Don’t keep ’em crossed: how not to get ahead in advertising

The photograph below, taken at Manchester Piccadilly station earlier this month, shows an installation commissioned by North West Cancer Research to encourage more women to get screened for cervical cancer. Which is, of course, a worthy goal; cervical cancer screening can save lives. But when I first saw this photo, what I mostly felt was rage. I was so angry, I immediately reposted it with a critical comment on Twitter/X. Evidently this struck a chord: within a couple of days my tweet had racked up 134K views and prompted numerous replies from other women who found the installation “awful”, “crass” and “disgusting”. In this post I’ll take a closer look at what the problem with it is—and why that problem is so common in women’s health campaigns.

The installation consists of five large display boards arranged in a line. Mounted on each of the middle three boards is a disembodied pair of crossed female legs. They’re like the legs you see on mannequins in the hosiery sections of department stores: long, slender, and carefully positioned for aesthetic effect. They begin at the top of the thigh and end in Barbie-style feet wearing high-heeled court shoes. They are “diverse” insofar as they represent a range of skin colours, but there is no diversity in relation to age, body-size or personal style. The imaginary woman these legs belong to is clearly young, slim, and conventionally feminine. On its own the visual element of the display could easily be mistaken for a lingerie ad: it’s far from obvious what legs have to do with cervical cancer. But the connection is spelled out in the verbal message, which is split between the two outer display boards. Both parts address the viewer directly and in the imperative: on the left, “don’t keep ‘em crossed”, and on the right, “get screened instead”.

While there are many things to object to about this installation, the thing I found so shocking that it rendered me temporarily speechless was that injunction “don’t keep ’em crossed”. It’s offensive because the crossing and uncrossing of a woman’s legs is a well-worn metaphor for sexual continence or incontinence. That’s the real reason why girls are taught that it’s “ladylike” to sit with your legs crossed (and “unladylike” to sit with them apart): while this is often presented as a matter of aesthetics or good taste, what it’s really about is modesty, in the sense of chastity. By adopting a posture that completely conceals her genital area, a woman signals that she is not available for sex.

The flipside, of course, is that the uncrossing of a woman’s legs becomes a sign that she is open to sexual propositions. When I was growing up in the 1970s people often said, about both rape and unwanted pregnancy, that all a woman had to do to prevent it was “keep her legs crossed”. This was a commonplace form of victim-blaming and slut-shaming, but it also had a flipside which might be called “prude-shaming”. The woman who did “keep ’em crossed” could be accused of denying men access because she was “uptight”, frigid and sexually repressed. Which is also what “don’t keep ‘em crossed/get screened instead” implies—that it’s uptightness that stops women from getting screened.

This sexualization of a medical procedure is offensive in its own right, but if the aim is to increase the uptake of screening it also seems strategically ill-conceived. If women are really deterred from getting smears by a prudish reluctance to open their legs, then surely it would make more sense to try to take sex out of the equation, and talk about smear tests in the same way you’d talk about any other medical procedure involving the probing of a bodily orifice. These are, after all, quite numerous: if sexual references are not a staple feature of campaigns encouraging men to get their prostates checked, why should they have any place in campaigns about cervical cancer?  

I say “campaigns”, plural, because the NHS and cancer charities have form for this. In 2021 the health app myGP ran a bizarre online campaign suggesting young women could remind their social media followers about the importance of regular smear tests by posting a picture of the type of cat (long-haired, short-haired or hairless) that best represented the current state of their pubic hair. The cat, obviously, was code for the explicitly sexualized term “pussy”. And it’s not just cervical cancer that gets this treatment. One Twitter commenter reminded me that in 2020 the Sun newspaper, which for several decades was famous for featuring a daily topless pin-up photo on page 3, ran a campaign to encourage breast self-examination whose title and slogan was “CoppaFeel!”. And in Canada a campaign to raise awareness of ovarian cancer renamed women’s ovaries “ladyballs”: its slogan was “have the ladyballs to do something about it”.

These campaigns persistently use the register of laddish banter, sometimes in combination with the visual language of pornography, in which women are reduced to their component body-parts (and often, as in this case, shown without faces, the most individualizing and emotionally expressive parts of the human body). It’s as if the designers are incapable of viewing female bodies from anything but a heterosexual male perspective, or of talking about diseases that affect thousands of women (some of whom will die from them) in anything but a laddishly jokey way. Does that not suggest an extraordinary level of obtuseness about, or indeed contempt for, women’s own experiences and feelings?

But if you’re assuming that the “don’t keep ‘em crossed” campaign must have been developed by men, I regret to tell you that you’re mistaken. The PR agency North West Cancer Research used, Influential, is led by women; a report on the website of Prolific North, a hub for digital and media professionals in the north of England, makes clear that women dreamed up those disembodied legs and came up with that repulsively rapey strapline. What were they thinking? Karen Swan, a director at Influential, explained to Prolific North that

We wanted a campaign that was playful and a bit cheeky in order to grab our audience’s attention, so the strapline “Don’t keep ‘em crossed” was perfect.  

Cara Newton, head of marketing at North West Cancer Research, agreed, saying they’d wanted a campaign whose launch would create what she described as a “real moment”.

When I first saw the installation I did have a “real moment”, of the Proustian variety: it transported me straight back to my teenage years in the 1970s, when “playful and cheeky” sexism was ubiquitous in popular culture. Some of the older women who commented on my tweet also made that connection, drawing comparisons with 1970s British favourites like the Carry On films and the Benny Hill Show. One recalled a piece of health messaging that makes Influential’s effort seem almost tasteful: when she had her first child in 1979, there was a poster in the maternity ward promoting breastfeeding with the message “Breast is best, and Dad can suck on the empties”.

Commercial advertisers in this period often used wordplay that gave their ads a sexist/misogynist subtext. Below, for instance, is an ad for the UK hosiery brand Pretty Polly in which a sexualized image of women’s legs is given a witty caption–“for girls who don’t want to wear the trousers”–that has both an innocuous reading (“for women who prefer wearing skirts”) and a sexist one (“for women who want to be dominated by men”) which is also a dig at feminists, with their presumed desire both to dominate men and to look like them. Influential’s installation is very obviously in this tradition: it uses the same combination of visual imagery (disembodied legs/high-heeled shoes) and verbal innuendo.

Back in the day, this kind of thing certainly grabbed feminists’ attention: it inspired complaints to the Advertising Standards Agency, stickering campaigns on the London Underground (“this advert degrades women”) and illegal spray painting of graffiti on street hoardings (Pretty Polly was one target for this form of activism, as seen below).  

It may be because I’m old enough to remember this that the “don’t keep ‘em crossed” campaign makes me so angry. How did we get to the point where women designing a women’s health campaign in 2023 can reinvent the wheel of 1970s sexism without apparently seeing a problem? Even if they were genuinely unaware of the connection between uncrossed legs and rape, why did they think a cancer prevention campaign needed to be, above all, “playful” and “cheeky”? Why is it still assumed that you can’t get women’s attention by addressing them as serious human beings?       

If you did want to take a more serious approach, one thing you’d need to do would be to think seriously about the reasons why many women are reluctant to be screened. Both in this campaign and in myGP’s earlier cat-themed effort, the key problem is assumed to be embarrassment, and the solution is to joke women out of it. But while embarrassment may be a factor, it’s certainly not the only problem. As many women who commented on Twitter observed, for a non-negligible subset of women the smear test is particularly daunting because of its potential to trigger memories of sexual assault and/or traumatic experiences giving birth. Women who avoid screening for trauma-related reasons are hardly going to be receptive to the “cheeky banter” approach.

Another thing that makes women hesitant is their knowledge that screening is often painful. Some Twitter commenters recalled occasions when they had said they were in pain and been ignored or told it was their own fault for not “relaxing” (the “uptightness” problem again). One woman healthcare professional who had been on both ends of the speculum described that instrument as “grim and bitey”, and wondered why more resources had not been devoted to improving its design, which has barely altered since it was invented.

In this particular case women may not have to endure the pain for much longer. Almost all cervical cancer is caused by the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), and since a vaccine against HPV became available the case-rate among women young enough to have been offered it has dropped dramatically. Recently the NHS announced that it hopes to eradicate the disease by 2040. Which will, if it happens, be very good news. But it will not solve the larger problem, which is the longstanding tendency, now well-documented by research, for medicine to take women’s pain less seriously than men’s.

Hysteroscopy, for instance, a procedure used to investigate symptoms that could indicate uterine cancer, is typically performed in NHS clinics without pain relief (other than the over-the-counter painkillers women are advised to take beforehand), though it is so painful that it is not uncommon to have to abandon the procedure midway through. Colonoscopy, by contrast, a comparable investigative procedure which is also performed on men, is usually done under sedation.

It isn’t only women’s pain that gets dismissed as trivial. NICE, the body which approves NHS treatments, recently issued guidance suggesting that women experiencing menopausal symptoms like insomnia, mood swings and brain fog should be offered cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). So, either they think the problem is in women’s minds, or else they think women should be satisfied with a treatment that helps them cope with their symptoms as opposed to one (HRT) that relieves them by targeting the cause. As one woman asked, will they also be recommending that older men with erectile dysfunction should be offered CBT rather than Viagra?  

This systemic sexism is the larger context in which health messaging for women needs to be seen. The problem with campaigns like “don’t keep ‘em crossed” isn’t just their crassness: even if the form of the message were less offensive, if its content still boils down to “stop being a prude and get a smear test” then it will still be treating women who avoid screening like irresponsible silly girls, while ignoring the evidence that many are deterred by their prior experiences of being patronized, insulted, dismissed or blamed.    

That said, there’s no getting away from the crassness—and that part of the problem could easily be fixed if the producers and commissioners of health messaging for women simply decided to stop using sexualized language and imagery. It isn’t just feminists, or women over 50, who find this inappropriate and offputting. Women may also object to it for religious or moral reasons, or because they find its humour tasteless, or just because they don’t see how it’s relevant. In Canada, some women criticized the 2016 “ladyballs” campaign for insulting their intelligence; one wondered if a campaign about testicular cancer would refer to men’s testicles as “brovaries”. Yet the marketing and PR professionals remain convinced that their “provocative” and “cheeky” approach is the right one. Why are they so wedded to the idea of sexing up cancer? Do they really know their audience, and do they actually care what it thinks? 

In that connection I find it interesting that Karen Swan’s comment, quoted above, begins with the words “we wanted a campaign that…”. By “we”, presumably, she meant the creative team at Influential. And what agencies like Influential want from a campaign isn’t always what’s most effective for the target audience. Of course they have to pay attention to the client’s brief (if they didn’t they’d find it hard to stay in business), but they also want their campaigns to be noticed and evaluated positively by their peers. And for that purpose, being provocative has its advantages: a campaign that generates controversy is also one that gets attention.  

This strategy was famously used in the so-called “bra-wars” of the 1990s, when rival bra manufacturers and their advertising agencies competed to produce more and more “daring” ads. First we had the Wonderbra “Hello, boys” campaign, which put supermodel Eva Herzigova’s breasts almost literally in the viewer’s face: the giant billboard version even prompted fears that it would cause traffic accidents by distracting male drivers. Then came Gossard’s even more provocative depiction of an underwear-clad model reclining in what appears to be a haystack over the line “Who said a woman can’t get pleasure from something soft?”. This thinly-veiled allusion to erect penises attracted so many complaints that Gossard was forced to switch to “when a firework is smouldering, stand well back”.

This change in language was forced on Gossard by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the body which regulates print and billboard advertising in Britain, and which adjudicates complaints about it from the public. But overall, their response to complaints about the bra-wars ads was surprisingly restrained. Gossard was only required to remove the “something soft” reference, while complaints about “Hello, boys” were dismissed altogether. The ASA’s adjudication said that “the copy lines invest [the model] with a particular personality and sense of humour”–or in other words, “Hello, boys” was not offensive and dehumanizing, it was just “playful and a bit cheeky”.

By contrast, a couple of ads which took a similarly playful and cheeky approach to men’s underpants, using close-ups of the model’s crotch area alongside jokey captions like “Loin King” and “Full Metal Packet”, were judged to have breached the ASA’s rules about “taste and decency”. Women’s breasts might be a legitimate subject for cheeky humour, but men’s penises were no laughing matter. Asked about this apparent double standard, an ASA spokesperson said: “The Authority reacts to prevailing standards. To some extent we live in a sexist society, and to some extent we reflect that”.

But by the mid-1990s it had also become possible for the makers of sexist ads to deploy a different argument, one that wasn’t about humour or playfulness–that using sexualized images of female bodies to sell products was not, as 1970s feminists had argued, degrading to women, but on the contrary, empowering. The women in the ads were not mere objects, they were agents; far from displaying submissiveness, they were making a statement about the power of female sexuality. The bra-wars ads might look to the uninitiated like 1970s sexism on steroids, but in fact what they represented was an “edgier”, more modern form of feminism. If you couldn’t see that a supermodel in a Wonderbra was the ultimate symbol of female empowerment, that was probably because you were a middle-aged, pearl-clutching prude.

This line went down well with the art-school/cultural studies crowd, and “Hello, boys”, in particular, is still remembered as “iconic” and “groundbreaking”. But that assessment overlooks an interesting if less well-known postscript to the bra-wars story. Both the UK companies involved, Gossard and Playtex (the makers of the Wonderbra), changed their marketing approach dramatically after realizing that the “iconic” bra-wars campaigns had done more to enhance the ad agencies’ prestige than to increase sales of the product being advertised.

In 1996, when Playtex announced that a new campaign for their Affinity range would feature the “elegant” but “accessible and clean-cut” Helena Christensen, the company’s account director at Saatchi and Saatchi explicitly related this change of direction to the controversy around Gossard’s “something soft” ad, saying “we don’t want to offend or upset women, which I think these ad campaigns do.” When a woman later became marketing director at Gossard, one of her first actions was to sack the agency that had created “something soft”, explaining, “I want to advertise to women, not men”. Even if they weren’t offended, market research showed that women were unimpressed by sexy poses and suggestive straplines. What they most wanted from a bra ad was “a good representation of what the actual bra looks like”.

