Sometimes on this blog I write about feminists who had interesting ideas about language before the 21st century: women like Suzette Haden Elgin, the linguist and science fiction writer who created a women’s language, Láadan, and Marie Shear, the editor and language commentator who defined feminism as “the radical notion that women are people”. I write about these women knowing that many readers won’t have heard of them; their stories illustrate how easily the work of women can fade into obscurity and be forgotten.
This post is about someone who understood that problem well: the Australian feminist Dale Spender, whose death at the age of 80 was announced last month. Spender devoted a great deal of time and energy to recovering the forgotten contributions of once well-known female thinkers and writers. She saw this as a political act: as she said in her book Women of Ideas And What Men Have Done To Them, “unless we can reconstruct our past, draw on it and transmit it to the next generation, our oppression persists”. For me Women of Ideas was the most successful of Spender’s books (not that I can claim to have read them all–she wrote or edited more than 30). But many feminists will remember her best as the author of Man Made Language. First published in 1980 and now regarded as a feminist classic, it was the book that established Spender’s reputation. It also played a significant, though complicated, part in my own development as a feminist linguist.
When Man Made Language came out I was both a student of linguistics and a politically active feminist. But those two parts of my life were completely separate. I didn’t know that anyone was doing feminist research in the subject I was studying: in the three years I’d already spent studying it none of this work had ever been mentioned. Then, one evening in 1981, someone in a local women’s group I belonged to turned up to one of our regular weekly meetings brandishing a copy of Man Made Language. “This is amazing”, she said: “we should read it and talk about it”. And it was by reading Spender’s book, not for an academic seminar but for a discussion in a women’s group, that I discovered the work of the first generation of feminist linguists, anthropologists and communication researchers.
One reason I hadn’t read it earlier was that I knew academic linguists didn’t think much of it. If they paid it any attention at all, they dismissed it as naive, ill-informed and trivial, the work of a writer who (a) was not a linguist, and (b) had an obvious political axe to grind. Though these critics spoke in the measured tones of what I’d now call “gentlemanly sexism”, it was clear to me that they were grinding axes of their own: they resented Spender both for trespassing on “their” turf and for her radical (or as they saw it, “manhating”) feminist views. Nevertheless, I deferred to their expert opinion, and felt no compulsion to read Man Made Language for myself.
When I did eventually read it, I found I agreed with some of the linguists’ criticisms. Not all of them, however. Though I wasn’t convinced by Spender’s answers, unlike the gentlemanly sexists I didn’t find her questions trivial. In fact, her book made me want to explore those questions further, and that led me to start writing what became my own first book. That book helped me to get my first academic job, and set me on a path that I would follow for the next 40 years. So, although (or indeed because) I was critical of Man Made Language, the book both inspired me and ultimately changed my life.
At the time, being young and arrogant, I didn’t give Spender the credit she deserved. I don’t mean she deserves credit for kick-starting my career (I’m not quite that self-absorbed), I mean she deserves credit for the impact Man Made Language had on a whole generation of English-speaking feminists. Since her death a number of my women friends have recalled reading it as “a lightbulb moment”: it put questions about language on the feminist agenda in a way no single book had done before and arguably none has done since. Not everyone who read it agreed with Spender’s arguments, but it challenged those who didn’t, like me, to come up with their own alternatives. A less radical, less provocative book would not have had this galvanizing effect.
So, what was Spender’s radical argument? It’s summed up in her book’s three-word title: she argues that the languages we all use were created by the dominant sex, men, and that they represent human experience from a perspective that is both male-centred (reflects men’s ways of seeing and interpreting the world) and masculist or patriarchal (assumes the superiority of men to women). In the Introduction she puts it like this:
One of our fundamental rules for making sense of our male-dominated world is – predictably – that the male represents the positive while the female, necessarily then, represents the negative. …Each day we construct the world we live in according to these man-made rules. …And one of the crucial factors in our construction of this reality is language. Language is our means of classifying and ordering the world: our means of manipulating reality. …Yet the rules for meaning, which are part of language, are not natural; they were not present in the world and merely awaiting discovery by human beings. On the contrary, they had to be invented before anything could be discovered, for without them there is no frame of reference, no order, no possibility for systematic interpretation and understanding.
