2023: forward to the past?

It’s that time again: the time when commentators of all kinds look back at the last 12 months, and pick out what they see as the most significant trends or the most memorable moments of the year. This blog’s annual round-ups have tended to be variations on a few well-worn themes; the details are different every year, but the overall trends are much the same. In that respect, as what follows will make clear, 2023 was fairly typical; but one thing several of the issues I’ve picked out have in common (something the title of this post alludes to) is an oddly “retro” vibe: they’re cases where an old form of sexism has been reinvented or repackaged for new times.             

1. Tech troubles

This year’s lists of WOTYs (words of the year) were dominated by a single theme: most major English dictionaries agreed that 2023 was the year of artificial intelligence. Though Oxford (which put its shortlist to a public vote) ended up crowning rizz, a slang term derived from charisma, Collins went with AI and Cambridge chose hallucinate (in the AI-related sense of “make stuff up”). Merriam-Webster’s choice, authentic, reflected concerns about AI’s capacity to deceive by mimicking or producing believable simulacra of real people: deepfake was also on its shortlist.

Feminists have their own concerns about recent developments in AI, ranging from the way large language models amplify sexist biases in the massive datasets used to train them to the implications of AI “companions”, whose increasing popularity I wrote about in May. But this year’s events reminded us that some of women’s most pressing technology-related problems are not new—and are still not getting the kind of serious attention, either from the tech companies or from policymakers, which we’ve seen being given to AI.  

In January, when the New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern unexpectedly resigned, there was speculation that the misogynist abuse and threats she’d been subjected to had played a significant part in her decision. Another female leader who resigned in 2023, the Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (though she clearly had other reasons for stepping down) spoke publicly both about her personal experiences of online abuse and her fear that it was driving women out of politics, or deterring them from entering in the first place.

We’ve known about this problem for some time. In 2016 a cross-party campaign (fronted by Yvette Cooper MP) was launched under the slogan “Reclaim the Internet”: it aimed, among other things, to pressure the tech companies to do more. But this initiative evidently did not achieve much. In 2017 a survey of women MPs found that one in three had seriously considered quitting because of the volume of abuse they received, and in 2019 a significant number chose not to seek re-election, citing abuse as a reason for their decision to stand down. Like tech’s other big misogyny problems–one being the ease with which violent and/or supposedly illegal pornography can be accessed online, by children as well as adults, and another being the proliferation of extreme misogynist content which is then promoted to young men on mainstream platforms like YouTube and TikTok—this one seems to be getting worse.          

2. Women beware women: the political rise of the female anti-feminist

But there’s one type of female politician who had a good year in 2023: the right-wing woman whose rhetoric is even more extreme, reactionary and authoritarian than that of the men around her. Though in most cases her main selling point is nationalism/racism, she will often position herself explicitly as a female anti-feminist, extolling women’s traditional domestic roles while making her own status as an exception, a woman in a position of public leadership, more acceptable by adopting one or more of the archetypal personae through which female power has historically been understood (mother, iron lady/warrior queen, seductress or “pet”). As a type she is far from new, but she has managed to reinvent herself: her politics may be backward-looking, but she presents herself as a thoroughly modern woman.

Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the “post-fascist” Brothers [sic] of Italy who is now the Italian prime minister, is a notable case in point. She has described herself as first and foremost a mother, and has emphasized her Christian beliefs, but she has also exploited her relative youth and sexual attractiveness in a way that sometimes makes you wonder if she’s trying to establish the bimbo as a new political archetype. She once posed for the media while holding a pair of melons to her chest (a reference both to her last name and to the slang meaning of “melons”, which is the same in Italian as in English), and at a NATO summit in 2023 she cut short a press conference on the grounds that her high heeled shoes were killing her. Like Marine Le Pen (who improved her performance in the last French presidential election by adopting a softer, more maternal image), Meloni seems to know what she’s doing: polls suggest that her brand of femininity is seen by many women as “relatable”.

The antifeminist female politician has also become a significant figure in the British Tory party, whose internal wars were, regrettably, a major driver of our national politics in 2023. She isn’t a completely new phenomenon (the obvious precedent is Margaret Thatcher), but I can’t remember a time when so many women were talked of on the Tory right as potential leaders. In some cases antifeminism is incidental to their political brand (Suella Braverman and Priti Patel, for instance, are more notable for being the rabidly anti-immigrant children of immigrants), but one of this year’s rising stars, the 41-year-old backbench MP Miriam Cates, brought it squarely into the foreground, underlining her status as a woman to watch with a speech at the NatCon conference which identified falling birthrates (she didn’t say “among white people” but that’s generally assumed to have been her meaning) as an “existential crisis”. Too many young people, she said (this obviously meant “young women”) were going to university and having careers instead of babies. (Footnote: Miriam Cates has a degree from Cambridge University and a career as a politician; she does also have three children, but given the demands of her job as an MP we can assume she delegates most childcare to someone else.)    

But as troubling as it is to hear this kind of rhetoric from an elected British politician, we Brits don’t seem to be in much immediate danger of being led by fanatically right-wing women. Their most senior representative in government, Suella Braverman, got the sack in November (prompting a reshuffle that brought a more traditional figure, “Daddy” David Cameron, back into the Cabinet). Meanwhile, the official inquiry into the handling of the Covid pandemic underlined the point that real power still belongs largely to the same privileged male public-school-and-Oxbridge types who have ruled us since time immemorial. The language these men used during the crisis (as revealed by the WhatsApp messages they exchanged) gave a good indication of their arrogance, laziness and hostility to any woman who raised concerns. The testimony of Helen MacNamara, the most senior female civil servant in the Cabinet Office at the time, was an incisive, albeit belated, contribution to feminist criticism of Boris Johnson’s monumentally incompetent and self-serving administration.