Though this backlash against hypersexualized, controversy-courting bra ads was described in one report I read as a return to “the ethos of a bygone age”, in reality it was more like a return to the basic principles of marketing: if your aim is to sell more bras you should design your advertising for the people who actually buy bras. And that principle also applies to women’s health campaigns. To the professionals who design them it may seem obvious that effective advertising is “provocative” or “edgy”, and that sexualized imagery is “empowering”: those ideas are simply the water today’s creatives swim in. But if the reception of “don’t keep ‘em crossed” shows us anything, it surely shows it’s time to pull the plug.  

Many thanks to everyone who commented on my Twitter thread    

Daddy’s home

It’s a truism that all political careers end in failure. But last week the former prime minister David Cameron, a man whose career we might have thought was a textbook illustration of that principle (he resigned in 2016 after calling and then losing the referendum that led to Brexit), made an unexpected comeback. In his latest rearrangement of the deckchairs on the Tory Titanic, Rishi Sunak appointed Cameron to the position of Foreign Secretary. This didn’t please everyone in his party, but some Conservatives were delighted to learn that, in one MP’s much-quoted words, “Daddy’s home”.

That reaction was widely mocked (the word “cringe” was used a lot on social media), but for me it raised an intriguing question about the use of gendered language in politics. Who, politically speaking, is “Daddy”?  

In the past I’ve had more to say about “Mummy”, because the use of maternal labels for female politicians is a cliché of modern political discourse. The Mother is one of the traditional female archetypes (others include the Seductress and the woman warrior or “Iron Lady”) which are used in patriarchal cultures to make female authority intelligible. It’s most popular on the political Right, where it resonates with conservative ideas about women’s nature and social role, and it is often embraced by women leaders themselves. In Germany, for instance, Angela Merkel was originally given the nickname “Mutti” by her opponents, who intended it to portray her as an overbearing nag; but she was able to turn it into a more positive symbol of her motherly concern for her fellow-citizens and her determination to do what was right for them. In the most recent French presidential election, similarly, the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen softened her previous hardline image by promising to govern like a “mère de famille”. And though Margaret Thatcher’s main persona was the “Iron Lady”, she also presented herself, when it suited her, as a down-to-earth housewife and mother.

In 2016, after David Cameron resigned, the ensuing Tory leadership contest featured two women candidates, Andrea Leadsom and the eventual victor Theresa May, who were both referred to as “Mummy” in private exchanges among MPs. At a time when the Brexit referendum had divided both the party and the nation, Mummy’s appeal lay in her reputation as a firm disciplinarian: she would sort out the squabbling children and restore some much-needed order. At first glance “Daddy’s home” has a similar vibe, casting the former prime minister as a father-figure whose wise counsel will put a divided and chaotic government back on course. But despite the obvious linguistic parallel between “Daddy” and “Mummy”, politically there are important differences between them.

“Daddy” is not as “natural” a persona for a male leader as “Mummy” is for his female counterpart. Familial labels in general are less commonly used for men in politics, and when they are used the implications are not always positive. In cases where they are positive, the term of choice tends to be the more formal “father” (as with the conventional description of certain revered, and often deceased, politicians like Washington, Gandhi and Mandela as “fathers of the nation”). More familiar/ affectionate labels are liable to be seen as disrespectful, and in some cases they are overtly insulting. “Centrist Dad”, for instance, is a derisive label for middle-of-the-road male politicians who are seen as uncool and ineffectual; “magic grandpa” is a dig at elderly male radicals like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders (and indirectly at the younger activists who support them).

“Daddy” also has another set of meanings which are not so directly linked to a male politician’s politics. While writing this post I found an instructive illustration in Buzzfeed Australia, which had declared 2015 “the year of the political Daddy”. Among the men who featured in its list of political daddies were Malcolm Turnbull (at the time the prime minister of Australia) and Justin Trudeau (who had just become prime minister of Canada). Both led broadly centrist parties (centre-right in Turnbull’s case and centre-left in Trudeau’s), but that wasn’t why they qualified for the “Daddy” label. Turnbull was a daddy because, in the words of a young person whose tweet the article quoted, “he’s a silver fox with good teeth who’d take care of you. He has an i-Pad and an Apple Watch so he’s clearly got money to spare and he could buy you things”. He was a sugar-daddy, in other words. Justin Trudeau, on the other hand, was the daddy equivalent of the “yummy mummy” or the “MILF”—mature and responsible but also hot (or as Buzzfeed put it, “a fine slice of Canadian bacon”).  

Though this piece was obviously meant to be humorous, I think it still tells us something about the political connotations of “Daddy”. And what it mainly tells us, put simply, is that “Daddy” is a trivializing label. Of course you could say the same about “Mummy”, which trivializes women leaders by likening their political power to the pettier authority that mothers have over children. But “Mummy” also serves a more serious purpose: it is used to counter the still-common perception of female leadership as unnatural and female leaders as sexless viragos. “Daddy” does not have an analogous function. Male power, being the historical and cultural norm, does not need to be defended against the charge that it’s unnatural or that it makes a man less manly. On the contrary, one reason why familial labels can be used to insult or trivialize male politicians is that these terms assign men to a domain which is seen as inferior, apolitical and feminized.

In fact, as any feminist will tell you, the institution of the family is far from apolitical: it is one of the foundations of patriarchy, and historically the paterfamilias was an important archetype of male power. But the later “separation of spheres” made the home a domain in which women had control. Though theoretically they remained subordinate to the male “head of household”, in practice they were allowed and indeed expected to take charge at home so that men could devote their energies to more important tasks outside it.

The personae constructed by modern male political leaders are typically based on these public roles: the archetypes they draw on include the patriotic soldier, the inspirational preacher, the hard-headed businessman and the efficient “scientific” manager. A persona like “Daddy”, which locates a man primarily in the domestic rather than the public sphere, risks implying that a male leader is soft or lightweight, preferring the comforts of home to the challenges of public life.

You might wonder, though, if what I’ve just said is out of date. Aren’t male politicians today—including Conservatives—keen to stress their “modern man” credentials by being photographed in their kitchens, parading their families as electoral assets and taking every opportunity to present themselves as “hands-on” parents? Wasn’t Boris Johnson, the father of numerous children (though the exact number remains unconfirmed), sharply criticized for his admission that he had never changed a nappy?

My answer would be “yes and no”. It’s true that contemporary politicians are expected to demonstrate “authenticity” and “relatability” by opening their personal lives to public scrutiny, and that has made it prudent for male leaders to cultivate the image of the “family man”. David Cameron was a case in point: his wife Samantha featured prominently in his election campaigns, and he presented himself as a fully-involved, caring father (though this was slightly undermined when he accidentally left his daughter in a pub). His excruciatingly dull WebCameron channel even featured a video of him doing the washing up.

But these are still largely superficial, token gestures–as we saw during the most recent Tory leadership election, when Rishi Sunak answered a question about the greatest sacrifice he had made by saying that since becoming Chancellor he had been, he was sorry to say, “an appalling husband and father”. This was calculated to tick not only the “modern man” box, but also and more importantly the “you can count on me to focus on the job 24/7/365” box. I’m pretty sure a comparable female politician would not have underlined her dedication to public service by describing herself as “an appalling wife and mother”. “Mummy” is expected to juggle her public and domestic responsibilities: nowadays she’s allowed to talk about how difficult she finds it, but not to admit she has failed or given up. An imperfect mother may be relatable, but one who chooses to neglect her children is just cold and heartless. “Daddy”, by contrast, can be candid about his negligence so long as he presents it as a sacrifice he has had to make (and not, like Boris Johnson, as a badge of alpha-male pride).  

Another problem with the “Daddy” persona has less to do with gender per se than with the way gender intersects with age. Though a literal father can be a (post-pubescent) male of any age, metaphorically paternal labels are ageing. The “centrist Dad” is (attitudinally if not literally) middle-aged—he’s staid rather than adventurous, reliable but dull—while the sugar-daddy is middle-aged-to-old.

These associations sit uncomfortably with the increasing tendency, at least in western democracies, to favour younger men as political leaders. There’s currently an obvious exception in the USA, where it seems likely that both candidates in the next presidential election will be almost 80; but by recent standards that’s unusual. Presidents Clinton and Obama in the US, President Macron in France and Prime Ministers Blair, Cameron and Sunak in the UK were all in their early-to-mid 40s when they took office. For men this appears to be the new sweet spot, the point at which a leader is old enough to have the gravitas his role demands, but also young enough to be perceived as energetic, dynamic and “modern”. For women, on the other hand, it is difficult to appear both youthful and authoritative: if anything political “mummies” are advantaged by being older.

“Daddy’s home” as a reaction to the return of David Cameron was presumably intended to evoke the more positive associations of ageing (experience, wisdom, stability, etc); but there are obvious reasons why so many people found this ludicrous. When Cameron entered Downing Street at the age of 43 he was the youngest British prime minister for almost 200 years; when he resigned he was not quite 50, and as he returns to frontline politics after a comparatively brief absence he is still a few years shy of 60. It’s absurd to cast him as a father figure, an elder statesman returning to the fray to give a new generation the benefit of his wisdom. He isn’t much older than his Cabinet colleagues, and in the short time he’s been away he’s done nothing that would make him any wiser. Where the Blairs and Obamas of the world set up foundations and get involved in international diplomacy, he has devoted his post-prime ministerial years to writing his memoirs and shilling for dodgy financiers.

That it’s possible even to attempt to rebrand Cameron as a wise counsellor or a stabilizing influence speaks volumes about the awfulness of the last seven years. The fact that the Tories have gone through four prime ministers since 2016 makes the Cameron era seem not only more distant in time than it really is, but also, by comparison with the Johnson era or the Truss moment, less politically disastrous than it really was. It was, after all, Cameron’s misjudged referendum gamble that paved the way for the chaos that followed. Now the fire his carelessness started has run completely out of control. The idea that he’s the man to put it out and save his party from electoral oblivion is a delusion born of desperation. (What do his supporters think he’s going to put it out with, the trusty watering-can of blandness? Cringe, indeed.)  

But pondering Cameron’s less than statesmanlike record does bring to mind another aspect of “Daddy” as a cultural archetype. In cartoons and sitcoms he is often a hapless figure, well-meaning but ineffectual; he’s the bumbling fool who doesn’t realize he’s a fool because his family pretends that he’s in charge. So, perhaps Daddy really is home after all. Though not, we may devoutly hope, for long.         

Lost words and hidden histories

Among the first feminist books I ever read was Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden from History. It was one of many attempts by feminists in the 1970s to write women back into a historical record which was partial in both senses of the word–incomplete and distorted by male bias. Rowbotham notes in her preface that filling the gaps had required her to piece together scraps of information found by combing through secondary sources: women, for the most part, had lacked the means to write their own stories.

The fact that women’s own words have so often gone unrecorded, or else been lost, discarded and forgotten over time, is a problem for feminist historians generally, but it’s particularly challenging for historians of language. Nevertheless, there’s a long tradition of attempts to recover or reconstruct the hidden history of women’s words.

Some attempts to do this have focused on what are often, though not entirely accurately, described as “secret” women’s languages—distinctive varieties which, in certain times and places, were used by women among themselves and were unknown to, or concealed from, men. One interesting case (which I had never heard of before a student from India told me about it*) is Begamati zubaan (“women’s tongue”), a variety of Urdu which was used until the 20^th century in the zenanas (women’s quarters) of Muslim households across northern India. In fact it was more a lexicon than a language: its vocabulary is said to have been “earthy and colourful”, and particularly rich in endearment terms, blessings and curses. Another example is Nushu (“women’s writing”), a syllabic script developed by peasant women in Hunan Province who had no access to formal instruction in the standard, character-based Chinese writing system.

These “secret languages” were the in-group codes of socially segregated and marginalized groups: they flourished in conditions of inequality and oppression, and were lost (or more exactly, abandoned) when those conditions changed. Much of what we know about them comes (ironically) from texts written by men. That’s especially true of Begamati zubaan, for which the main sources of detailed information are male-authored scholarly and literary texts produced in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was also a man, Zhou Shuoyi, who pioneered the modern academic study of Nushu (though recent efforts to revive it have been led by women).    

But attempts to retrieve the hidden or forgotten vocabulary of women are not confined to cases where women had their own distinctive spoken or written variety. This post was inspired by two books I’ve read recently which explore, from different angles, the history of women’s words in English.

I’ll start with Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words, which was published earlier this year. Its author Jenni Nuttall points out in the introduction that “many of our current words for women’s lives and experiences are relative newcomers into English”. Her book examines the way women were represented in earlier forms of the language: in Old English (spoken during the early mediaeval period), Middle English (which developed after the Norman Conquest of 1066) and Early Modern English (the language of Shakespeare’s time, roughly the 16^th and 17^th centuries). For the reasons I’ve already mentioned, her evidence comes largely from texts written by men, but she does make use of women’s writing wherever possible.

There have been nonfiction books about “women’s words” before: examples include Jane Mills’s 1989 Womanwords, a feminist riff on the socialist critic Raymond Williams’s Keywords, and the various feminist dictionaries of the 1980s. Mother Tongue, however, takes a different approach: it’s not structured as a list of individual words (rather the chapters deal with broad themes such as the vocabulary of menstruation, sex, reproduction, care, work, violence, etc.), and AFAIK it’s the first book for non-specialists which concentrates on the immediate ancestors of modern English, looking for clues to the way women, and matters pertaining to women (from their bodies and life-cycles to their labour and their relationships), were seen and thought about by English-speakers in the past.