I don’t dispute the point that many (if not most) languages exhibit male bias, but I’ve always had trouble with the idea that this is because men invented the “rules for meaning”. Are there, in fact, “rules for meaning”, and if there are, does it make sense to think of them as “invented”? Presumably Spender can’t have thought that the rules for meaning were decided at some all-male committee meeting thousands of years ago, but when and how are they supposed to have come into being? And how were men able to impose their rules on the entire speech community, preventing anyone who experienced the world differently (and in particular, the women who made up half the population) from using words to express their own reality?
My own view was, and still is, that no one invented the rules of meaning, and no one can control the use of language in the way Spender suggests. It’s true there are some kinds of language (most obviously, formal published writing) which can be regulated quite strictly by people with institutional authority; it’s also true that until recently that authority belonged overwhelmingly to men (or more exactly, to a privileged subset of men). Historically it was those men who wrote the dictionaries and grammar books which define “correct” usage, who created the technical vocabulary of specialized domains like science, and who controlled, as printers, publishers and editors, the most influential or prestigious channels through which writing circulated publicly. Those facts explain why male perspectives dominated public discourse for centuries. But it doesn’t follow that men control “language” or “meaning” in general: we don’t need to believe in some mysterious male power to dictate what all words will mean for every language-user in every context.
In fact, there are good reasons to reject that belief. Most of what we know about our native language(s) and the rules or conventions for using them is learned through everyday (mainly spoken) interaction which is not subject to institutional control. A lot of that learning takes place in childhood, and typically it is women and older girls who are primarily responsible for the linguistic socialization of children. And why would women or girls who spent more time talking among themselves than to men or boys (a pattern which was probably the norm in most cultures for most of history) have been unable to use language in ways that reflected their shared experience?
Another thing we don’t need to believe in is the kind of “strong” linguistic determinism Spender espoused in Man Made Language—the view that language sets limits not only on what can be said, but also on what can be thought. As she explained in the Introduction,
While at one level we may support or refute the myth of male superiority – it being a matter of political choice – at another level we are unaware of the way in which it structures our behaviour and forms some of the limits of our world.
A language which incorporates man-made semantic rules like “male is positive, female is negative” makes it impossible to conceptualize femaleness positively.
But what this line of argument always leaves unexplained is how the person making it can think outside the linguistic box they claim the rest of us are trapped in. How do we reconcile Spender’s own ability to conceptualize femaleness positively, and to assert that man-made language distorts reality, with the argument that language structures our thinking and determines what we perceive as real?
In fact Spender doesn’t argue that consistently. After making the observation I’ve just quoted about the way our everyday use of language reproduces a male view of reality, she goes on:
Some of us, however, have decided to stop. We no longer wish to give substance to the patriarchal order and its integral component, the superiority of the male. We have started to formulate different rules for classifying the world, rules that are not based on the assumption that the proper human being is a male one and that female is a negative category. We have begun to codify the meaning that woman is an autonomous category and we are beginning to make this version of the world come true.
This implies that man-made language does not, in fact, prevent women from noticing and rejecting its male bias. They can decide to stop following men’s rules and substitute their own. Far from being controlled by language, Spender is saying that women can choose to take control of it.
Is it really that simple, though? The paragraph I’ve just quoted reminds me of the famous exchange in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass where Humpty Dumpty insists (in the face of Alice’s polite scepticism) that words mean whatever he chooses them to mean. The problem with this isn’t that Humpty Dumpty can’t choose to use words in novel and unconventional ways (he can and he does): it’s that his ability to communicate through language depends on other people’s understanding of the words he uses. If he wants his interlocutors to grasp what he means, there are limits on how far he can stray from the norms of his linguistic community. He can’t just ignore what everyone else thinks a word means and unilaterally impose his own, completely different definition.
But it’s also a mistake to think that definitions are set in stone, or that conscious efforts to change them are automatically doomed to fail. The history of such efforts suggests that they’re most likely to succeed when they are linked to wider shifts in social attitudes and practices. The word marriage is an obvious recent example: where the law has changed to permit same-sex marriage that has also changed the way the word is used, making it very unlikely that its traditional meaning (“the union of a man and a woman”) will be its primary meaning for future generations–however vocally religious conservatives insist it should be. By contrast, when the organizers of the first “slutwalk” proposed to redefine a “slut” as “a woman who is in control of her own sexuality”, they were accused of being out of touch with reality: the punitive attitudes expressed by the word slut had not changed enough to make “reclaiming” it feasible or desirable.