3. Misrepresenting male violence

Another subject which continued to make national headlines in 2023 was the high prevalence of violence against women, and the extent to which the justice system is failing women who suffer it. Since Sarah Everard’s abduction and murder by serving police officer Wayne Couzens in 2021 there has been a steady flow of new revelations about police officers either perpetrating crimes against women or covering up for colleagues who had done so. But while the media have been instrumental in bringing these cases to public attention, an academic book published in April, Alessia Tranchese’s From Fritzl to #MeToo, showed that their reporting of sexual violence is itself part of the problem, contributing significantly to the climate of disbelief, victim-blaming and “himpathy” (making excuses for male perpetrators) which enables so many violent men to evade justice.

Tranchese’s analysis of the language of rape reporting in UK newspapers provides clear evidence that language which implies that women who report rape are lying is not only still the norm, it has actually become even more entrenched in recent years. One of the developments that has helped to entrench it is the “celebrification” of news coverage since the 2010s: stories about male celebrities accused of rape or sexual assault are getting more space in newspapers, and these men are particularly likely to be given the “himpathetic” treatment. While it’s often assumed that #MeToo put a stop to this, Tranchese’s data suggest that its effect was in fact quite limited, and that the backlash that followed (which she documents in detail) may have entrenched the problem further.

Her point was demonstrated in September of this year, when a documentary that aired allegations about Russell Brand prompted a flurry of complaints that Brand was being unfairly subjected to “trial by media”. This view was expressed by commentators across the political spectrum, and none appeared to have noticed what Tranchese had pointed out: that women who report being raped or sexually harassed by a popular celebrity like Brand (or even one as lacking in “rizz” as Prince Andrew) are routinely put on trial by the media, in reports which implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—represent them as sluts, gold-diggers, vengeful obsessives and liars. Yet this form of “trial by media” does not raise the same concern that it might interfere with the pursuit of justice through the proper channels: it’s familiar, unremarkable and taken for granted. From Fritzl to #MeToo was not the most enjoyable feminist book about language I read this year (that accolade goes to Jenni Nuttall’s Mother Tongue), but in political terms it was probably the most important.   

4. Back to bullshit

One issue this blog has returned to regularly since 2015 is the never-ending flow of bullshit about women’s language masquerading as wisdom or science. There was something of a slowdown during the pandemic, but by the beginning of this year normal service had been resumed.

In January I spotted what looked like a new riff on the familiar theme of How Women’s Language Holds Them Back, in a Harvard Business Review article headed “Research: men speak more abstractly than women”. Which is a problem, apparently, because “our studies have shown that people tend to associate abstract language with power and leadership”. So, if you want to be seen as a leader, try waffling vaguely about “intangible concepts”. And if you’re wondering how that fits with another common piece of advice for women—namely, “cut out the fluff and be direct”—let me remind you that this kind of logical thinking will get you nowhere. On Planet Bullshit the only rule which applies consistently is that anything women do–or are said to do–with language can and will be used against them.

Later in the year I revisited the more familiar bullshit claim that women are incapable of forming a sentence without using the word “sorry” after stumbling across some training materials which set out to cure trainees of their addiction to the S-word by confronting them with the shocking fact that in the course of her life the average woman will apologize no fewer than 295,650 times. And where did this statistic come from? Why, from a survey conducted by an online florist! Whose purpose, needless to say, was not scientific but commercial: it was designed to persuade us that, since verbal apologies have been rendered meaningless by overuse, we should consider buying “apology flowers” instead.  

In July one of the world’s leading newspapers, the New York Times, took the unusual step of publishing an op-ed in which the writer Adam Grant (a professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton Business School) defended women’s use of so-called “weak language” as a rational choice, given the evidence that women who follow advice to speak directly and assertively are liable to be judged “abrasive”, “strident” and unlikable. It’s an argument that feminist linguists have been making for decades; but perhaps now that a man has made it, people might actually start taking it seriously.

5. (M)adwomen: reinventing sexism in advertising

As annoyed as I get about bullshit advice (especially when it makes use of garbage “research” like the online florist’s survey while resolutely ignoring the existence of actual research on language and gender), my most rage-fuelled post of 2023 (and also the one that got most page-views) was about another old chestnut, sexism in advertising: more specifically, the way the use of verbal innuendo and sexualized visual imagery has spread from its original home in ads for products like women’s underwear to charity-led campaigns about women’s health.

Once again, this was not the first time I’d broached the subject. In 2021 I criticized a campaign which claimed to be raising awareness about cervical cancer screening by urging women to post a cat picture online, choosing a longhaired, shorthaired or hairless cat to show whether their pubic hair was “bushy, bare or halfway there” (cat = pussy, geddit?). Could efforts to encourage women to have smear tests get any more tasteless? The answer, it turns out, is yes: in Manchester in November, North West Cancer Research unveiled its latest campaign, featuring 3D images of disembodied female legs alongside a slogan its creators described as “playful and a bit cheeky” (though I’d call it “demeaning and a bit rapey”): “don’t keep ‘em crossed, get screened instead”.