Though I’ve studied (and indeed taught) the history of English, there was plenty in Mother Tongue that was new to me, particularly in the chapters dealing with the female body, sex and reproduction. (Oddly enough, these were not subjects the men who taught me Old and Middle English in the 1970s were eager to discuss.)  I didn’t know that before English acquired Latin anatomical terms like vulva and vagina, the relevant body parts were often named using words like gate, wicket (i.e., small gate) or port—a metaphor which we might think is both more logical and less offensive than what’s implied by vagina, the Latin word for a sheath or scabbard. Both sexes had tits, and for a long time both could have wombs (i.e., bellies). Rather than menstruating (another Latin word), women had their courses or their flowers: the latter term may have reflected the understanding that just as plants flower before setting fruit, regular bleeding in women is a sign of fertility.

Early English speakers inherited from antiquity the belief that conception required orgasm in both partners. Orgasm “released the seed” in men, and was assumed to do the same in women, though what the female seed consisted of remained a matter of speculation. Women were not viewed as sexually passive, but as actively lustful, and—being the weaker sex—less able to control their lust than men. On that basis the 14^th century Lollards argued that nuns should not take vows of celibacy: unable to resist their urges, they would be constantly “busy knowing [having sex] with hemself”.

“With hemself” could mean either “with themselves” or “among themselves”, making it unclear whether the concern here was about masturbation or women having sex with women. Neither practice was shrouded in ignorance: while there were many things early English speakers didn’t know about women’s bodies, they did know what the clitoris was for. Nuttall cites texts whose authors mention various dialect terms denoting it, such as “the kiker in the cunt” and “hayward of corpse’s dale” (a hayward was a field overseer, so this expression figures the clitoris as the boss of women’s genital area). Jane Sharp, a midwife who wrote a book for other midwives in 1671, described it as “a little bank called a mountain of pleasure”, adding that the pleasure could be enhanced by touching the “folds and pleats” of the labia. Three hundred years later, the sex education I got in school was both less informative and more male-centred. 

But mediaeval women didn’t spend all their time having sex. The work-themed chapter of Mother Tongue illustrates the range of jobs they did: they appear in Old English texts with occupational descriptors like spinster (which would later become a general term for unmarried women, but literally means “woman who spins [wool]”), webster (weaver), combster (wool-comber), hewster (dyer), maltster (maker of malt), tæppestre (“tapster”, server of ale) and bæcestre (baker). All these terms contain the Old English feminine ending –estre or its variant –ster. Male occupational terms ended in the masculine –ere: a male server of ale was originally a tæppere, a tapper rather than a tapster. But in some cases—including tapster—the feminine form became the generic term, used for men as well as women. Later English-speakers sometimes felt the need to clarify where occupational –ster terms referred to women by giving them a newer feminine ending (from which we can deduce that –ster itself had stopped being a clear indicator of a worker’s sex). An example is the word seamstress, where the French feminine suffix –ess(e) has been tacked onto an English form (semestre) that already contains an Old English feminine suffix.    

Jenni Nuttall does not deny that mediaeval English society was deeply patriarchal, but she does want to challenge the common folk-view of women’s history as a simple narrative of progress from the unmitigated horrors of the supposed Dark Ages to the enlightenment that allegedly characterizes our own time. The story she tells through language is less about the gradual fading of sexism and misogyny than about the different forms they took at different times. It’s also about the niches women in the past were able to create for themselves, and how that sometimes enabled them to evade the most restrictive forms of patriarchal control. 

Patriarchal authority and women’s resistance to it is a central theme in the second book I want to talk about, Pip Williams’s The Dictionary of Lost Words. First published in 2020, this is not a work of linguistic scholarship but a novel—a fictionalized version of a story that’s been told numerous times in nonfiction, about the making of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The main action takes place during the compilation of the OED (which was published in instalments from the 1880s onwards: the last volume appeared in 1928), and the characters include a number of real people who worked on it, most notably its chief editor James Murray. The main protagonist Esme Nicoll, however, is a fictional creation. She learns about dictionaries as a child by accompanying her widowed lexicographer father to work in Murray’s “scriptorium” (basically a shed outside his house), and later becomes (as some of Murray’s daughters did in reality) a paid OED employee herself.  

Though the f-word is never used, Esme also becomes a feminist. She has some involvement with the women’s suffrage movement, as well as other personal experiences that make her conscious of women’s generally unjust treatment in Victorian/Edwardian England, but she is mainly interested in using her professional skills to retrieve women’s words from the obscurity to which conventional lexicography has consigned them. The material she collects for that purpose is the titular “dictionary of lost words”: eventually it will be printed (though not published) in a volume entitled Women’s Words and Their Meanings.  

The concept of “women’s words” in this novel overlaps with, but isn’t identical to, the one that informs Mother Tongue. Esme is most concerned to record words, and senses of words, used predominantly by and among women, which are left out of mainstream dictionaries because their male editors either lack access to women’s talk or else consider it too trivial or too distasteful to record. Some of the words she collects are items she finds in the OED’s reject pile. But many are words that would never reach the scriptorium because they don’t come from “reputable” printed sources. Rather they belong to the everyday speech of uneducated working-class women like the Murrays’ servant Lizzie (who provides Esme with knackered, meaning “so tired as to be fit for nothing, like a worn-out horse”) and the market trader Mabel, a former prostitute who is a prolific source of sexual terms. Esme also collects novel vocabulary items from the women she knows in the suffrage movement, including the word suffragette and the political sense of sister(hood).

Occasionally Esme succeeds in getting a meaning or a quotation into the relevant OED entry, but mostly the men are not interested. When she tries to give Oxford’s Bodleian Library a copy of Women’s Words and Their Meanings, the librarian declines her offer, saying that it’s “an interesting project, but of no scholarly importance”. To this Esme replies: “it is not for you to judge the importance of these words”. But of course, part of the point the novel makes is that our view of the English language has been shaped by the judgments of educated men on what and whose language was important. Though the makers of the OED prided themselves on their objective, evidence-based approach, they didn’t always practise what they preached (it wasn’t for want of evidence that the word lesbian did not get an OED entry until 1976); and some of their guiding principles, such as the requirement that words be attested in respectable published sources, reinforced both class and gender bias.

Pip Williams has explained that she was partly inspired to write The Dictionary of Lost Words by reading Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne, a nonfiction bestseller (later adapted into a film starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn) which tells the story of the OED through the figure of William Minor, a doctor and convicted murderer who contributed material for thousands of entries while confined to an asylum for “criminal lunatics”. Williams recalls being “left with the impression that the Dictionary was a particularly male endeavour”. “Where”, she asked herself, “are the women in this story?”

The answer (documented in detail in Lindsay Rose Russell’s academic history of women and dictionary making) is that a large number of women contributed in some way to the making of the OED, and some made very substantial contributions–they included Murray’s daughters Hilda, Elsie and Rosfrith, his co-editor A.C. Bradley’s daughter Eleanor, and Edith Thompson, a volunteer reader, sub-editor and proof-checker who becomes a major character in The Dictionary of Lost Words. Despite their experience and long service, which in some cases spanned several decades, the OED’s women were paid less than their male counterparts and received little public credit for their work. Pip Williams dramatizes this lack of recognition by having Edith Thompson write a (fictional) letter recounting the (true) story of the formal dinner which was held to celebrate the dictionary’s completion. No women were invited, but as a special concession, three of them were allowed to sit in a balcony to hear the speeches and watch the men eat.    

Dictionary-making was not always such a male endeavour. Many early English dictionaries were compiled by women (e.g. Mary Evelyn, whose 1690 Mundus Muliebris (“Women’s world”) included a “fop-dictionary” devoted to the vocabulary of fashion and cosmetics); some were not unlike the fictional Women’s Words and Their Meanings, in that they focused on “English as it was spoken among and with women” (here I’m quoting Lindsay Russell’s description of the 1694 Ladies Dictionary). The marginality of women and women’s words in the OED is another illustration of Jenni Nuttall’s point that advances in knowledge don’t always represent progress for women. As lexicography became more “scientific”–more systematic, more fact-oriented, more rigorous–it also became more male-dominated, and more masculinist in its assumptions about what did or didn’t belong in dictionaries.

The books I’ve been discussing are explicitly about the past, but we should not overlook their relevance to the present. English-speaking women are no longer confined to a “separate sphere” (or hidden away in a balcony), but there is plenty of evidence that, today as in the past, women’s words get less attention than men’s. In mixed-sex groups, both online and face-to-face, research shows that men dominate most interactions; we also know that men’s tweets, blog posts and newspaper articles get more engagement (though women’s attract more abuse), and that men’s literary writing is studied more than women’s. Meanwhile, women’s talk among themselves–whether in private or in female-dominated forums like Mumsnet–continues to be disparaged as trivial and distasteful.

In a male-dominated and sexist society we can expect women’s voices, their words and what they know about the world to be underrepresented and undervalued. But if we want things to change, one important thing we need to do is acknowledge that they haven’t changed as much as we’ve been led to believe by the standard progress narrative. In Mother Tongue and The Dictionary of Lost Words the past is another country–but it’s not a completely alien land, nor in every way inferior to our own.

* Thanks to Shayeree Chakraborty

Postscript: Jenni Nuttall, the author of Mother Tongue (and also my former colleague at Oxford University), died in January 2024. Her death is a sad loss to feminist language study; I hope many more people will read her book about women’s words, and I dedicate this post to her memory.

Is this what a feminist looks like?

It’s been an odd couple of days since Queen Elizabeth II died, and one of the oddest things about it has been the appearance of a rash of statements, news articles and opinion pieces on the question of whether the Queen was a feminist.

This hare may have been unwittingly started by the actor Olivia Colman in a statement she made back in 2019 to publicize a new season of Netflix’s royal family drama The Crown, in which she was about to play the role of Elizabeth II. She called the Queen “the ultimate feminist”, adding that “she’s the breadwinner. She’s the one on our coins and banknotes. Prince Philip has to walk behind her. She fixed cars in the second world war”. 

I’m sure Colman didn’t anticipate that these remarks would become a talking point in the aftermath of the monarch’s death three years later. Nevertheless, that’s what happened. First the Washington Post ran with “Was Queen Elizabeth II a feminist?”, then suddenly the pieces were everywhere: The Independent, The Guardian, Metro, Woman’s Hour, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, the business publication Forbes (which brought a “lean in” vibe to the proceedings by suggesting that “the queen’s commitment and dedication to her own job paved the way for other women to dedicate themselves fully to their careers”). The majority of them took the view that the Queen had indeed been a feminist, though dissenting voices included the Guardian columnist Zoe Williams and Amanda Taub in the New York Times.

I also have a view on the question itself, as will become clear, but the question I found myself asking as I scrolled through all this commentary was about words: what do these people think the word “feminist” means? Actually, my brain formulated it rather more prescriptively: “does anyone know what feminism is anymore?” This spontaneous reaction was slightly embarrassing, because I am, among other things, the author of a short introduction to feminism which is quite insistent on not being too prescriptive about the meaning of the word. For as long as feminism has existed there have been different/competing definitions of it, and massive disagreements among those who claimed to represent it. As a political movement it has always and everywhere been decentralized, a loose and shifting coalition of autonomous groups which themselves varied wildly in their mode of organization; there’s no politburo-style committee with the power to decide on or enforce a party line for everyone who uses the label “feminist”. In my book I dealt with this by proposing a very minimal working definition of a feminist as someone who believes two things: (1) that women are oppressed as women, and (2) that this can and should be changed through political action. Everything else—how you analyse the nature and the root causes of women’s oppression, what kind of change you want to see, what kind of action you think will bring it about—is up for grabs.

In theory, then, I’ve got very little interest in attempts to police the way the f-word is used—and as a linguist I have a lot of interest in observing how it actually is used, and how that varies and changes over time, as it inevitably will. But the “was the Queen a feminist” debate did make me wonder if we’re in the process of evacuating the word of both its political meaning and its history. 

As the feminist theorist Sylvia Walby has observed, feminism is now understood by many people more as a kind of personal identity than as a political project: we ask “is so-and-so a feminist?” rather than “does so-and-so do feminism?” Since we’re currently in a phase when feminism is cool rather than despised (this goes in cycles), one result is that almost any woman who isn’t actively anti-feminist is fairly likely to identify herself as a feminist. For large numbers of women who don’t “do” feminism—or any other kind of politics—that’s just a shorthand way of indicating that they subscribe to what is now a conventional, mainstream view in most parts of the world: women should be equal and free to choose their path in life, whether it be full-time parenting or running for president. (This is the kind of feminism The Onion had in mind when it marked International Women’s Day with a piece headlined “Women now empowered by anything a woman does”.)  

Despite–or rather because of—her privileged position, the Queen was not, in the mainstream feminist sense, “empowered”: she spent her life in the proverbial gilded cage, with no freedom to choose her own path, or to express political views of any kind. Commentators wanting to claim her as a feminist were therefore obliged to look for evidence of her doing or saying things which might be read as signs that she was privately sympathetic to feminist ideas. In many cases what they came up with strained credulity. For instance, many pieces cited the fact that when she married she kept the name Windsor rather than taking her husband’s name, Mountbatten, prompting him to complain that he was the only man in the country who couldn’t give his name to his children. I doubt this had anything to do with feminism: it’s far more likely to have been motivated by dynastic considerations. It also overlooks the evidence that in private she did defer to her husband. After Philip died, we were endlessly told that although he walked behind her on ceremonial occasions, when it came to family matters, he was the “undisputed master”; in public she wore the crown but at home he wore the trousers.

Another striking thing about the commentary, which is also in line with the broadening and political bleaching of the f-word’s meaning in contemporary discourse, was its tendency to uncritically equate “being a feminist” with “being a woman who occupies a position of power”, or in this case perhaps I should say “being a female figurehead”, since as a modern constitutional monarch the Queen, though influential if she chose to use her influence, had no serious political power. Having your picture on stamps and banknotes doesn’t make you powerful, it makes you a symbol; nor is it very convincing to suggest that merely having a woman in that symbolic role somehow elevates the status of women in reality (see also fertility goddesses, Marianne, the Virgin Mary, etc.)

