Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

5.5 Feminist changes to language
Unit 5 Language and time
Section 2 Language variation

Recent writers on the relation between language and political and social power, such as Michel Foucault (1978), stress the fact that language is both an instrument of social constraint and a means of resisting that constraint.

This is most clearly seen in recent feminist theory, where language is identified as one of the means through which patriarchal values are both maintained and resisted (for a fuller discussion of this, see Unit 8, Language and gender). Feminists such as Dale Spender (1980) draw our attention to the fact that there are many elements in language that are sexist and offend women, for example the use of ’girl’ to refer to adult females. However, because there have been many campaigns by feminists against sexist language, sexism has now changed and has become much more indirect. For example, on Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles uses many phrases that are openly sexist to his female co-presenter and to female callers to the programme, but the BBC argues that he is using these terms in a parodic and humorous way. This masking of sexism by irony and humour makes sexism much more difficult to identify and take issue with.

Jane Mills’s Womanwords (1989) is a dictionary that demonstrates the way that words associated with women often have a revealing history of meanings. For example, the word ’glamour’ once meant ’magical strength’, and was used to refer to both men and women; however, when the word began to be used for women alone it took on sexual and trivializing connotations, as in ’glamour girl’. A similar trajectory can be noted for words like ’witch’, which was once used for both men and women but started to acquire negative connotations once its usage was restricted to referring to women. It would be hard to identify a particular individual or group responsible for such changes; rather, we interpret them as occasioned by the ideological and discursive structures that make up what feminists generally call ’patriarchy’ (i.e. the economic, social and political norms within a society whose end result is that women are treated as if inferior to men).

To counter this verbal discrimination against women, some feminists have attempted to reform the language in a variety of ways. For example, feminists argue that offensive or discriminatory terms should be replaced by more neutral terms: ’chairperson’ instead of ’chairman’; ’humankind’ instead of ’mankind’; ’staff’ instead of ’manpower’ and so on. Pauwels (1998) has demonstrated just how successful this type of language reform has been and it is to be noted that many of the trivializing and discriminatory terms that feminists campaigned against in the 1980s now have an archaic feel to them or are no longer used (consider, for example, words like ’usherette’ and ’aviatrix’). However, as Deborah Cameron (1985) has noted, although it is possible to make changes in language on a small scale, getting the changes adopted more generally is not so easy. This is partly because the changes have to go through what she calls ’the gatekeepers of language’ - i.e. institutions such as the media, education, the government, lexicographers and so on, which tend to be resistant to the type of changes feminists wish to introduce. Changes that feminists wish to make may also be labelled mere ’political correctness’ by their detractors (Dunant, 1994). However, as Cameron makes clear, one of the effects of this debate about the negative connotations of gendered terms is that, within the public sphere at least, sexist terms are now largely unacceptable. In addition, those who wish to continue to use terms such as ’chairman’ for women will be viewed as making clear statements about their beliefs:

By coining alternatives to traditional usage, the radicals have effectively politicised all the terms. They have made it impossible for anyone to speak or write without appearing to take up a political position for which they can then be held accountable.

(Cameron, 1994, p. 31)

The more general point that emerges from this is that, for the most part, changes in language occur outside the conscious control of particular individuals or groups. Even when ’the gatekeepers of language’ attempt to resist or introduce change there is no guarantee that they will be successful: British and American history furnishes many examples of failed attempts to reform the language according to some arbitrarily imposed standard (see Cameron, 1995). However, as Pauwels (1998) has shown, the concerted efforts by anti-racist, feminist and gay and lesbian activists have demonstrated that pressure groups can effect change in language, though this change is often resisted and derided by other groups in society.