A lot of people who objected to this campaign assumed it must have been designed by men, but in fact it was produced by a female-led creative team at an agency whose website stresses its feminist credentials. Unfortunately it is part of an industry whose feminism leans heavily on half-baked ideas about “empowerment” and sexual “agency”: hence the assumption that using sexualized words and images in the context of cancer prevention is witty and “edgy” rather than offensive (except of course to dried-up old prudes who haven’t caught up with the latest thinking). For this agency’s next awayday I’d recommend a daytrip to Tate Britain, whose current exhibition of late 20^th century British feminist art, Women in Revolt! might help them understand why those of us who remember the 1970s (that golden age of sexist advertising) aren’t impressed. The issue isn’t that we’re old: we’re just puzzled and disappointed to see younger women reinventing a wheel we spent our own youth trying to put a spoke in–partly [irony klaxon] so that future generations would be spared the relentless sexism we grew up with.

6. Books, old and new

Speaking of late 20^th century feminism, November brought the sad news that Dale Spender had died. Though her contributions to the women’s movement were many and varied, particularly in her native Australia, in Britain she was probably best known as the author of the 1980 feminist classic Man Made Language, in which she argued that using a language made by men forces women to internalize and reproduce a male-centred view of the world. My post about Spender explained why I didn’t (and still don’t) agree; but it also explored the reasons why her book spoke so powerfully to many feminists, and reflected on the way it challenged me to formulate my own ideas coherently (a process whose end result was my own first book). It isn’t always the writers you agree with who inspire you, and you don’t have to agree with other feminists about everything to admire and respect their contributions.

Though I can’t compete with Spender’s lifetime output of over 30 books, I’ve written a few more since the 1980s, and the most recent of them, Language, Sexism and Misogyny, was published just before Christmas. It’s my attempt to assess what’s changed—and what hasn’t—in the 50 years since language became a serious subject of feminist study; it covers many of the subjects I’ve written about on this blog, and it’s aimed at a similar kind of audience (i.e., it’s not just for specialists in linguistics). If anyone who’s reading this post would also like to read the book, you can find the details here.

As ever, I’ll end by thanking everyone who’s visited Language: a feminist guide in 2023, and all the other feminist researchers and writers who’ve contributed to this year’s posts through their published work or their suggestions and recommendations. And whatever may happen in 2024, I hope it will bring you at least some of what you wish for.    

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.

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.                    

Between children

On the first day of the first full week of the new school year, the BBC reported that cases of ‘sex abuse between children’ had doubled over a period of two years. In 2016-17 the police in England and Wales recorded just under 8000 incidents where both the abuser and the victim were minors; in 2018-19 the figure was over 16,000. During the pandemic the number fell, but there were still more than 10,000 cases recorded in 2020-21. And since these figures include only cases which were reported to the police, they almost certainly understate the true extent of the problem.  

This news would, of course, be shocking whatever words were used to report it; but I couldn’t help being struck by the phrase ‘sex abuse between children’. This formula seems to have originated with the BBC (the statistics were compiled for its long-running current affairs programme Panorama). But it soon became ubiquitous: as so often happens in contemporary news reporting, the language used in the original source got picked up and recycled by other media outlets with minimal or no alteration. The Times’s headline, ‘Sexual abuse between children more than doubles in two years’, was almost identical to the one that appeared on the BBC website (‘Reports of sex abuse between children double in two years’). The Mail Online had an expanded version, ‘Reports of sex abuse between children doubles [sic] in two years to 16,000 cases in England and Wales – with 10% of youngsters accused aged 10 or under’. The Sun was an outlier, diverging from the ‘between children’ formula and going with ‘Reports of children sexually abusing other kids DOUBLE in a year to almost 16,000 cases’.

One thing that’s notable about all these headlines is their use of gender-neutral/inclusive terms like ‘children’, ‘kids’ and ‘youngsters’. That pattern continues in the body of the reports, and in quotes from named sources like the psychologist Rebekah Eglinton, who said that unwanted touching and being pressured to share nude photos had become ‘a part of everyday life for children’. There were also quotes from politicians who affirmed their commitment to ‘keeping children safe’ and ‘creating a safe learning environment for children’.

In most contexts this would be unremarkable—neutral/inclusive terms are the default choice—but in this case it’s striking because the issue under discussion is by no means gender-neutral. In the words of the BBC’s report, ‘a big majority of cases involved boys abusing girls’. Later the report spells out what ‘a big majority’ means: around nine out of ten abusers were boys, while eight out of ten victims were girls (figures which suggest that there must have been as many cases of boys abusing other boys as there were of girls abusing anyone). The framing of sexual abuse as something ‘children’ do to other ‘children’ glosses over this enormous imbalance. Apart from the BBC, most media outlets treated it as an incidental detail: the Times and the Sun each devoted one sentence to the information that most abusers were boys, while the Mail didn’t mention the issue at all.  

But when I first heard ‘sex abuse between children’, what caught my attention wasn’t primarily the word ‘children’. In the headlines, at least, I found the choice of ‘children’ understandable: the point, I assumed, was to flag the topic of the story as cases where both abuser and abused were under 18, as opposed to cases where children are abused by adults. Still, to my ear there was something not quite right about the phrase–and on reflection I concluded that the problem was ‘between’.