A lot of this power and leadership stuff felt weirdly anachronistic, talking about a woman who personified an ancient and highly traditional institution in the sort of language we might associate with profiles of Silicon Valley “girlbosses”. Writers kept referring to the Queen as a “role model” for women leaders, which was particularly jarring given that the role of a hereditary monarch is only open to a tiny, pre-determined set of people, who do not have to have any ambition to fill it, nor any particular aptitude for it.   

But perhaps this is a bit more complicated than I’m suggesting. From Amanda Taub’s thoughtful piece in the New York Times I learned that in 1952 an aspiring woman politician wrote an article for the Sunday Graphic which contained these words:

If as many earnestly pray, the accession of Elizabeth II can help to remove the last shreds of prejudice against women aspiring to the highest places, then a new era for women will indeed be at hand.

Once again this glosses over the fact that hereditary monarchs do not “aspire to the highest places”, they are simply put in their predestined place when the time comes. But could it be true that a society which has accepted a queen as its figurehead (because with monarchy you get who you get) becomes more receptive to the idea of a woman leader who did have to aspire to power, and compete for it with men? This writer apparently hoped that was true, though she was not, in any other respect, a feminist. Her name, in case you haven’t already guessed, was Margaret Thatcher.

Amanda Taub also talked to a historian, Arianne Chernock, who had studied the phenomenon of the “queen crazy woman” in 1950s America. In 1953 a report on this phenomenon in the LA Times quoted a psychologist who explained that for some American women the Queen had become “a heroine who makes them feel superior to men”. Though my own feminist education has given me a strong tendency to suspect any pronouncement about women made by a psychologist in the 1950s of being sexist bullshit, I don’t find the idea that identification with a female figurehead might prompt women to imagine having power either implausible or uninteresting; all liberatory politics has to begin in the imagination.    

My own objection to the idea that the Queen was a feminist is not really about her personal views (of which we know almost nothing) or the way she conducted herself (as Amanda Taub notes, “she stuck quite rigidly to traditional gender roles in terms of her behavior, clothes and public presentation of herself as a wife and mother”). It’s more about the extraordinarily patriarchal nature—and I mean “patriarchal” in the strictest and most literal sense—of the institution she was born into and dutifully served throughout her life.  

Many commentators pointed out that she presided over the 2011 reform of the law of succession which dispensed with male primogeniture: in future Britain may have a Queen regnant who has younger brothers (though we already know it won’t happen before the death of George, son of William, son of Charles). But one thing nobody mentioned (so forgive me if I do) was that one of the primary responsibilities of any queen, regnant or consort, is to produce legitimate heirs. This is another aspect of the “gilded cage”: royal women may live in luxury, be deferred to and publicly venerated, but they are also regarded as breeding stock. Elizabeth I managed to choose to remain unmarried and childless, but it wasn’t easy for her to hold that line, and I can’t imagine a modern, figurehead-type queen being able to hold it. Feminists may not agree on much, but one thing they mostly have tended to believe is that compulsory heterosexuality, marriage and reproduction—along with the whole concept of “legitimacy”—are among the cornerstones of the patriarchal order. Royal women are living symbols of what that order means for women, and even though what they experience is the luxury version, I find it impossible not to see it, and their consent to it, as a sort of degradation. (I think some royal women, especially those who married into it, have also come to see it that way, and their response has been to look for an exit.)

When I say that the Queen was not a feminist, that’s not a criticism of her or the way she did the job: a royal woman born in 1926 was never very likely to be a feminist. Her views and her behaviour, like everyone else’s, were bound to reflect her social milieu and life-experience (which in some ways was unusually varied, but in others extraordinarily limited). In that respect I found some of the arguments against her being a feminist as off-point as the arguments in favour. For instance, some people maintained she wasn’t a feminist because she was an upper-class white lady who was comfortable with hierarchy and inequality and, at a minimum, unapologetic about British colonialism. Well, OK, she was all of that; but in that case Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union (aka the suffragettes) wasn’t a feminist either. (In her youth Pankhurst was a radical, but she became an avid nationalist, an outspoken defender of the Empire and, eventually, a Tory—while at no point renouncing her commitment to women’s rights.) This is another case of projecting a contemporary, broadened definition of feminism (as a movement to end all forms of social injustice rather than specifically a movement to advance women’s rights) onto a figure from an earlier period of history.

I’m still committed to the view that feminism is a house of many mansions: there are and always have been competing/conflicting definitions, and that hasn’t stopped feminists from getting on with whatever they saw as their work. But I’m equally committed to the view that however variously we define its goals, principles or methods, feminism is a political project: simply existing as a famous or powerful woman does not, in and of itself, make someone a feminist. We should be able to admire the achievements of non-feminist women without needing to co-opt them into a movement they never wanted to join, and we should be able to criticize the ideas or actions of feminist women, past and present, without needing to deny that they were ever feminists.      

Body language

At the girls’ grammar school I attended in the early 1970s, most of my peers’ most hated subject was Latin, which was generally considered to be super-hard, super-boring, and of no practical use whatsoever. I too found it pretty tedious, but there were several subjects I hated more, including geography, PE and, above all, domestic science. So I was content, if not exactly ecstatic, to plod on with Latin until O Level, the ancient equivalent of today’s GCSE. The school encouraged us to do this if there was a chance we might go on to university, and especially if we aspired to study medicine. Whenever we complained about the uselessness of Latin, we’d be told that ‘Latin trains the mind’, followed by ‘and you’ll need it if you want to be a doctor’.

Today’s medical students are not expected to have studied Latin, but they still need to learn a technical vocabulary which is heavily reliant on it. In anatomy, for instance, much of the standard terminology dates back to the Renaissance, when Latin was the language of learning across Europe. And sometimes, decoding medical Latin reveals that it isn’t just the language that’s ancient.

Last year the New York Times reported on the experience of Allison Draper, who as a first-year medical student came across a reference to the ‘pudendal nerve’. Not knowing the word ‘pudendal’, she consulted a dictionary of anatomy. She was shocked to learn that it derived from the Latin verb ‘pudere’, meaning ‘to be or make ashamed’, and that ‘pudendum’, a gerundive form meaning, roughly, ‘thing to be ashamed of’, was the standard anatomical term for the outer female genitalia. She decided to write a paper arguing that such terms had no place in modern medicine. Her (male) anatomy professor supported her, though he admitted that before she raised it he had never given the matter any thought.  

Another male anatomist, Bernard Moxham, had already concluded that ‘pudendum’ was a problem. To his mind it was not only sexist but also unscientific, putting moral judgment in place of description. Moxham had previously served as president of the international organisation that oversees the standard reference work on anatomical terms, Terminologia Anatomica, and he proposed that organisation’s terminology group should consider replacing ‘pudendum’ and ‘pudendal’ with more objective, descriptive alternatives.

He was surprised when this proposal met with resistance. Some members of the group maintained that the terms weren’t really sexist: they could be interpreted as referring not to the negative concept of shame but to the ‘positive’ concepts of modesty and virtue (though it’s hard to see what’s positive about locating women’s virtue in their genitals). Others warned darkly of a slippery slope: if ‘pudendum’ went, how many other traditional terms might also have to go because they were scientifically uninformative or out of tune with modern sensibilities?  Eventually the group agreed that ‘pudendum’ should be removed from Terminologia Anatomica, but ‘pudendal’, as in ‘pudendal nerve’, should stay; they were concerned that its removal might cause difficulty for colleagues in other branches of medicine. However, a pain-management specialist who regularly performs the procedure known as a ‘pudendal block’ told the Times she found its survival ‘incredible’. ‘What’, she asked, ‘does that say about the medical establishment and their attitudes to women?’ 

The story of ‘pudendum’ does say something about the sexism of medicine as an institution, but arguably it says at least as much about the culture in which medicine exists. In the 21^st century it may seem crassly offensive to label women’s genitals ‘the thing to be ashamed of’, but historically that label served the same purpose which is more often served today by using vague expressions like ‘undercarriage’ or ‘bits’. These are forms of polite avoidance, ways of not directly naming the offensive thing itself. And what’s behind that is not a specifically medical prejudice, but a far more general and culturally pervasive view of female sexuality, and the associated body-parts, as a source of shame and disgust. That view remains widespread among women themselves: surveys have found that many or most of those questioned regard terms like ‘vulva’ and ‘vagina’ as embarrassing and offensive.

But while medical terminology reflects the prejudices of the surrounding culture, the authority and prestige of medicine give its language a particular power to define the realities it speaks of—including the female body and the processes which affect it. Challenging that power, and medical authority more generally, has been an important feminist project more or less throughout the history of the movement. But as the case of ‘pudendum’ shows, it isn’t easy (even for insiders) to shift the norms of a linguistic register whose traditions are so revered and so jealously guarded. How changes happen, when they do, is a complicated question–as we see if we consider an earlier challenge to the language used by doctors about women’s bodies.    

In 1985 the UK medical journal The Lancet published a letter from a group of senior obstetricians calling on the profession to stop using the term ‘abortion’ to refer to both induced terminations of pregnancy and ‘spontaneous’ or involuntary pregnancy loss. The letter stated that in the writers’ experience, women who had experienced pregnancy loss found the use of ‘abortion’ distressing and offensive. It proposed, on ‘humanitarian grounds’, that non-induced cases should instead be called by women’s own preferred term, ‘miscarriage’.

Research has shown that ‘miscarriage’ did subsequently become more common in medical usage. But there has been some debate on the role played by the Lancet letter. Was it the letter that changed doctors’ attitudes, and thus their linguistic choices, or was a gradual shift from ‘abortion’ to ‘miscarriage’ already happening in response to external pressure? Patient-led groups and women’s health activists had established a clear preference for ‘miscarriage’ before 1985: in 1982, when a charity was set up to support affected women, its founders named it the Miscarriage Association. Might these ongoing developments, led by women outside the profession, have played a more important role than the letter in shifting the professional consensus over time?      

That question has recently been revisited in an article by the corpus linguist Beth Malory, who investigated the use of ‘abortion’ and ‘miscarriage’ in the titles of articles published in three UK medical journals (The Lancet, the British Medical Journal and the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology) between 1975 and 1995. Using a statistical modelling technique called ‘change point analysis’, which is designed to identify sudden (rather than gradual) changes in an established pattern, she found that in this case there had been a moment when the pattern abruptly changed, and there was an 85% probability that this occurred in 1986—within months of the publication of the Lancet letter. In Malory’s view this is strong evidence that the letter played a pivotal role in the shift towards ‘miscarriage’.

That doesn’t mean external pressure played no role: the letter was, by its authors’ own account, a response to the concerns expressed by patients and organisations representing them (the letter cites a survey conducted by the Miscarriage Association in which 85% of respondents opposed the then-current medical use of ‘abortion’). But it does seem likely that the effect of the letter reflected the authors’ status as eminent members of the medical profession, which enabled them to make the case for ‘miscarriage’ more authoritatively than the women they spoke for could have done. So, in this case as in the case of ‘pudendum’, the moral of the story seems to be that changing the language of medicine is not something sisters can do for themselves: they may be instrumental in preparing the ground, but ultimately they need the support of high-ranking insiders. (Who will often, as in these cases, be men.)    

Nearly 40 years have passed since the Lancet letter, but the issue it addressed hasn’t gone away. ‘Miscarriage’, once recommended as a compassionate and respectful choice, is increasingly under fire itself. And this time women are voicing their objections from a platform that didn’t exist in the 1980s.

In 2020, after the model and media personality Chrissy Teigen shared the news of her recent pregnancy loss on Instagram, the response quickly spread across social media, and then to mainstream publications like Glamour magazine, which ran an article headed ‘Women are calling for the word “miscarriage” to be banished for good’. The article reproduced a Twitter exchange in which a woman expressed her appreciation for Teigen’s use of the term ‘pregnancy loss’, observing that ‘“Miscarried” is such an awful description…it’s like you did something wrong’. Other women agreed: ‘miscarry = mishandle’, tweeted one, while another added, ‘you’re so right…it’s no wonder so many women carry feelings of shame and guilt after their loss’. Many women commented that the term ‘pregnancy loss’ was new to them, and said they planned to start using it instead of ‘miscarriage’.

This change already had some professional support. In 2011 the US journal Obstetrics and Gynecology published a paper entitled ‘Nomenclature for pregnancy outcomes: time for a change’ (note: no question-mark), which argued that new terms were needed to reflect both advances in scientific knowledge and what it called ’emotional considerations’. The authors’ own list of suggested terms contained several that included the word ‘loss’ (e.g. ‘embryonic loss’ and ‘early pregnancy loss’). ‘Pregnancy loss’ also appeared in some of the article titles in the paper’s bibliography, showing that some specialists had already adopted it.

Though it hasn’t happened yet, it wouldn’t surprise me if ‘pregnancy loss’ became the dominant term in the not-too-distant future. Personally I think it’s a good term: it’s straightforward, transparent and acknowledges what the experience means to those affected by it. But it’s still striking, as Beth Malory also comments, how fast and how far ‘miscarriage’ has fallen. The responses to Chrissy Teigen suggested that it is now widely seen as a woman-blaming term (in the words of the tweet quoted earlier, ‘miscarry = mishandle’). That isn’t just a lay view, either: in 2015 a doctor writing in the Toronto Globe & Mail argued that ‘miscarriage’ was a harmful term because the ‘mis-’ prefix leads women to believe their pregnancies have ‘gone wrong’ (when in reality it’s more likely they were never viable) and that this must be because of something they did wrong.

This argument implies that the negative associations of ‘miscarriage’ are–and always were–an integral part of its meaning. Yet if we look back to the 1980s, there is no reason to think it was perceived as negative. In those days it was championed by feminists, patient groups, charities and eventually doctors; it was presented as the term women themselves preferred. One of the advantages it was said to have over ‘abortion’ was that it didn’t carry a stigma, or make women feel they were being blamed. Evidently that’s changed during the last 40 years; but what has happened to change it?   

