Book Review : On the Origins of Gender Discrimination in Language

Grammar and Gender by Dennis Baron (Yale University Press: $23.50)

Feminist scholars have been profoundly distressed by sexism in language, a state of affairs resistant to reform. Despite strenuous and often creative attempts to neutralize terminology and grammar, pathetically little headway has been made.

For what it’s worth, we have Ms., and enlightened journals have officially abandoned endings perceived by the reformers as diminishing, such as the endings on authoress, farmerette, aviatrix and the like. Capitulating to vociferous demand, the United States Manpower Administration has renamed itself the Education and Training Administration and issued a list of 3,500 job titles revised to eliminate references to age or sex, “except where no meaningful neuter titles could be developed, like ‘able seaman’ or ‘leading lady.’ ”

Wherever possible and sometimes where not, sex-specific suffixes are replaced by the syllable er, giving us the designations servicer, repairer, flagger, launderer, and for a seamstress, sewer, which illustrates how doggedly the English language fights back.

Bobbye Sorrels, a feminist grammarian quoted by Dennis Baron, cannot tolerate the masculine generic in any form and would purge our vocabulary of masterpiece, maestro, masterly, and even master key. She would put killers on trial for personslaughter and remove the king from chess, checkers and decks of cards, replacing it with the gender-neuter president, leaving the matter of renaming the rest of the pieces to someone like Gary Kasparov, who would, of course, no longer be a grand master of the game but merely a champion or best in show.

His, Her, Their?

Most troublesome of all to the militant grammarians is the lack of a neutral pronoun to agree with collective nouns like everyone. As matters stand, proper English usage demands all such nouns be followed by the cumbersome double singular--his or her--if the group is mixed. These crusaders believe the female psyche is irreparably damaged by the use of his alone in these cases. Some justify the incorrect plural their, reasoning that bad grammar is better than sexism; others would devise an artificial pronoun, a long list of which Baron includes.

These innovations date from 1850, when the first stirrings of the feminist movement inspired ne, nis, nim and hiser, to 1985, when herm was advocated. Not one of these words has ever been adopted, for which we might all be grateful. Would a fifth-grade girl be more likely to become a physician or lawyer if her teacher had said, “Everyone hand in ips notebook?” Po, xe, em, hisher, sheehy and hesh have been suggested by other reformers, but to no avail.

Barton meticulously explores the origins of gender discrimination in language, finding the source of the distinction in the myths of creation, as languages developed according to an Adam’s rib pattern: man primary, woman secondary. He has amassed an overwhelming collection of evidence to show how sexual bias invades a language and becomes virtually impervious to eradication, discussing those in which nouns have specific gender but concentrating upon English, which discriminates in subtler ways. Though this insidious process may begin spontaneously, Barton cites cases of male etymologists inventing and perpetuating myths about the origin of words in order to rationalize those that belittle women and glorify men, while purporting to do just the opposite.

When the BA degree was first granted to women, many 19th-Century educators insisted female recipients be known as Maids of Arts, and in the rare cases when a woman earned a more advanced degree, as Mistress or Doctress. As more women entered occupations dominated by men, the diminutive and demeaning suffixes proliferated. Some, like starlet and majorette, linger on; most died of acute absurdity, like hoboette for an indigent female traveler, jockette for a woman who rides racehorses, and pickette, a woman striker.

Subtle Prejudice

Baron also investigates the curious taboos surrounding the use of so-called “feminine” expressions and phrasing by men: words such as adorable, lovely, divine, charming, chic, exquisite and stunning, a powerful prejudice illustrating how even theoretically genderless words are perceived as masculine or feminine. The feminine is always disdained by men and avoided by women who wish to be taken seriously.

Though “Grammar and Gender” is a calm, lucid and evenhanded discussion of a problem often arousing fury from less temperate scholars, the persistence of such discrimination seems irremediable unless we are willing to impoverish our language by discarding all such expressions and replacing them with synthetic, graceless coinages.

Baron ends his work with the wistful hope that dictionaries, grammars, thesauruses and usage guides will acknowledge “woman’s position as a visible and independent partner in the creation and perpetuation of English,” which seems all a reasonable person could ask.

The alternative is a return to grunts, growls and cave drawings, which might well turn out, on close scrutiny, to be inherently gender-specific. Why not just settle for being involved in mankind?