My guess is that ‘between’ was chosen for the same reason as ‘children’—to emphasise that the report dealt with cases where both the perpetrators and the victims were minors. More familiar phrases like ‘sexual abuse of children’ wouldn’t have made that clear. But ‘between children’ is jarring, because it tends to imply that what’s being described is in some sense a joint activity. That’s how ‘between’ works in phrases like ‘a quarrel between neighbours’ or ‘a fight between rival gangs’. The activities referred to are inherently adversarial, but they are nevertheless understood to require reciprocity. You can’t quarrel or fight with someone who isn’t also quarrelling or fighting: if your adversary doesn’t reciprocate you’re not having a quarrel or a fight, you’re just ranting at them or beating them up.

‘Sexual abuse between children’ is apparently constructed in the same way, but it doesn’t fit the template, because reciprocity is not part of the meaning of ‘sexual abuse’. You can see this even more clearly if you turn the nouns (back) into verbs. If it’s true that ‘the Jets fought the Sharks’ then it’s also true that ‘they fought [each other]’; but ‘Jack sexually abused Jill’ does not entail that ‘they abused [each other]’. Sexual abuse, by definition, is something one person does to another without their consent, let alone their active involvement. That’s what makes ‘sexual abuse between children’, and indeed any reference to ‘abuse between Xs’, so peculiar.  

As I’ve already said, I don’t think whoever came up with ‘sexual abuse between children’ actually intended to convey the idea of mutuality or reciprocity. It’s more likely they just didn’t notice that implication. But I still think it’s a problem, as is the consistent preference for gender-neutral or inclusive terms. These linguistic choices are part of a larger pattern—one I’ve commented on in several previous posts about the representation of both sexual violence/abuse and sexism/sexual harassment in schools.

In commentary on these issues there’s a persistent tendency to present coercion or exploitation as mutual engagement. One way in which this is often done is by exaggerating girls’ maturity, agency and power. You see this a lot in court cases involving the sexual abuse or exploitation of children by adults, where it is clearly intended to minimise the adult’s culpability. By presenting the girl as an autonomous agent who voluntarily engaged in a relationship with an older man, defence lawyers hope to persuade jurors, judges and/or public opinion that the so-called ‘abuse’ was in reality no such thing: though her age makes it technically illegal to have sex with her, her precocity makes that a victimless crime, and the verdict or punishment should reflect that.

The idea of female precocity can also be invoked in cases where the abuser is a minor rather than an adult. Boys, the argument goes, mature later than girls both sexually and socially, and this is a reason to cut them some slack: they’re not really bad, just clumsy and impulsive (and easily manipulated by more sexually sophisticated girls). Both versions of this discourse represent girls as more grown-up, and more equal in their relations with boys and men, than most really are, or than they tell researchers they feel.

In relation to schools there is also a persistent tendency to frame sexism and sexual harassment in terms of an eternal ‘battle of the sexes’ which ‘naturally’ expresses itself in conflict between boys and girls. In 2015, when the Institute of Physics issued some guidelines for combatting sexism in schools, commentators regretted that this po-faced political correctness might bring an end to (in one Telegraph writer’s words) ‘the days of boys and girls cheerfully baiting each other in the playground with terms such as “sissy” and “cupcake”’. Like the ‘between children’ formula, ‘baiting each other’ implies reciprocity: the combatants are by implication positioned as equals, ‘cheerfully’ engaged in the mutual ‘baiting’ which has been a feature of playground culture since time immemorial.

The IoP made it easier than it should have been for the media to take this line. Though its intervention was prompted by concern about the way sexism affects girls, its guidelines made a point of being inclusive, treating sexist insults directed to boys, like ‘sissy’ and ‘man up’, on a par with those directed to girls (most of which are far more degrading than ‘sissy’). Other reports published since 2015 have taken a similar approach: though they invariably report that both verbal and other forms of harassment are experienced far more frequently by girls, they end up paying disproportionate attention to the minority of cases where boys are targeted. Presumably this even-handedness is meant to counter accusations of anti-male bias; but when the evidence shows clearly that sexism in schools affects girls far more commonly and more seriously than boys, a representation which suggests otherwise is itself biased.

The same bias is apparent in comments like the one I quoted earlier from the psychologist who said that unwanted touching and pressure to share nude photos had become ‘part of everyday life for children’. It is overwhelmingly girls for whom those things are ‘part of everyday life’, just as it is girls who make up the great majority of victims in cases of ‘sex abuse between children’ (while boys are an even larger majority of abusers). In both our language and our actions we need to face up to the reality of that difference, and of the power imbalance that underpins it. We will never solve the problem of sexual violence and abuse if we habitually use linguistic formulas that obscure what the problem really is.   

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’.

Who’s to be mistress?

On April 13, the Associated Press Stylebook’s Twitter account issued a reminder:

Don’t use the term mistress for a woman who is in a long-term sexual relationship with, and is financially supported by, a man who is married to someone else. Instead, use an alternative like companion, friend or lover on first reference and provide additional details later.

I call this a ‘reminder’ because the rule isn’t new: it was added to the stylebook last year. Nevertheless, the tweet got a reaction: people were variously puzzled, irritated and–in the case of the usual suspects–outraged by this latest manifestation of political correctness gone mad. ‘The word “mistress”’, declared the Daily Mail, ‘is CANCELED’.

Many responses queried the suggestion that ‘mistress’ could be replaced by ‘friend’ or ‘companion’: weren’t those euphemisms rather than synonyms, and as such potentially misleading? The AP conceded that these alternatives ‘fell short’, but insisted they were ‘better than having one word for a woman and none for the man, and implying that the woman was solely responsible for the affair’.