The short answer is that changes in word-meaning may reflect changes in the surrounding culture, and in this case I can think of two developments which might be relevant. One is the increasingly aggressive promotion of the idea that individuals are responsible for their own health, and the associated tendency to blame any problems on people’s own unhealthy choices; in the case of pregnant women, whose choices also affect their unborn children, this attitude is particularly punitive (think of all the total strangers who feel entitled to intervene if they see a pregnant woman drinking alcohol). The other is the rise in popular culture of a new ideal of perfect motherhood, embodied by celebrities and social media influencers who plot an exemplary and very public course from conception (which happens exactly as planned) through a radiantly healthy pregnancy to birth (ideally ‘natural’), after which they have no trouble bonding with the baby, and quickly shed any excess weight. For the great majority of women (maybe all of them) this ideal is unattainable, but that doesn’t stop them feeling guilty for falling short.

Of course it’s true that pregnant women in the 1980s—and for that matter the 1880s—were nagged about their health and presented with unrealistic images of motherhood; it’s also true that women who lost a pregnancy were always susceptible to feelings of shame and guilt. But I’m suggesting that the pressure on prospective mothers to be ‘perfect’ has been massively ramped up in recent decades, and that this may at least partly explain why ‘miscarriage’ has taken on more negative, judgmental or accusatory overtones. It’s a projection of our feelings about the thing onto the word that names it. And one question that might raise is whether changing the word will solve the problem.

Critics of this kind of change are fond of pointing to cases where terms which were introduced to replace a stigmatising label rapidly became pejorative themselves, necessitating a further change in the approved terminology (‘handicapped’ replaced ‘crippled’, and was replaced in its turn by ‘disabled’; ‘lunatics’ became ‘insane’ and then ‘mentally ill’). New terms are corrupted by the persistence of old attitudes, turning the project of reforming language into an endless game of whack-a-mole. My response to this is ‘yes, but…’. Changing linguistic labels may not eliminate social stigma, but that’s not an argument for sticking with terms that have become pejorative. You wouldn’t tell someone suffering from chronic headaches that they shouldn’t take a painkiller today because it won’t stop them getting another headache tomorrow. Temporary relief is still relief.

But when feminists get involved in debates about medical terminology, we should be clear about what renaming can and can’t achieve. Terms which were targets of feminist criticism in the past, like ‘hysteria’ and ‘frigidity’, may no longer appear in doctors’ diagnostic manuals, but they live on as everyday sexist insults (also, how enthusiastic are we about replacements like ‘female sexual dysfunction’, which arguably just repackage the old sexist ideas under a new, blander label?) What we’re ultimately fighting is not a war on words, but a battle against oppressive beliefs and practices. Language can play a part in that, but it isn’t the only thing we need to change.

I’m grateful to Beth Malory for sending me her article (which I hope those of you with access will read for yourselves), but she should not be held responsible for the opinions expressed in this post.

2021: mixed messages and weasel words

When I last did an annual round-up we were nearly a year into the pandemic. 2020 had been grim, but it seemed possible 2021 would bring a gradual return to something more like normal life. It didn’t: though the government in England declared ‘freedom day’ in July, as I write in late December normality still seems a long way off.

Living through this pandemic has something in common with living as a feminist. In each case you’ve always got to be prepared for some new horror, while at the same time knowing (a) that the underlying problem is the same one you’ve been shouting about forever, and (b) that the response of the people with the power to do something about it will be the same mixture of arrogance and incompetence, excuse-making and victim-blaming, which has failed on every previous occasion. Spin and disinformation will abound, and large sections of the media will amplify them.

In Britain, and particularly in England, the pandemic has been, among other bad things, an object lesson in how not to do public communication. One reason for that, though not the only one, is that the Communicator-in-Chief, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is a man who has never been renowned for his clarity, honesty, seriousness, grasp of detail or commitment to any kind of public service. It’s hard to think of anything he has said since about March 2020 (when he announced the first full lockdown by saying ‘you must stay at home’) that has not been evasive, confusing or misleading.

By the end of 2021, as evidence surfaced of Johnson and his colleagues drinking and partying while the rest of us were forbidden to socialise or even visit dying loved ones, the public’s patience began to wear thin. But the media had spent the year making excuses for ‘Boris’, if not explicitly then implicitly, by using language that echoed his own carefully cultivated image as an unruly schoolboy forever getting into ‘scrapes’, and in some cases blaming his poor decisions on the malign influence of his partner Carrie. And yes, this is about sexism. Though I don’t think feminists should idealise women leaders (which was something of a trend in 2020), at least women in positions of authority generally make some effort to look and sound like competent adults. No woman could get away with Boris Johnson’s naughty schoolkid act.

For British feminists—and many women who might not think of themselves as feminists—perhaps the galvanising horrific event of 2021 was the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard in March. There were many other killings of women by men this year (by December 18 there were 136 known cases), but this one stood out because the perpetrator was a serving officer in the Metropolitan Police, who had used both his police ID and the circumstances of the pandemic to entrap his victim (he told her he was arresting her for breaching the public health rules in force at the time). It also emerged that his predatory attitudes to women had been known to his colleagues for years, and that he had been reported more than once for exhibitionism—reports which his fellow-officers apparently did not follow up on. The case thus highlighted not only the extent to which women’s freedom is restricted by their well-founded fear of male violence, but also their inability to trust the police.

Violence against women in general is a subject on which mis- and disinformation is rife, mainly because of the constant repetition of ancient but demonstrably inaccurate and misleading stories about why it happens and who is (or is not) responsible (‘he just snapped’; ‘she rejected him and he couldn’t live without her’; ‘an isolated incident’, etc., etc). But in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder what we got from the authorities, as well as assorted experts and pundits, was gaslighting on a grand scale—a sustained attempt to persuade women that when they described the realities of their own lives they were being irrational and even ‘hysterical’.  

My most-read post of 2021 was an analysis of the discourse in which the mass outpouring of women’s anger was dismissed as an overreaction to something (the killing of a woman by a male stranger) which was, mysteriously, both an inevitable fact of life and at the same time ‘incredibly rare’. (So, maybe one or two cases a decade then? No: according to the UK Femicide Census they account for about one in every twelve cases. Applied to this year’s figures that statistic would translate to roughly one every month.) Think-pieces in the media asked why women are so afraid of men; few asked why so many men habitually behave in ways that make women fearful. And in a bravura display of missing the point, it was suggested that any lone women stopped by a male police officer could call a police station to verify that he was legit. This advice entirely ignored the reason why the question had been raised in the first place—that when Wayne Couzens stopped Sarah Everard he was not impersonating a police officer, he actually was one.  

The anger this case provoked among women gave a boost to the ongoing campaign to extend current legal provisions on hate crime to offences motivated by misogyny. For a moment it seemed as if the government would seize on this apparently popular demand, but in the event they decided to pass. I did not share some feminists’ disappointment: I’m no fan of the government (see above), but I am nevertheless a ‘misogyny hate-crime’ sceptic, for reasons I wrote about in March. Apart from my doubts about whether ‘hate’ is the right frame for most violence against women and girls, I agree with those feminists who have argued that the main problem for victims of rape, sexual assault and domestic abuse is the failure of the criminal justice system to enforce the laws we already have. One issue here is how poorly resourced the system has become after years of public spending cuts. But another is the endless excuse-making and victim-blaming complainants continue to encounter within a system that is itself institutionally sexist and misogynist.

The criminal justice system is not alone here. A number of schools responded to incidents of girls being upskirted by boys by telling the girls to wear ‘modesty shorts’ underneath their uniform skirts. Perhaps the teachers who came up with this policy weren’t aware that upskirting became a criminal offence in 2019. Or perhaps making new laws is just a futile symbolic gesture if you don’t also make efforts to tackle the attitudes which both underlie the behaviour you’re concerned about and ensure that most instances of it will continue to go unreported and/or unpunished.  

This year brought more evidence that UK schools are struggling to deal with endemic sexual harassment and rising numbers of sexual assaults, including a growing number involving children aged under 11. On this issue disinformation took another common form—using language that obscures who’s doing what to whom. The vast majority of sexual assaults recorded in schools are perpetrated by boys against girls, but the statistics which contained this information were reported in virtually all media sources using the studiedly gender-neutral (and reciprocity-implying) phrase ‘sexual abuse between children’. We do need to talk about the way early exposure to a highly sexualised popular and online culture is affecting both girls and boys—but without implying that the effects are the same for both.

There’s a lot of muddled thinking in this area, though, and in 2021 it produced some strikingly mixed messages. On one hand there were repeated expressions of concern about the effects of social media in ramping up the objectification of teenage girls and the attendant dissatisfaction many feel with their bodies. In January, for instance, a report was published which found that heavy use of social media was associated with lower levels of wellbeing and self-esteem for adolescents generally, but girls experienced a steeper decline than boys from the age of 14 (with one in three girls reporting negative feelings about their appearance). Yet in the same month a public health campaign to increase the take-up of cervical cancer screening among young women suggested they should encourage their peers to get screened by posting coded references to the state of their pubic hair (‘bushy, bare, or halfway there?’) on social media.

While objectified female bodies are hyper-visible, women’s voices continue to be silenced and disparaged. Examples that made the news in 2021 included the story of the man in charge of the Tokyo Olympics, who defended the near-absence of women in his organisation by saying that women would cause problems with their incessant talking, and a study which revisited some 40-year old findings about who speaks in US university classrooms and reported that not much had changed (men in this study talked 1.6 times as much as their female peers). My post on this topic was inspired, however, by a more positive story, about a woman whose response to being told to stop talking by a man in a Zoom meeting was swift, uncompromising and highly effective: she expelled him. I refer of course to Jackie Weaver, who became a national celebrity after a recording of the Handsforth Parish Council meeting went viral.  

In summer, reading an academic history of women’s contributions to language study before World War II made me wonder how many of the women discussed had an entry on Wikipedia. I discovered as I expected that many of them did not, but I was also shocked by the sexist and sometimes downright insulting content of the entries I did find. I also discovered a study which found that feminists’ efforts to redress Wikipedia’s well-known gender imbalance are being undermined by a persistent tendency for entries about women to be nominated for deletion because, allegedly, their subjects are not sufficiently ‘notable’.

We had a topical illustration of women’s non-notability in December, when the Sunday Times ran a piece about the data scientists who’ve become popular celebrities during the pandemic. All the individuals featured were white men. The i-Paper swiftly countered by profiling a selection of what it mockingly dubbed ‘the female “data lads”’. ‘Men’, the writer observed, ‘have indeed been at the forefront of Covid number-crunching, but because the pandemic did start a long time ago but not as far back as the Dark Ages, swathes of women have been doing it too, also amassing thousands of online followers’.

In October and November this blog took a backseat to my day-job, and I only returned to it as the end-of-year festivities approached. Not that I was feeling the seasonal goodwill: a rant about the portrayal of ‘Nana’ in Christmas ads was as festive as it got. It could have been a lot darker, though. Shortly before Christmas I stumbled across a tweet whose author had collated no fewer than four versions of a family Christmas card in which Dad, Mum and 2+ kids posed for the camera wearing Christmas jumpers or Santa hats—and in the case of Mum and the kids (or in two cases, just the daughters), a strip of duct-tape fixed firmly over their mouths. This delightful scene was captioned ‘Peace on Earth’. (In case you’re wondering, I’m not reproducing these photos because they contain degrading images of children too young to have given informed consent to their public circulation.)

When the depiction of gagged women can become a humorous Christmas meme, we are a long way from where feminists might have hoped we’d be in the third decade of the 21^st century. And this wasn’t the only point in the year when I wondered if we were going backwards. In April the death of Prince Philip unleashed a global wave of commentary so overtly patriarchal it could easily have been composed 100 years ago. Its main theme was Philip’s difficult position as a man forced to walk in his wife’s shadow—though we were repeatedly assured that in private he ‘wore the trousers’. An Italian newspaper approvingly remarked that ‘he was the only one who could tell the sovereign to shut up’.

Telling women to shut up was one of the recurring themes of this year. But so was women refusing to (be) shut up. Those who featured directly in my posts included not only Jackie Weaver, but also the women who organised and attended vigils for Sarah Everard despite attempts to stop them, and the female employees whose testimony led to the downfall of New York state Governor (and serial sexual harasser) Andrew Cuomo. In this second Plague Year, when so many women were so overburdened with extra work and worry, the fact that they continued to raise their voices was cheering, even if the events they were responding to were not. Thanks to everyone who read this blog this year, along with all the researchers whose work I made use of; let’s hope things get easier in 2022.

Unspeakable

September was an eventful month in the ongoing War of the W-Word. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) tweeted out an edited version of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s words defending a woman’s right to choose, in which the words ‘woman’, ‘she’ and ‘her’ were replaced with ‘person’, ‘they’ and ‘their’. The medical journal The Lancet published a cover informing readers that ‘Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected’. And a series of British politicians publicly tied themselves in knots about whether it’s permissible to state that ‘only women have a cervix’.

‘Bodies with vaginas’ caused particular offence, but as the science writer and editor Sue Nelson pointed out, The Lancet had taken the phrase out of context. The statement on the cover was what’s known in the trade as a ‘pull-quote’, lifted from an article discussing an exhibition about menstruation at London’s Vagina Museum. Not only did the article mention women, it did so in the very sentence the quote was taken from:

Historically the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected—for example, the paucity of understanding of endometriosis and the way women’s pain has been seen as more likely to have an emotional or psychological cause, a hangover from centuries of theorising about hysteria.

The article does connect the treatment of ‘bodies with vaginas’ to the fact that vaginas, on the whole, belong to women. But the cover obscures that through selective quotation. Sue Nelson described this as ‘deliberately provocative’, adding that it was ‘clickbait…virtue-signalling, or both’.