One of the things I found frustrating about Man Made Language was its tendency to swing between the extremes of strong determinism (man-made language imposes a male view of reality on everyone) and voluntarism (we can simply “decide to stop” deferring to man-made rules). Apart from being, on the face of things, incompatible, both these views (IMO) oversimplify the way language works.
But my biggest disagreement with Spender was more basic. I don’t believe that “man (or men) made language”, and I don’t think there’s anything liberating about what that belief implies–that language does not belong to women in the same way it belongs to men, and that women will therefore find it harder than men to put their thoughts, feelings and experiences into words. Though Spender’s version of this argument is framed in a different (i.e., feminist) way, to me it still feels uncomfortably close to the popular “deficit model” which holds that women’s ways of using language are inferior to men’s.
Women are constantly told, by all kinds of self-appointed experts, that there are problems with the way they express themselves verbally. Their speech is said to be “weak” and “lacking in authority”; according to Naomi Wolf they don’t get firsts at Oxford because their written sentences aren’t bold enough. In the past male critics dismissed women’s literary writing on the grounds that its subject-matter was “trivial” and its prose style “flowery”, while linguists and lexicographers had their own version of the “man made language” story, in which men were, as Otto Jespersen put it in 1922, “the chief renovators of language”,: their use of language was creative and innovative whereas women’s was conservative and conventional. There was, Jespersen commented, “a danger of the language becoming languid and insipid if we are always to content ourselves with women’s expressions”.
These claims are based on prejudice, not evidence: they are examples of the “male positive, female negative” thinking Spender criticizes. And I’m not suggesting she herself believed women’ were inferior communicators. But unfortunately, many people–including many women–do believe that. I thought the thesis that language was made by and for men might end up just reinforcing women’s feelings of inadequacy, while distracting attention from the most significant communication problem they face–which is not the way they speak, but the way they are heard (or not heard) and judged.
But my reservations about Man Made Language put me at odds with most of the feminists I hung out with in the early 1980s. Whereas I found its arguments too sweeping, for them it was the book’s bold and uncompromising stance that made it so inspiring. Unlike previous popular treatments of language and sexism, which addressed a mainstream audience from a liberal, equal rights feminist perspective, Man Made Language spoke to grassroots activists who were more aligned with radical feminism. In those circles it was very influential: it undoubtedly started some important conversations, and for that we should be grateful to Dale Spender.
I met Spender only once, at a conference in the early noughties where we were both invited speakers. She was about to leave when we ran into each other, and was wheeling a large purple suitcase which matched her trademark purple outfit. I hadn’t actually sought her out because I thought it might be a bit awkward, but if she knew I had criticized Man Made Language she gave absolutely no sign of it: I found her open, friendly, likeable and funny.
Pondering this encounter later, I remembered a TV “debate” on Man Made Language which had pitted Spender against the linguist Randolph Quirk. He was enormously condescending, but Spender refused to be provoked or cowed; instead of trying to argue with him, she just kept repeating what she’d said in the book. Since in a debate you’re supposed to try to refute your opponent’s points, not ignore them, the result was a bit of a car crash, and at the time I found it excruciating to watch. But after meeting Spender I saw it more as a case of someone practising what she preached. She wasn’t interested in playing what she saw as a male game, or in bolstering Quirk’s sense of his own superiority by engaging seriously with his criticisms.
If I’d been in her position I’d have been impelled by my own vanity to try to win the argument. But I don’t get the impression that Dale Spender was vain. In person she didn’t expect you to defer to her status as an Uber-Famous Feminist (and I’ve met plenty of famous feminists who did). She was a tireless promoter of other women’s ideas, not only in her own writing but also as an editor of encyclopedias, book series and the journal Women’s Studies International Quarterly.
Though I disagreed with Dale Spender about some things, I admired her for her conviction, her energy, her optimism, and her commitment to preserving the words and achievements of women for the benefit of future generations. What she did for other women of ideas, I hope we, and those who follow us, will do for her.
language: a feminist guide 