By this point I was confused myself. Is that really the problem with ‘mistress’? And if it is, can it be solved by simply substituting a different word? I couldn’t help feeling that the AP was missing the point—or at least, that it was only skimming the surface. So, in this post I want to take a closer look at a word with a complicated history.

Borrowed from French in the middle ages (the earliest example quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from the early 14^th century), ‘mistress’ was originally just the feminine form of ‘master’, and its core meaning was ‘a woman having authority or control’. ‘The mistress’ could be the female head of a household, or its the highest-ranking female member; she could also be a female boss, in charge of workers, apprentices or servants (it has the same sense in compounds like ‘schoolmistress’ and ‘postmistress’). The female respect titles ‘Mrs’ and ‘Miss’, which are still in use today, are both abbreviated forms of ‘mistress’–and what they originally marked was not marital status, but simply status.  

But of course, word-meanings can change—and when the words refer to women, they have a tendency to change for the worse. Back in 1975, Muriel Schulz named this tendency ‘the semantic derogation of woman’, explaining that

again and again in the history of the [English] language, one finds that a perfectly innocent term designating a girl or women may begin with totally neutral or even positive connotations, but that gradually it acquires negative implications. 

Schulz drew attention to several male/female word-pairs, including ‘Lord/lady’, ‘governor/governess’ and ‘master/mistress’, where the two forms, originally parallel, had diverged in their meaning over time. In each case it was the masculine term which preserved its original association with authority and status, while the feminine term acquired a less exalted meaning. For instance, while ‘Lord’ still denotes a male aristocrat, ‘lady’ can now describe a woman of any social rank. ‘Governess’, originally a direct equivalent of ‘governor’ (in the 16^th century Queen Elizabeth I could be described as ‘the supreme Majesty and Governess of all persons’, meaning that as monarch she ruled over all her subjects), came to refer to a woman who earned her living teaching other people’s children. US states still have ‘governors’ (as do prisons in the UK), but where women have occupied those positions they have invariably adopted the masculine form rather than styling themselves the ‘governess’.

‘Mistress’ is a similar case, with the added problem that it exemplifies what Muriel Schulz considered the archetypal form of semantic derogation, where in addition to being downgraded in status, a word referring to women acquires a specifically sexual derogatory meaning. Often it ends up as yet another synonym for ‘prostitute’. ‘Mistress’ has stopped short of that final destination, but it’s certainly in the same ballpark: Schulz glosses it as ‘the woman with whom a man habitually fornicates’, while the AP’s rule proscribing the word alludes to the idea of the mistress as a ‘kept woman’, financially supported by the man in the relationship.

To understand this history we need to consider the larger context in which words are used—which in this case means examining the economic, social and cultural conditions that have shaped relationships between men and women. If we have, as the AP suggests, ‘one word for the woman and none for the man’, that’s not a random accident; it has a logic which is rooted in past and present realities.

In fact, though, we do have words for the man. Leaving aside the informal and pejorative ones (like ‘cheat’ and ‘love rat’), the most obvious one is ‘lover’. I was taught at school (I know, weird) that if Mary Jones is John Smith’s mistress, then John Smith is Mary Jones’s lover. ‘Lover’ is also the traditional term for a man in an illicit relationship with a more powerful women, as in the Boney M song about Rasputin (‘rah rah Rasputin/lover of the Russian queen’). The pairing of ‘lover’ with ‘mistress’ has a literary pedigree, going back to the mediaeval courtly love tradition in which a knight dedicated his life to the service of the lady he loved, but who was forever out of reach because she was married, often to a higher-ranking man (e.g. Sir Lancelot loved Guinevere, the wife of King Arthur). This is where we get another sense of the word ‘mistress’, ‘a woman who is loved and courted by a man’. That usage remained common in literature for several centuries, but there’s a note in the OED explaining that by the late 19^th century writers had started to avoid it. They feared readers would interpret the word as referring to the morally suspect ‘kept woman’ rather than the idealised love-object of the past.  

We also have at a word for a ‘kept man’: ‘gigolo’, defined by Merriam-Webster as ‘a man who is paid by a woman to be her lover and companion’. But a gigolo is different from a mistress, in ways that reflect some basic facts about patriarchal societies. To begin with, fewer women than men have the resources to pay someone for sex and companionship. Also, men are not encouraged to view economic dependence on women as desirable, or even acceptable, nor to treat their own sexuality as a marketable commodity. That’s why ‘gigolo’ is—I would say—a more pejorative term than ‘mistress’. Of course, nobody tells women in so many words that they should treat their sexuality as a commodity, but historically that has often been their best or their only route to economic security. In the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, when women’s earning opportunities were limited and their rights almost nonexistent, feminists often drew parallels between marriage and prostitution, pointing out that both were exchange-relationships–sex for money, or for upkeep—which women entered into by necessity. The mistress as a ‘kept woman’ also had a place in this structure. The gigolo does not: like his female employer he is an anomaly.

Would calling a man a gigolo imply, as the AP thinks ‘mistress’ implies, that he was ‘solely responsible for the affair’? My feeling is that it wouldn’t, and indeed that we wouldn’t describe this relationship as an ‘affair’. ‘Affair’ tends to imply mutual desire (even if there’s also a financial element), but the gigolo is understood to be in it for the money, not the sex—if his employer were desirable she wouldn’t need to pay. The gigolo isn’t like Whitney Houston’s character in ‘Saving All My Love’, lamenting that she can only share ‘a few stolen moments’ with her lover because his family comes first; nor is he Dolly Parton’s Jolene, the flame-haired temptress and homewrecker. He’s a paid employee, a sort of cross between an escort and a personal assistant.