What is it, though, that makes ‘bodies with vaginas’ so provocative? Many critics complained that the phrase dehumanised women by referring to them as ‘bodies’, but I’m not convinced that ‘bodies’ is the problem. I don’t think The Lancet would have been deluged with complaints if its cover had called attention to the historical neglect of ‘the anatomy and physiology of women’s bodies’, or ‘female bodies’, or ‘the female body’. On the cover of a medical journal, in a sentence about anatomy and physiology (‘the study of the structure and functions of bodies’) those phrases would not have seemed out of place.

In my view the provocation had less to do with the words The Lancet did use than with the word it conspicuously avoided. Whatever else they communicate, expressions like ‘bodies with vaginas’ (see also ‘menstruators’, ‘pregnant people’, ‘anyone who has a cervix’) signal that the speaker or writer has made a conscious decision not to use the word ‘women’. Particularly when it’s repeated across contexts and over time, this intentional avoidance implies that ‘women’ is taboo: it belongs to the category of words whose offensiveness makes them ‘dirty’ and publicly unspeakable.    

At this point you might be thinking: but this isn’t about avoidance, it’s about inclusion. It’s a way of acknowledging that some individuals who have vaginas/periods/abortions do not identify as women, but rather as trans men or nonbinary people. Is this not the same argument 1970s feminists made when they objected to the pseudo-generic use of masculine terms like ‘chairman’? I agree that there are parallels; but there are also, if you look closer, differences.     

1970s feminists looking for alternatives to ‘he/man’ language had a number of strategies at their disposal. One of these was ‘doubling’, conjoining terms with ‘and’, as in the phrase ‘servicemen and women’, now routinely used by politicians paying tribute to the armed forces. Feminists don’t complain about the continuing presence of ‘men’, who are still the majority of those who serve. But when the problem is the word ‘women’, and the issue is including people with other gender identities, there’s a tendency to shy away from the ‘add on’ approach (e.g. ‘we provide advice and support to pregnant women, trans men and nonbinary people’). The preferred strategy is to substitute a word or phrase that does not contain the word ‘women’—even if the result is bizarre (‘bodies with vaginas’), circumlocutory (‘anyone who has a cervix’) or unclear (e.g. the ACLU’s use of ‘person/people’ in a context where the reference is not to all people but specifically to those who can become pregnant). If you’re just looking for ways of referring to a category which includes but is not limited to women, why is it so important to avoid the word entirely?  

Another piece of evidence that we are dealing with avoidance is that the substitution rule only applies to ‘women’. As critics of the Lancet cover pointed out, a few days earlier the journal had tweeted something about prostate cancer which referred to those affected by the disease as ‘men’. If inclusiveness were the sole concern, the same considerations should apply to prostate cancer as to cervical cancer. In both cases, some patients in need of screening or treatment may identify as trans or nonbinary. But texts about cancers which only affect male bodies do not talk about ‘people with prostates’ or ‘bodies with testicles’. That can’t be because ‘men’ is more inclusive than ‘women’; the difference is that ‘men’ is not taboo.      

The English word ‘taboo’ means a kind of avoidance which reflects our notions of polite or socially appropriate behaviour. It covers such injunctions as not swearing in certain contexts (in front of your grandparents, or at a job interview), and not speaking plainly about certain subjects (e.g. death). The word ‘woman’ was once considered impolite (as a child I was taught to call say ‘lady)’, and avoiding it to be inclusive is also, to some extent, about politeness—being sensitive to others’ feelings and trying not to offend or upset them. But some aspects of the way this avoidance plays out might remind us of taboo in the more technical, anthropological sense.

The anthropological use of ‘taboo’ reflects the way it was observed to work in the Polynesian societies which originally gave English the word. In those societies, ‘tabu’ (or ‘tapu’ or ‘kapu’) is connected to the concept of ‘mana’, a form of power which all things are believed to possess, and which is dangerous if not correctly channelled. The danger is managed through the observance of ritual prohibitions, like not eating certain foods, or not bringing objects that serve one purpose into a space reserved for another, or not uttering the names of gods, rulers, or the recently deceased. Taboo-breaking is understood to be both dangerous and shameful: offenders may be shunned, and in extreme cases even killed.      

The avoidance of ‘women’ among contemporary English-speakers is not motivated by fear of supernatural forces, but it does sometimes seem to be rooted in another kind of fear—the fear that if you don’t observe the rules you will be publicly shamed and ostracised. When politicians were asked about ‘only women have a cervix’, it was striking how many of them could not explain why, in the Labour leader Keir Starmer’s words, ‘it is something that should not be said’. Some of their responses were like the answer James Cook got when he asked why it was forbidden for Tongan men and women to eat together: ‘it is our custom’, they told him, ‘and the custom is right’. A taboo does not require an explanation.     

Even in modern western societies, linguistic taboos retain an element of the ancient belief in word-magic. An obvious example is swearing, where the effect depends on harnessing the power attached to a specific word: if you substitute a synonym (e.g. say ‘copulate off’ rather than ‘fuck off’) the effect is completely lost. And quite similar ideas about the potency of certain words inform some common recommendations for making language more inclusive.

The psychologist Carol Tavris drew attention to this phenomenon in a piece about some new guidelines produced by the University of California at Irvine (UCI).  Noting that the guidelines recommended avoiding ‘hearing impaired’ and replacing it with ‘hard of hearing’, she wondered why one was considered preferable to the other. The answer is that guidelines often proscribe terms that include the word ‘impaired’ on the grounds that it is negative and therefore stigmatising. But is ‘hard of hearing’ any less negative just because it doesn’t contain ‘impaired’? (One piece of evidence which might suggest otherwise is the existence of the joke-expression ‘hard of thinking’, meaning ‘stupid’.)

Even if they’re not efficacious, we might think these avoidance-based rules are harmless. But as Tavris says, for the average language-user, who is not steeped in the discourse of diversity, equality and inclusion, they make talking about certain issues into what can easily appear to be a minefield. They also create a gap between the approved language of inclusion and the everyday language used by most people most of the time. The mismatch is apparent in another of UCI’s recommendations—to avoid the phrase ‘homeless people’ and substitute ‘people experiencing homelessness’. If most ordinary English-speakers don’t follow this advice, is that because they don’t believe homeless people are people? Or are they just reluctant to use such wordy, convoluted jargon? Maybe they think ‘people experiencing homelessness’ is a patronising euphemism—like when doctors ask if you’re ‘experiencing discomfort’ when you’re actually in excruciating pain.   

Disregarding the views of ordinary language-users is a mistake language reformers have made repeatedly. When the ACLU substituted ‘person’ for ‘woman’ in its edited quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, many objections took the form of mockery—repeating the same substitution in a context where it was clearly absurd, like ‘When a man loves a person’, or ‘feminism is the radical notion that persons are people’. Something similar happened in Britain after the Sex Discrimination Act made it illegal to use gender-specific terms in job advertisements. With the many jobs whose title had traditionally contained ‘-man’ there were two options: you could either use paired terms like ‘servicemen and women’, or find a gender-neutral variant to cover both. One result was a crop of new compounds like ‘chairperson’, ‘salesperson’ and ‘spokesperson’. Another was an endless stream of jokes about ‘personholes’, ‘personagers’ and whether in future diners would have to ask the ‘waitperson’ for the ‘people-u’.

To begin with this looked like a predictable backlash which would die down as the new terms became familiar. But there were other problems with -person. One was our old friend ‘the illusion of inclusion‘. Outside job ads, person-terms were frequently used not as generic substitutes for ‘man’, but as euphemisms for ‘woman’. Women were ‘chairpersons’, while men continued to be ‘chairmen’. It also became evident that replacing ‘man’ with ‘person’ often produced real terms that sounded like jokes. Soon after the law came into force I got a job in a local hospital, where my wage-slip informed me I was a ‘laundrywoman’. I found that term archaic, but on reflection I could see why it hadn’t been replaced with the ludicrous-sounding ‘laundryperson’.

‘Person’ once appeared to be the obvious substitute for ‘man’, but in hindsight we can see that it failed. Today almost none of the old -person compounds survive. But over time people converged on more acceptable solutions to the problem of making job-titles inclusive (e.g. ‘chair’, ‘sales assistant/associate’, ‘firefighter’). What they rejected was not the basic principle of inclusion, but the imposition of terms they found unnatural or ridiculous.    

The very public controversies of the last few weeks suggest that the kind of inclusive language that requires the avoidance of ‘women’ may be encountering similar resistance. It wasn’t just a certain kind of feminist who criticised ‘bodies with vaginas’. There were other Lancet-readers who were not so much offended as just bewildered that a medical journal would go to such lengths to avoid the W-word.

But many women were angry, and that isn’t hard to understand. Erasing one group of people as a way of including others sends a clear message about who matters and who doesn’t. And replacing the word a group of people use to name themselves with terms that many of them find alien and insulting makes it clear that women’s own preferences are irrelevant. This isn’t new: for millennia, all kinds of names have been imposed on women against their will. In that respect, terms like ‘menstruator’ and ‘birthing person’ are not so different from ‘slut’ and ‘slag’. Men like Keir Starmer and the editor of The Lancet would deny that they think of women as subordinates–yet they apparently feel entitled to tell women what it’s acceptable for them to say about their own bodies. They need to understand it isn’t up to them to decide, and let women speak, in their own words, for themselves.                    

The fall of Andrew Cuomo

Governor Andrew Cuomo resigned this week, following the publication of a report which found he had ‘sexually harassed a number of current and former New York State employees by, among other things, engaging in unwelcome and nonconsensual touching [and] making numerous offensive comments of a suggestive and sexual nature that created a hostile work environment for women’.

The part of this story that caught my attention was Cuomo’s repeated protestations that what had happened was not harassment, it was ‘miscommunication’. Referring to a complaint made by his executive assistant Charlotte Bennett, he told the investigators that Bennett had ‘processed what she heard through her own filter. And it was often not what was said and not what was meant’. At a press conference after the report was published, he again insisted that Bennett had ‘heard things I just didn’t say’.

This didn’t get my attention because it was novel or unexpected. We’ve heard it before and we’ll undoubtedly hear it again. So, this may be a good time to take a closer look at the ever-popular ‘miscommunication’ defence.

There are several reasons why this defence is useful to men like Cuomo. One is that it stops short of calling the complainant a liar: that’s also popular, of course, but for a liberal politician with a lot of female supporters there’s something to be said for a less overtly woman-blaming approach. It also has the advantage of resonating with beliefs about communication which are part of our cultural common sense. Cuomo suggested that some of the complainants had misinterpreted his actions because of cultural differences (he’s Italian-American, he touches everyone); he also mentioned generational differences (he’s 63, you have to make allowances). And lurking in the background was the idea that men and women routinely misunderstand one another because they’re from different planets, speak different languages, and process reality through different ‘filters’.

The claims made in self-help books about ‘male-female miscommunication’ are not, in fact, supported by credible evidence. But the miscommunication defence contains a core of truth which makes it difficult to refute conclusively. Because humans are not mind-readers, and language is not a rigid code in which every utterance has only one possible interpretation, there’s always room for doubt about what someone really meant by what they said.

When Andrew Cuomo says of Charlotte Bennett that she ‘heard things I just didn’t say’, he’s describing what all of us do all the time in our efforts to understand other people. We have to ‘hear things they didn’t say’, because not everything we need to make sense of an utterance is in the words a speaker uttered. Some of it we have to supply ourselves, using contextual information, background knowledge about the world, and our ability to reason about how everything fits together.

If someone says to me ‘it’s cold in here’, is that a statement or is it an indirect request to close the window? To decide, I have to put the words together with other relevant information. If we’re two strangers sitting in a public building (where neither of us has the authority to go round closing windows, or the obligation to make other visitors comfortable), I’ll probably treat it as small-talk and respond in kind (‘yes, it’s freezing’). But if the speaker is my boss who’s just walked into my office, I might well take it as a request and respond by closing the window. In which case, clearly, I will have heard something my boss didn’t actually say.

Because she didn’t actually say it, however, it could turn out that I got it wrong. Maybe when I move to close the window she’ll say ‘oh no, don’t do that, I like it cold’. It’s always open to the speaker to deny that what you inferred was not what she intended. And to complicate matters further, when she denies saying A and meaning B, that could be because she genuinely didn’t mean B, but it could also be a strategic denial: she did in fact mean B, but it’s in her interests to say she didn’t.  

Men accused of sexual harassment have an obvious interest in denying they meant what the complainant took them to mean. And this will often be made easier for them by the nature of the communication whose meaning is in dispute. While some forms of verbal sexual harassment may be direct enough for their meaning to be indisputable, others are very indirect, relying on the hearer to ‘read between the lines’. In this respect, sexual harassment is not unlike another linguistic practice through which sexual interest may be communicated: flirting.

Flirting has been defined by the linguist Scott Kiesling as ‘an off-record negotiation and recognition of interpersonal desire’. ‘Off-record’ means that the participants don’t put their cards on the table: they leave things inexplicit, vague or ambiguous. It’s been suggested that this element of uncertainty is part of what makes flirting fun–it keeps the participants guessing and prolongs what’s been called ‘the excitement of possibility’. In the case of sexual harassment, however, inexplicitness serves less benign purposes. Uncertainty about the harasser’s intentions only increases the victim’s discomfort (is she misjudging the situation? If she objects will she be being unfair?), and in the event of any challenge it gives the harasser ‘plausible deniability’.

In 2003 the conversation analyst Liisa Tainio published an analysis of a phone conversation in which a Member of Parliament in Finland sexually harassed a 15-year old girl (he was later convicted of attempting to sexually abuse a child). This was the second call he had made to the girl: after the first she decided, with the help of her family, to arrange another call and record it. Tainio’s transcript confirms that inexplicitness is a key feature of the harasser’s talk. At no point does he explicitly mention any recognisably sexual activity: his proposition to the girl, which he repeats in various forms no fewer than 15 times, is that they should ‘go for a ride’. At one stage he mentions the possibility of going to a hotel: that might hint at a sexual intention, but since there are other, non-sexual things one could do in a hotel, it remains ambiguous and deniable.

