outside of the dominant culture. Women, who fall into our ironic category called “minorities”, are subject to linguistic oppression. And what makes this oppression so striking is that much of it is built into the structure of language itself. In other words, the oppression of women is grammatically correct.

One of the ways in which sexism is built into language is through the use of gender as a way to categorize words. It is important to remember that, while sex is a biological given, gender has been created by human beings. It is therefore colored by society’s attitudes and expectations.
This makes me think of my early studies of French when I first became aware of gender in language (we often don’t notice these things in our own language—that’s what’s so insidious about linguistic forms of discrimination.) We would learn lists of adjectives in the masculine form first. We would later add a feminine form, which was always longer and more cumbersome. How many times did we girls get points marked off because we left off the extra “e” that boys never had to worry about when describing themselves in the world? This “markedness” is oppressive in that, not only does it require more work on the part of the user; it also points out that women fall outside of the “standard” grammatical forms.
As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1953, “Language makes the male the basic reality and the female the “other.” Not much has changed since then.
Let us examine what is considered to be a “neutral” term in English, the word man. I decided to look it up in my American Heritage dictionary to see what I could find. The definition read as follows:

“1. An adult male as distinguished from a female. 2. Any human being, regardless of sex or age; a member of the human race, a person.”
The order of the definitions is very telling. Humankind is male, first and foremost. And how can a term “distinguish” men from women in one breath, then lump them together in the next? It is very disturbing to have a term that both includes and excludes half the world’s population. How are we supposed to know if we’re being indicated or not?

Women are kept out of the center of society by the grammatical structures available to them and by discriminatory “neutral” terms such as he and man. And the reason that the oppressive power is so strong is that the oppressed are trapped inside a linguistic web that keeps them in their place. Even to talk about their oppression requires the use of oppressive language.

When a woman speaks of her own linguistic plight, she may catch herself using “Women’s Language”. This type of language is characterized by asking more questions, using more hedges and qualifiers (kind of, sort of), using more tag questions (don’t you think?”), and using many intensifiers (really!). I do not wish to say that there is anything inherently bad or weak about Women’s Language or the use of a more polite and affirming conversational style. I simply find it interesting that women are taught forms of language that command less respect than those that men use. It’s as though, in a society that respects and admires black coats, women are given white ones.

A strict grammarian who insists that the correct use of language is not oppressive is simply denying the fact that language is filled with value judgments. We can’t look at language as a natural phenomenon that magically “appeared” nor can we look at it as sacred and unalterable. Our society invented it and our society can change it. If some of our corrections sound ungrammatical at first, then we must remember that language is a living, growing thing, and that our changes will eventually be assimilated. Everyone who follows can raise their hands.

Clearly, women’s oppression is not simply reflected in language, it is perpetuated by it and in some cases created by it. One approach to overcoming oppressive practices in our society is to become more aware of our own linguistic practices. We must question how words can include women one moment then exclude them the next. We should examine our “marked” grammatical forms and discuss their implications. And, we should realize that until our society learns to value women as different from—but equal to—men, the conversational style that we teach our daughters places them in a position of weakness and inferiority.

Further Reading
Chafety, Janet Saltzman Masculine/ Feminine or Human. (1974) F.E. Peacock Publishers, Itasca, Ill.
Kohn, Alfie, “Girl Talk, Guy Talk”. (February 1988). Psychology Today.