There’s no way of knowing if the women in the songs are mistresses in the ‘kept woman’ sense, or just single women in relationships with married men. Do ‘kept women’ even exist any more? The economic element doesn’t seem to be central to the current meaning of ‘mistress’ for most English-speakers, who seem happy to use the word for women who have well-paid jobs and/or husbands to support them (Camilla Parker-Bowles, for instance, was referred to as Prince Charles’s mistress during the period when both of them were married to other people). I remember, back in the 1980s, being told about a senior academic who had allegedly asked a woman he met at a conference to become his mistress, presenting her with a draft contract in which he undertook to pay all her expenses if she gave up her job and devoted herself to his needs. We found this both shocking and hilarious: what professional woman in the late 20^th century would be remotely interested in such a proposal? (Today I’d have another question: what man would feel obliged to make it?)

But if the ‘kept woman’ is disappearing—if women no longer need or want to be her and men no longer feel an obligation to compensate her—why do we go on using the term ‘mistress’ for women in sexual relationships with married men? Without the element of financial dependence there’s surely nothing distinctive about these relationships: anyone–man, woman, straight or queer–can get involved with someone who is cheating on their spouse. So, why not abandon ‘mistress’—which is sex-specific, presumptively heterosexual and, in its ‘kept woman’ sense, increasingly archaic—and adopt a single label that covers all the possibilities? If we don’t like ‘friend’ or ‘companion’, we could go with the AP’s other suggestion, ‘lover’. We use it for men, so why not for women too?  

But the responses to the AP’s tweet suggested that some people do think a mistress is different from a lover. And this does seem to be connected with the question of responsibility, though I don’t see the connection in exactly the same way as the AP. To my mind, the issue isn’t that we have ‘one word for the woman and none for the man’—that she gets blamed because (only) she is named. Arguably it has more to do with the historical baggage ‘mistress’ carries, a lot of which is about female power. The mistress may no longer be a powerful woman in the original (social and economic) sense, but what she does still have, in our collective imagination, is sexual power: she uses her lover’s desire for her to gain authority and control over him.  

That view of the mistress was visible in some comments both on the AP tweet and the Daily Mail article. They tended to come from women whose husbands had had affairs, and who wanted to push back against the idea that it’s unfair to women to use a word that ‘implies the woman is responsible for the affair’. Their point was that wives are women too, and it isn’t unfair to hold mistresses responsible for behaving in ways that harm other women. Some conceded that the mistress wasn’t solely responsible—‘I know it takes two’—but they clearly blamed her more than they blamed their cheating husbands.

One reason for that may be simply that it’s easier and less painful to blame the one we don’t love. But also in the mix is the idea that when it comes to sex men are weak and gullible creatures: they can’t help themselves, whereas a woman in a relationship with a married man ‘knows exactly what she’s doing’ and could choose, if she had any decency, not to do it. In essence this is the ‘Jolene’ story, where the salient power differential is not between men and women, but between the wife and the woman who threatens to ‘take her man’ (an interesting phrase, since it reverses the usual pattern by making a woman the agent and a man the object).

The connotations ‘mistress’ has acquired over centuries of use make it particularly well-placed to serve this woman-blaming/man-excusing purpose. Yet it is clearly possible to express the same ideas in other words. As an illustration, consider a recent Spectator article in which Douglas Murray aired his concerns about the power wielded by Carrie Symonds, the partner of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Murray doesn’t call Symonds a ‘mistress’: though their relationship began while Johnson was married, it would be a strange term to use now she is living with him and their child in Downing Street. Instead he refers to her as Johnson’s ‘girlfriend’ or his ‘companion’. The AP Stylebook would presumably approve–except that what follows is exactly the kind of woman-blaming the ban on ‘mistress’ was meant to counter.

Murray points out that in Britain by convention we don’t assign a political role to the ‘first lady’ (or gentleman): we think the only people who govern us should be the ones we actually elected. But as he sees it Carrie Symonds is not abiding by that convention: she is using her position to gain undeserved political influence. He also suggests that many of Johnson’s problems since 2019 have arisen because of the ‘sway—even terror—his younger companion seems to exert over him’. She is said to be responsible for a number of misjudgments: for instance, she ‘persuaded the PM to stop a badger cull’, and ‘made him stop a COBRA meeting at the height of the Covid crisis’.

Here, once again, we have the female agent/male object pattern, presenting Symonds as the powerful one and Johnson as her puppet. Yet even if he did cancel an important meeting to placate her, that was still his decision, his action, his responsibility. He’s the Prime Minister, FFS: ‘she made me do it’ is the excuse of a four-year old. Granted, it’s not Johnson himself who’s making that excuse, but Murray isn’t the only person making it on his behalf. Dominic Cummings recently claimed that Johnson tried to prevent an inquiry he feared would cause ‘trouble with Carrie’; and more or less everyone blames her for the current ‘cash for cushions’ scandal. (And no, I’m not suggesting Johnson cares about cushions—just that he’s the one who ultimately decides what will or won’t be purchased for his official residence.)