However, Tainio points out two other features of the call that support an interpretation of it as harassment. One is the repetition of the proposition. Issuing the same invitation 15 times in a single conversation is highly marked behaviour. Analysis has shown that if someone is going to accept an invitation they will normally do so promptly; if they hesitate or hedge that will be heard as declining, even if it isn’t followed by a direct refusal (refusing by ‘just saying no’ is in reality very rare). The girl does hesitate and hedge (‘I don’t know’… ‘I’m very busy’), but the MP ignores this, and keeps re-issuing the invitation. By normal standards he is badgering her, and that’s one piece of evidence suggesting harassment.

The other piece of evidence that he’s harassing her is the fact that he tries to blackmail her. He informs her that he knows (because he’s been spying on her) that she has had a boy in the house in her father’s absence, and then says:

Listen, I know more about you than you think. I won’t ever tell these things to your Daddy, y’know …cause I do know your Daddy… I won’t gossip, I won’t do that, I’m nice enough …but I know a lot about you

This is a good example of an utterance whose intended meaning differs from its apparent meaning. On the surface he’s promising not to tell the girl’s father what he knows, but by implication he is threatening to tell unless the girl co-operates.   

Despite the creepiness of this man’s behaviour—spying on an adolescent girl and calling her at home to ask her out—Tainio tells us that the police and the press were initially reluctant to treat it as sexual harassment. That may be because, as she says, ‘there is no one single feature of the talk which could be “typical” of sexual harassment’. In particular, the MP makes no explicit and unambiguous sexual propositions. Tainio’s analysis picks out several different features (the badgering, the hesitant or hedged responses, the veiled threats), and suggests that it’s only when you put them all together (along with the information that this is an adult man talking to a 15-year old girl) that the case for sexual harassment becomes compelling.

Could we make a similar analysis of the interaction which prompted Charlotte Bennett to accuse Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment? Not quite, because we don’t have a recording of the interaction; but we do have a detailed narrative account of Bennett’s testimony, which is included in the report I linked to earlier. Here’s an extract:

the Governor asked her how long it had been since she hugged someone, and complained that he had not hugged anyone in a long time. Ms Bennett understood that the Governor did not seem to be asking about platonic hugs, because when she responded that [he] could hug his daughters he responded with something like “No, no, not like that–a real hug”. Ms Bennett testified that the Governor then said he was lonely and that he wanted a girlfriend in Albany. In the same series of conversations, the Governor asked her if she had ever been with older men and whether she thought age mattered in relationships. According to Ms Bennett, while she was trying to figure out how to answer…he cut her off and said “I don’t think [age differences] matter”. [He] then said that he would have a relationship with someone who was “22 and up” or “over the age of 22”. Ms Bennett noted that earlier the same day she and the Governor had discussed the fact that she had recently turned 25. The Governor also asked Ms Bennett if her last relationship had been monogamous.

From this Bennett concluded that Cuomo was expressing a sexual interest in her—something he strenuously denied, saying she had ‘processed what she heard through her own filter’ (i.e., her interpretation was not grounded in any plausible reading of what he said to her). To assess these competing accounts, we need to reconstruct the process Bennett might have gone through to get to her conclusion. Were her inferences, as Cuomo suggested, unwarranted, or were they, in context, reasonable?

We can begin by acknowledging that Cuomo didn’t explicitly say he wanted a sexual relationship with Bennett (if he had there would be nothing to argue about). He did, however, introduce the topic of sexual relationships into a conversation that took place at work, and you would expect someone in Bennett’s position to treat that as meaning something. You would also expect her, in pondering what it might mean, to take account of who was talking to whom (sex-talk addressed by a man to a woman has a different range of potential meanings from the same kind of talk between two male colleagues, for instance). Of course, the fact that he broached the subject does not, in itself, license the conclusion that he was hitting on her (though it doesn’t rule out that possibility either); but there were other clues in the details of what he said. For instance, he mentioned wanting a girlfriend in Albany (he knew Bennett was living in Albany); then he asked if she’d had relationships with older men (he’s an older man himself, nearly 40 years older than Bennett), and followed up by saying he’d have a relationship with anyone older than 22 (Bennett was 25 and that had been mentioned earlier in the day). Finally he asked if her previous relationship had been monogamous (a question that could be heard as probing her openness to casual or illicit sex).

As in the Finnish case, you can’t point to any single thing Cuomo said as definitive: you have to put it all together and consider the cumulative effect. That’s evidently what Charlotte Bennett did, and while we can never know with 100% certainty whether the conclusion she ultimately came to was right (in the sense of reproducing exactly what was in Cuomo’s mind), I think we can reject the claim that she simply imposed an interpretation which the evidence did not support. She did have to read between the lines, but those lines weren’t just figments of her imagination. 

Cuomo, of course, disputed that. He claimed that his reasons for broaching the subject of sex were related either to his responsibilities as Governor (e.g., his comments about hugs expressed a general concern about the emotional impact of Covid restrictions on New Yorkers) or to his role as Bennett’s mentor (he said he’d asked her about her experience with older men because he’d heard rumours she was involved with someone older and he wanted to give her a chance to talk about it). Once again, we can’t be 100% certain these explanations are untrue, but we might think they’re less convincing than the one Bennett constructed from the same evidence. That appears to have been the view of the investigators, whose report describes Cuomo’s account as ‘unpersuasive’.  

Am I saying that there are no circumstances in which it would ever be legitimate for someone like Cuomo to claim that miscommunication had occurred? No: clearly people can and do misunderstand one another. But I don’t think just saying someone misunderstood you is sufficient to make the case, and I also don’t think communication between men and women has some special propensity to go awry. In fact, I believe that so-called ‘male-female miscommunication’ often doesn’t involve misunderstanding at all; what’s presented as a misunderstanding is actually a conflict.

There’s a famous line in the 1967 prison movie Cool Hand Luke, spoken by the prison warden after Luke has escaped and been recaptured: ‘what we’ve got here is failure to communicate’. They both know communication is not the issue. Luke doesn’t defy the warden because he doesn’t understand him. His defiance is a challenge to the warden’s authority. It’s a conflict, not about what words mean, but about who gets to impose their will and who is obliged to submit.

Back in the days when sexual harassment, in Gloria Steinem’s words, ‘was just called life’, women on the receiving end of behaviour like Andrew Cuomo’s had little choice but to submit. They might complain about it privately, but it was difficult to challenge the prevailing view of harassment as just normal male behaviour. Harassers didn’t need to justify themselves, because they didn’t expect their behaviour to have consequences. The courts agreed that employers could not be expected to regulate this kind of behaviour, since, in the words of one US judgment quoted by Gillian Thomas in her history of Title VII,

The attraction of males to females and females to males is a natural sex phenomenon and it is probable that this attraction plays at least a subtle part in most personnel decisions.

Today things are different. Sexual harassment has been named and defined as a problem; workplaces have policies that prohibit it, procedures for reporting it, and sanctions for those who perpetrate it. In practice we know this hasn’t solved the problem. But it has had some consequences, and in my view the popularity of the miscommunication defence is one of them. This defence is a weapon in the ongoing conflict between men who still feel entitled to harass women, and women who’ve been emboldened to challenge that.  

In this case the conflict was resolved in favour of the women. But the struggle isn’t over. Though it didn’t prevent the fall of Andrew Cuomo, the miscommunication defence remains an obstacle to justice, and feminists must continue to point that out.   

Fighting words

Note: this is post is a reworking/updating of a piece I wrote for Trouble & Strife magazine in 2014.

Remember Betty Friedan’s ‘problem that has no name’? Or Gloria Steinem recalling that in the 1960s no one talked about sexual harassment–not because it didn’t happen, but because ‘it was just called life’? Naming women’s experiences of oppression has always been an important political task. Though you don’t solve a problem just by giving it a name, naming it brings it more clearly into focus, making it easier to recognize, to analyse and to fight.

Feminists don’t always agree on what a problem should be called. We have arguments about terminology—about the difference between, say, ‘prostitution’ and ‘sex work’, or ‘gender-based violence’ and ‘male violence against women’—because we don’t think these are just empty labels. They are tools for making sense of the world, reflecting different understandings of what they name.

As times change, names may also change: in recent decades there’s been a change in the way we name forms of oppression. The radical social movements of the 1960s and 70s popularised a set of terms ending in –ism (e.g. racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, classism); many of these are still in use, but more recent social justice activism has produced another set that end in –phobia (e.g. homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, fatphobia, femmephobia, whorephobia). This hasn’t (AFAIK) prompted much heated debate: we don’t seem to think it matters much whether we call something an ‘ism’ or a ‘phobia’. But –ism words and –phobia words frame the problem in different ways–and that difference may not be inconsequential.

If we look at their meanings in the language as a whole, words ending in –ism most commonly name systems of ideas or beliefs–political, religious, intellectual or artistic (e.g. feminism, socialism, nationalism, Buddhism, postmodernism, surrealism). Terms like sexism and racism are also names for systems. They were intended to capture the systemic nature of male or white dominance, the idea that these were not just individual prejudices, they were built into the social structure and the workings of social institutions.

Words ending in -phobia, by contrast, most commonly name clinical conditions. The first ‘phobia’ word to appear in an English-language text was hydrophobia (Greek for ‘morbid fear of water’), meaning rabies; in the 19th century the term became associated with mental rather than physical illness, and in current medical usage it names a class of anxiety disorders in which something that is not objectively a threat triggers a pathological reaction—intense fear, panic, disgust, an overwhelming desire to avoid or escape the danger. In everyday parlance the term is used more loosely: it retains the sense of ‘a pathological (over)reaction’, but the emphasis is less on uncontrollable anxiety, the main symptom of clinical phobia, and more on aversion or hatred. Terms like homophobia, transphobia and Islamophobia thus suggest that the problem is not so much social structures as individual feelings or mental states.

Does the shift from ‘isms’ to ‘phobias’ go along with a shift in our understanding of oppression? Clearly there hasn’t been a total shift: we still talk about ‘isms’, and we still (at least sometimes) think in terms of systems. But in today’s progressive discourse I do think there’s a stronger tendency to link oppression directly to feelings of antipathy–and to treat those feelings as a source of harm in their own right. If I believe you hate me for who I am, even if you do nothing about it, that oppresses me.

A version of this idea has been incorporated into the law through the concept of a ‘hate crime’, an offence which is motivated by hostility to the victim as a member of a certain social group. Such offences are seen as particularly serious because the victim is harmed twice over–not only by the act itself (e.g. a threat or an assault), but also by the hostility that motivates it. The law doesn’t criminalise hate itself, but it does treat it as an aggravating factor in cases where it motivates a crime, and directs the courts to consider imposing harsher penalties.

As I explained in a recent post, in Britain crimes against women are not currently eligible to be treated as hate crimes. Some feminists have campaigned for that to change, arguing that misogyny should have the same legal status as racism or homophobia. But there are also feminists who see this demand as misguided. The commonest crimes against women, they point out, such as domestic violence/abuse, do not fit the legal definition of a hate crime. They don’t express hostility towards women in general, but rather the perpetrator’s feeling of entitlement to dominate and control ‘his’ women. A law which treats domestic abuse as less serious than ‘misogyny hate crime’ will not deliver justice for most women.   

At a more general level, this disagreement reflects differing understandings of how women’s oppression works. It’s not that woman-hatred doesn’t exist, but if we want to understand the system feminists call patriarchy, we shouldn’t over-emphasise the role played by hate, or underestimate the contribution made by acts and practices which have other motivations. Domestic abuse is about dominance and control; many forms of workplace discrimination (e.g. not hiring female job applicants on the grounds that they might become pregnant, or paying women workers less than men) are motivated by economic self-interest. Other patriarchal practices reflect ingrained cultural beliefs about women’s nature and what’s best for them: in particular, the belief that women’s ‘natural’ role is to take care of others’ needs, and that curtailing their freedom for the benefit of others does not harm them in the same way it would harm men. This seems to be the attitude of the World Health Organisation, which was criticised last week for suggesting that women ‘of childbearing age’ should be ‘prevented’ from consuming alcohol, It’s also the attitude of men who do no housework or childcare. Hatred, in short, is not a necessary feature of oppression. Is the emphasis placed on it in current progressive discourse actually obscuring the nature of the problem?.

Another question we could ask is how this emphasis on hate might be affecting our own political culture. It’s a difficult one, because there was never a golden age when feminists didn’t criticise, attack or trash each other. (As Ti-Grace Atkinson said 50-odd years ago, ‘Sisterhood is powerful’. It kills. Mostly sisters’.) They just didn’t always do it for an audience of thousands on social media. But contemporary practices like accusing people of being ‘phobic’–harbouring irrational/pathological hatred—tend to raise the emotional temperature. When hating is thought of as the ultimate sin, or even, in the ‘phobia’ frame, something akin to a mental illness, the target of the accusation is bound to resent it–and also, perhaps, the critic’s presumption in claiming to have access to her inner feelings. The object of her alleged hate, meanwhile, may feel that since the provocation is so extreme, she is justified in fighting fire with fire–with abuse, threats, or demands for the offender to be fired/de-platformed/ostracised.   

Last week, two much-discussed pieces of writing directly addressed this issue. One was an essay in which Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recounted her own experience of being targeted after making what some considered a transphobic comment, and went on to criticise the vindictive online culture which has created a climate of fear, bad faith and self-censorship. The other was an article in which Ayesha Hazarika, a member of the Board of the UK women’s rights organisation Fawcett, described current feminist debates on sex and gender as ‘fights to the death of [sic] who can scream and shame the loudest’. I don’t think that’s universally true. But I do think the contemporary tendency to label anything anyone takes exception to as ‘phobic’ or ‘hate speech’ encourages more extreme and more emotion-based responses. These labels function like ‘fighting words’, provoking or escalating conflict.

The debate Hazarika discusses is relatively recent, but many much older political arguments among feminists (some, indeed, as old as feminism itself) have come to be conducted in the same accusatory language. Familiar criticisms of make-up and high heels draw complaints of ‘femmephobia’; concerns about sexual practices like ‘breath play’ (aka choking) are denounced as ‘kinkphobia’; feminists who oppose the sex industry are accused of ‘whorephobia’. Will reframing them in this way resolve these long-running disagreements? Do the new terms shed any new light, or do they just generate (even) more heat?    

The terminology of oppression has always had a tendency to rely on analogies between different forms of it. The term sexism, for instance, was modelled on racism: many women who became active in US second wave feminism drew inspiration from their prior experience in the civil rights movement, and from the parallels they perceived between Black people’s situation and their own situation as women. This tendency has continued in the age of the internet meme, a unit of meaning which replicates rapidly, generating new variations as it goes. The recent proliferation of ‘phobias’ is one product of that process.

But the analogies are always imperfect (many commentators have criticised 1960s feminists for overstating the parallels and underplaying the differences between sexism and racism) and as they multiply they may become progressively less illuminating. For instance, it’s not hard to see the logic of labelling prejudice against lesbians and gay men homophobia: some of the forms it commonly takes do exhibit the irrational loathing and disgust the word ‘phobia’ brings to mind. But it’s harder to see why the devaluation of ‘feminine’ things should be called femmephobia. Who feels loathing or disgust when confronted with, say, a lipstick or a Barbie doll? Whorephobia is even less apt: suggesting that feminists who oppose the sex trade do so because they hate the women who work in it is like suggesting that anyone who criticises Tesco or Amazon must hate checkout operators and warehouse workers.

‘Hate’, to me (and probably to most people) is a strong word, but in some circles it and its derivatives (‘hate group’, ‘hate speech’) are used so freely, and with such a broad range of reference, it’s hard to connect the emotional charge of the word with what it’s being used to describe. A lot of this hyperbolic hate-talk is probably just unreflective habit; but that doesn’t mean we can’t stop to reflect on what it means and what it does. In my own opinion it would be no bad thing if we were more selective about what we label ‘hate’, and what we pathologize as ‘phobia’.

Hit or Miss

This post is about a longstanding feminist bone of contention: the use of the terms ‘Miss’ and ‘Sir’ to address teachers in UK schools. According to Project Britain, a website about British life and culture,    

Teachers in primary schools (4-11 year olds) are always addressed by their surname by parents and pupils alike, always Mr, Mrs or Miss Smith.…. In secondary schools (11-16 years), teachers are usually addressed as Miss or Sir.

This is a bit of an overgeneralisation: there are primary schools where ‘Miss’ and ‘Sir’ are used, and secondary schools which prescribe other forms of address, most commonly ‘title + name’ (i.e., ‘Mrs/Ms/Miss/Mr Smith’). When I put out a call to teachers on Twitter asking what terms were used in their schools, most reported either ‘Miss/Sir’ or ‘title + name’, but some reported the use of first names (especially in private schools and sixth form colleges where students are over 16), and some worked in schools where the prescribed form for women was not ‘Miss’ but ‘Madam’ or ‘Ma’am’.

This variation isn’t new. At the girls’ grammar school I attended in the early 1970s we were strictly forbidden to call teachers ‘Miss’ (or ‘Sir’, though since we had almost no male teachers that issue rarely arose). We had to call them ‘Miss/Mrs X’. That wasn’t because of any feminist objection to ‘Miss’. It had more to do with class snobbery. Saying ‘Miss’ and ‘Sir’ was ‘common’, something the kids at the local Secondary Modern did. This prejudice seems to have been quite widespread. One woman who answered my question on Twitter commented that when she was at school her teacher used to say ‘don’t call me Miss, you’re not at Grange Hill’ (the name of a fictional comprehensive school in a popular children’s TV series).  

It’s ironic that my school regarded ‘Sir’ and ‘Miss’ as low-class and vulgar, because ‘Sir’, at least, seems to have originated—like so many British educational customs—in the public schools that educated the sons of the privileged in the 19^th century (note for Americans: ‘public’ here means what you’d call ‘private’, i.e. fee-paying; your ‘public school’ is our ‘state school’). Calling teachers ‘Sir’ was like calling your father and other senior male relatives ‘Sir’—not uncommon at the time—or like calling a superior officer ‘Sir’ in the army: it was a mark of respect for and deference to authority in a hierarchical and highly regimented institution.

The story of ‘Miss’ is different. It’s not clear that pupils at elite girls’ schools addressed their teachers as ‘Miss’ (as opposed to ‘Miss X’). You don’t see it much in early 20th century schoolgirl fiction: at Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers, for instance, only the French teacher is ‘Mam’zelle’, while other teachers are addressed as ‘Miss Potts’ or ‘Miss Williams’. Both in fiction and in life, however, their title was always ‘Miss’, the conventional marker of a woman’s unmarried status. Though the law had been changed in 1919 so that women could enter professions that had previously excluded them, many employers, including the local authorities that employed most teachers, continued to limit women’s access to employment by operating a ‘marriage bar’. They refused to hire women who were already married, and required those who married later to resign. In theory this policy was illegal, but challenges to it failed repeatedly, because of the widespread view that, as an Appeal Court judgment put it in 1925,  

It is unfair to the large number of young unmarried teachers seeking situations that the positions should be occupied by married women, who presumably have husbands capable of maintaining them.

The marriage bar in teaching lasted until 1944, and this is thought to be the reason why ‘Miss’ became the female analogue of ‘Sir’ in British schools.

But times have changed since 1944, and most women teaching in Britain’s schools today probably aren’t, in any other situation, ‘Miss’. In any case, the problem feminists have with ‘Miss’ isn’t just about the title itself, it’s also about the lack of parity between ‘Miss’ and ‘Sir’.

In other contexts the female address term analogous to ‘Sir’ is not ‘Miss’ but ‘Madam’ or ‘Ma’am’: though ‘madam’ has undergone some semantic derogation (it has acquired the specialised meaning ‘woman in charge of a brothel’), as an address term it retains a higher degree of formality and gravitas than ‘Miss’. That’s presumably why the related form ‘Ma’am’ has become the standard address term for senior female officers in the armed forces and the police. ‘Miss’ does not suggest deference to someone senior: though it originated as an abbreviated form of ‘mistress’, which did historically denote a woman in authority, its modern associations with youth and what you might call ‘juniority’ mean it can easily come across as belittling or trivialising. Even if you don’t find it belittling, it’s less deferential than ‘Sir’. As the feminist linguist Jennifer Coates commented in 2014, ‘Sir is a knight, but Miss is ridiculous–it doesn’t match Sir at all’.  She added:

It’s a depressing example of how women are given low status and men, no matter how young or new in the job they are, are given high status.

But this critical view of ‘Miss’ is not shared by all women teachers, or even all feminist teachers; and the reasons for that are complicated.

One complicating factor is our old friend the sociolinguistics of status and solidarity. The non-reciprocal use of any title marks the existence of a status hierarchy (if you call me ‘Professor’ and I call you ‘Susie’ it’s a safe bet that I outrank you), and feminists tend to be ambivalent about that, caught between resenting the way respect-titles are often withheld from women when men get them automatically, and feeling we shouldn’t care, because after all, we believe in equality. In that egalitarian spirit, some of the people who answered my question on Twitter said they’d prefer to be called by their first names. Though these commenters were critical of ‘Miss’, their objection was more to status-marking in general than to the sexism of ‘Miss’ in particular. This brought them into conflict with other people who were more interested in levelling up (ensuring that women teachers got the same respect as men) than levelling down (flattening the hierarchy by eliminating titles). The most-liked comment made by anyone in my thread was an uncompromising defence of hierarchy:

Miss or Sir is appropriate. Teachers are educators and advocates. They are not, nor should they be ‘bessie mates’ with their students. Titles establish boundaries. Boundaries help children as they grow into adults.

You could, of course, defend the use of titles without endorsing the specific titles ‘Miss’ and ‘Sir’, but evidently this tweet’s author didn’t pick up on the issue of sexism. She wasn’t the only one. It’s true that I phrased my opening tweet in a deliberately general, open-ended way—‘are [Sir and Miss] used at your school? Does that bother you? Why or why not?’—but since I’m a feminist who tends to attract other feminists as Twitter followers I was surprised by the number of respondents who either didn’t appear to have noticed any problem with the Sir/Miss pairing or who explicitly said they hadn’t thought about it before.

Others had thought about it, and had decided they didn’t mind being ‘Miss’. The main reason they gave for not minding was that they didn’t believe ‘Miss’ either was, or was intended to be, disrespectful. Calling women teachers ‘Miss’ was seen as, in one teacher’s words, ‘accepted practice, really’: it’s just what children do in school. Another teacher compared ‘Sir / Miss’ to a pronoun, a proxy for the teacher’s full name (which students may not know or remember), adding, ‘I don’t personally receive it as in any way derogatory’. Several respondents said that as long as students weren’t overtly disrespectful they didn’t care what address terms they used. What mattered was not the language but the quality of the relationship.

Some teachers at schools which prescribed other modes of address, either title + name or an alternative title like ‘Ma’am’, commented that pupils often reverted to ‘Miss’, which was entrenched, along with ‘Sir’, in the oral culture of their peer-group. Others also remarked that it’s primarily an oral form, and that in writing many students replace it with ‘Mrs’ or ‘Ms’. This is an interesting observation sociolinguistically: it may help to explain the longevity of a form which has its origins in the conditions of the fairly distant past (i.e., the period before the lifting of the marriage bar). While some aspects of the language of children and adolescents evolve rapidly (teenage slang is an obvious example), others may be very resistant to change, and particularly to attempts to impose it from outside.

‘Miss’ did have some feminist advocates. Two contributors to the thread cited the argument made by the teacher and writer Kate Clanchy in her book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me:  

Miss: I have heard so many professional people express distaste for that name, but never a working teacher. Usually the grounds are sexism, but real children in real schools don’t use ‘Miss’ with any less (or more) respect than ‘Sir’. ‘Miss’ grates only on the ears of those who have never heard it used well: as it grated on me, a middle-class Scot, thirty years ago. No longer: Miss is the name I put on like a coat when I go into school; Miss is the shoes I stand in when I call out the kids in the corridor for running or shouting; Miss is my cloak of protection when I ask a weeping child what is wrong… Miss seems to me a beautiful name, because it has been offered to me so often with such love.  

Clanchy thinks the distaste of ‘professional people’ for ‘Miss’ reflects a combination of class and gender prejudice. She points out that teaching has historically been both a profession open to women (albeit not always on the same terms as men) and ‘the profession of first resort for graduates from working-class backgrounds’. Those facts contribute to the perception of it as a low-status profession; in that context, criticisms of ‘Miss’ may be just another way to put teachers, and especially teachers of working-class children, in their socially inferior place. I can’t help feeling Clanchy has a point here. I also agree with her that ‘Miss’, uttered by schoolchildren, is neither more nor less respectful than ‘Sir’–though the fact that a term is used with the intention of showing respect, or being polite, does not prevent it from also being sexist (the word ‘lady’ is a case in point).

However, I can’t agree with Clanchy’s suggestion that working teachers don’t find ‘Miss’ distasteful. Some of the working teachers who responded to my tweet made their distaste for it crystal clear. For some the problem was its generic, depersonalising quality. ‘I’m not a fan…I’d prefer to be Mrs ____’. This complaint was also made by men about ‘Sir’. ‘I always hated it’, wrote one: ‘I have a name’.  For others, what they disliked wasn’t being addressed by a generic label, it was being addressed, specifically, as ‘Miss’. ‘I’m not a “Miss” and wouldn’t want to be called that’. ‘I’m a “Ms” and always have been’. Several women who had worked in schools where the prescribed female address term was ‘Ma’am’ contrasted it favourably with ‘Miss’. ‘Ma’am’, said one, ‘felt genuinely respectful, whereas “Miss” always feels demeaning’. ‘I miss the Ma’am’, wrote a woman who had moved to another school, adding ‘Really dislike Miss’. A man whose wife was also a teacher said that both of them were troubled by the disparity between ‘Sir’ and ‘Miss’. ‘She receives a less flattering term of address – one that creates a child-like impression’.

This echoes some of my own feelings about ‘Miss’. One commenter suggested that the idea of it as demeaning is based on a lack of understanding of where it comes from: it’s a shortening of the ‘mistress’ in ‘headmistress’ and ‘schoolmistress’, and those are not demeaning terms. Well, maybe; but language change has obscured the connection. ‘Schoolmistress’ is now archaic (though while writing this I discovered that schoolmistresses do still feature in porn, where their main job is administering corporal punishment); ‘headmistress’ is going the same way, as schools increasingly shift to the gender-neutral ‘head teacher’. Today the most salient associations of ‘Miss’ have less to do with authority and more to do with immaturity. It’s telling, perhaps, that one woman in my Twitter thread said she preferred ‘Miss’ to ‘Ma’am’ because ‘Ma’am’ made her feel old. That points to another complicating factor: our culture views ageing in women so negatively, many women feel more flattered than demeaned by terms that imply youth.

I should acknowledge, of course, that you don’t get a representative sample of the teaching profession by canvassing your followers on Twitter. But the diversity of views expressed in my small and unrepresentative sample suggests there is no consensus on ‘Miss’. Which might also suggest there’s no great impetus for change. Though you’ve probably gathered that I’m not a fan myself, I do think ‘Miss’ is a survivor: the debate about it has been going on for years, and I doubt it will be settled any time soon.

Thanks to everyone who responded to my questions on Twitter.