Times may change and words may change, but what doesn’t change is the story of the ambitious, manipulative woman and the man whose desire for her makes him putty in her hands. You can give her whatever name you want: terminology, in this case, is a symptom of a deeper problem. Though I’d be happy to see the back of ‘mistress’, we shouldn’t imagine that cancelling the word will stop people blaming women, or making excuses for men.

‘Woman’: an update

Back in the summer of 2019, I wrote about a petition which called on Oxford University Press to change the Oxford dictionary entry for ‘woman’. It was started by Maria Beatrice Giovanardi after she googled the word ‘woman’ and was shocked by what her search returned—entries full of insulting synonyms (‘baggage’, ‘besom’, ‘bint’) and time-warped example sentences like ‘Ms September will embody the professional, intelligent yet sexy career woman’. Oxford wasn’t the only offender, but its market position and reputation made it a prime target for Giovanardi’s campaign. Her petition attracted media attention, and ultimately over 30,000 signatures. Oxford announced that it was undertaking a review. And earlier this month, the first results were unveiled.

Here’s what you get if you google ‘woman’ now:  

Woman /ˈwʊmən/ noun

noun: woman; plural noun: women

1. an adult female human being. “a drawing of a young woman”

Similar: lady, adult female, female, girl, person, lass, lassie, wife, colleen, Frau, Signora, Señora, the female of the species, member of the fair sex, member of the fairer sex, bird, gal, Jane, sister, Sheila, femme, Judy, dame, broad, frail, maid, maiden, damsel, demoiselle, gentlewoman, bint, mare, [offensive] bitch

• a female member of a workforce, team, etc. “thousands of women were laid off”
• a female person associated with a particular place, activity, or occupation “she was the first Oxford woman to take a first in Physics”
• a disrespectful form of address to a woman “don’t be daft, woman!”
• DATED  a female person who is paid to clean someone’s house and carry out other domestic duties “a daily woman”
• a person’s wife, girlfriend, or female lover. “he wondered whether Billy had his woman with him”

Similar: girlfriend, girl, partner, significant other,  wife, spouse, consort, fiancée, lover, mistress, sweetheart, inamorata, better half, other half, baby, Mrs, old lady, gf, missus, bird, her indoors, mot, dona, bibi, querida, lady friend, lady love, young lady, lady, lady wife, old dutch, squeeze, patootie, leman, doxy, paramour

• a person with the qualities traditionally associated with females. “I feel more of a woman by empowering myself to do what is right for me”
• a female individual; one “with that money, a woman could buy a house and put two kids through college”

First, a pedantic point: though many headlines said Oxford had ‘changed the definition of woman’, in fact the definition has not changed: it’s still ‘adult female human being’. What’s changed is some of the other stuff that appears in a dictionary entry. The list of synonyms no longer includes some of the archaic and little-used terms from the previous version (e.g. ‘besom’, ‘wench’); it does still contain some insulting items, on the grounds that they remain in common use, but notes have been added explaining that ‘bitch’, for example, is ‘offensive’. Some more specialised senses of ‘woman’ get similar warning labels. ‘Woman’ as a vocative (as in ‘don’t be daft, woman!’) is ‘disrespectful’, and ‘woman’ in the sense of ‘maid/cleaner’ is ‘dated’.

The old example sentences have been ditched; the new ones depict women in what Oxford calls an ‘active and positive’ way, getting first class degrees in physics, empowering themselves and putting their children through college. Even the less upbeat ‘thousands of women were laid off’ is an implicit reminder of women’s presence in the paid workforce. I’ll confess to finding this a bit heavy-handed, as though the entry-writer had decided to atone for the casual sexism of the past by choosing only examples with an Uplifting Feminist Message. But that’s a minor quibble: the new examples do a decent job of illustrating the usages they’ve been chosen to exemplify.    

For most media commentators, however, the most newsworthy aspect of the revision was not the culling of archaic synonyms or the use of examples showing women in a positive light. What really caught their attention was the shift to LGBT-inclusive language in ‘a person’s wife, girlfriend or female lover’. Pink News, unsurprisingly, led on this change—but so did many mainstream publications which are not exactly known for their cutting-edge sexual politics. The Daily Mail, for instance, ran a report headed ‘Oxford English Dictionary updates entry for “woman” so that it is now defined as a “person’s” wife, girlfriend or lover as opposed to a man’s after gender review’, and went on to note that the entry for ‘man’ has had a parallel makeover: it ‘now reads as “a person’s husband, boyfriend or male lover”’.   

These updates were undoubtedly needed. We’ve been referring to same-sex partners as ‘wives/husbands’ for several years now, and same-sex uses of ‘boyfriend/girlfriend/lover’ go back much further. But the issue being addressed by the substitution of ‘person’ for ‘man/woman’ is not sexism but heterosexism. The commentators who hailed it as a breakthrough seem not to have noticed that it’s an isolated and largely token gesture: the rest of this section, beginning with the example sentence ‘he wondered whether Billy had his woman with him’ and continuing with a list of synonyms which includes ‘her indoors’, ‘doxy’ and ‘patootie’, is still entirely patriarchal and heteronormative.

Some readers did notice this, and were evidently confused by it: their comments on the Mail story included ‘People in general are definitively much more than just the roles they fill in others’ lives’, and ‘So a woman is not an individual person but belong[s] to somebody else?’ This criticism does not reflect the overall emphasis of the entry, where ‘a person’s wife, girlfriend or female lover’ is only one of several senses listed. But it does reflect the emphasis the media gave to the LGBT inclusion angle, which led some readers to conclude that ‘wife, girlfriend or female lover’ was now the primary definition of ‘woman’, and to wonder–not unreasonably–why that was supposed to be progress.   

Though the petition focused specifically on the ‘woman’ entry, Oxford’s review did not stop there. Revisions have also been made to other entries which were thought to pose similar problems. Many news reports mentioned two of these: ‘housework’, where the example ‘she still does all the housework’ has been replaced by ‘I was busy doing housework when the doorbell rang’, and ‘high-maintenance’, where the sentence ‘if Martin could keep a high-maintenance girl like Tania happy, he must be doing something right’ has been replaced by ‘I freely admit to being high-maintenance’.   

These substitutions, while unobjectionable, show the limitations of an approach which tackles stereotyping by simply replacing sex-specific examples with gender-neutral/inclusive ones. When you read ‘I freely admit to being high-maintenance’, who do you imagine as the ‘I’? In many cases we would tend to imagine a gender-unspecified person as male by default, but in this case I’m betting that most readers will picture a woman. Part of what English-speakers know about the expression ‘high-maintenance’ is that when it’s used to describe a person, that person is likely to be female (I did a quick corpus search to check, and found that references to ‘high-maintenance’ women were over three times more frequent than similar references to men). If you want to block that association, you probably need to pick an explicitly male-referring example. A gender-neutral one avoids overt stereotyping, but it doesn’t prevent the covert stereotyping that results from readers interpreting ‘I’ in relation to their pre-existing cultural and linguistic knowledge.

But in any case there’s a question about whether a descriptive dictionary, one whose aim is to document, as OUP’s press statement put it, ‘how real people use English in their daily lives’, should be trying to block associations which are part of our knowledge about words. It’s one thing if the sexism is gratuitous—if a sexist example has been selected for no good reason (as appears to have been the case with Oxford’s use of ‘a rabid feminist’ to illustrate ‘rabid’, which was criticised on social media a few years ago); but if there’s evidence that ‘high-maintenance’ really is used more frequently about women, should that not be reflected in the entry for it? Should dictionaries be trying to present us with a less biased world than the one we currently inhabit—or is their real obligation to reflect the world as it is, and as it shapes our use of words?

For the makers of dictionaries this is a perennial, and genuinely difficult, question. They may say that their decisions are ‘driven solely by evidence about how real people use English in their daily lives’, but ‘solely’ is an overstatement: they also have to consider what real people want from, and find acceptable in, their products. Sensitivities change over time—in the past many controversies turned on matters of taste and decency, whereas today there is more concern about diversity and bias—but what doesn’t change is the existence of competing pressures, and the difficulty of finding a balance between them.  

Has Oxford found the right balance? Maria Beatrice Giovanardi told reporters that while she is mostly happy with the revisions, she’s disappointed by the retention of ‘bitch’, and will continue to press for its removal. I think she’s got a point: while I don’t believe offensive epithets should be airbrushed out of dictionaries, I do struggle with the logic of putting ‘bitch’ on a list of synonyms for ‘woman’.

To see what I’m getting at, let’s take a look at the list of synonyms in the ‘man’ entry:

male, gentleman, guy, fellow, gent, mother’s son, bloke, chap, geezer, lad, Joe, dude, bro, hombre, digger, oke, ou, oom, bodach, cove, carl.

Essentially this is a list of stylistic and/or regional variants meaning ‘man’, or in a couple of cases ‘old man’. The corresponding list in the ‘woman’ entry (see above) also includes informal and regional variants (e.g. ‘girl/gal’, ‘lassie’, ‘colleen’, ‘Sheila’), but in addition it features two sets of words which have no parallel on the ‘man’ list: archaic courtly terms (‘maiden’, ‘damsel/demoiselle’, ‘member of the fair(er) sex’) and belittling or dehumanising insults (‘bint’, ‘bird’, ‘bitch’, ‘mare’–though not ‘cunt’, which suggests that evidence-based decision-making does have limits).

This is what I meant when I used the word ‘logic’: it’s not just that the two lists contain different words (which you’d obviously expect), it’s that they seem to have been compiled on different principles. That can’t be because there are no comparable words for men. If you’re going to count ‘bitch’ and ‘mare’ as synonyms for ‘woman’, you could equally count ‘stallion’, ‘cock’ and ‘stag’ as synonyms for ‘man’. True, they’re not exact equivalents (the difference reflects our culture’s more negative attitude to female sexuality), but if it’s relevant to include words from this general category in the ‘woman’ entry, why not do the same for ‘man’? If the casually contemptuous ‘bint’ belongs on one list, why doesn’t the other include, say, ‘git’ or ‘bastard’? If ‘damsel’, why not ‘knight’?

I’m not seriously suggesting that these terms should be added to the ‘man’ entry. The serious question is why flowery euphemisms and insults are deemed essential for our understanding of ‘woman’, whereas ‘man’ requires no such elaboration. I’m inclined to see this asymmetry as a hangover from the long history of treating ‘woman’ as man’s ‘Other’, and representing her from men’s perspective. Just removing ‘bitch’ would not resolve this deeper problem–but I do think it needs to be acknowledged and addressed.

So, from me as from Maria Beatrice Giovanardi, it’s two cheers for Oxford’s revisions. Heartfelt cheers in my case, though, because I don’t think we should underestimate either the magnitude or the difficulty of the task they’ve taken on. It’s a lot easier to criticise a dictionary than it is to make one.