I don’t know why I thought of these words of actress Meryl Streep which occurred in a chat show in November 2023 but it got me thinking again about language. Who determines it and how it is used. Its power resides in the fact that it appears neutral but is in fact almost always gendered and can reflect and reinforce ongoing inequalities in more subtle ways than direct discrimination.
My first foray into a feminist analysis of language was via the brilliant book Man Made Language by Australian writer Dale Spender. The work of other feminist linguists like the late Debbie Cameron whose most popular book is The Myth of Mars and Venus have been invaluable in revealing the importance of language in feminism.
This is what Streep says:
“Women learn the language of men. They live in the house of men. They speak men. But men don’t speak women.”
Meryl Streep says something here which at first hearing sounds quite shocking … we don’t really expect such feminist pronouncements in a tv show but it absolutely resonated with women in the audience who burst out in spontaneous applause. One of the other (all male) guests broke the slight awkwardness on the stage with a funny comment..it was risky but it worked and provoked a lot of laughter, particularly from Meryl. She had verbalised what women know deep down but don’t often acknowledge consciously in quite a stark way.
Fitting into public life has always required women to use male language. Public discourses weren’t developed by women because until relatively recently women were barred from most areas of public life.
It took decades to get institutions and common parlance to even add the word women to men, rather than assume we were included in the word men, which is what we were told we should infer. You can see why us older feminists are fighting for the right to retain the word woman and other female terms which are being erased in the name of a crazy ideology which reframes the erasure as inclusion! ( I will be writing another post on the use of language in the world of diversity)
German sociologist Max Weber developed a theory of social closure …he saw that professions often develop their own language as a way of keeping control of who is in and who is out (as well as other measures like exams). We see this all the time with excessive use of acronyms in certain professions and particularly in academia where the language these days is pretty incomprehensible to anyone not inside the academy. Closure is useful concept that I have applied to the ways in which organisational cultures can close off areas of work to women or marginalise them whilst appearing normal or natural. Language and communication styles is one way in which this is done.
When I joined a City bank in the early eighties as a graduate, the language of the stock market included many metaphors and words from the world of sports, war and sex… a lot of these phrases were uncomfortable for a woman to use. As an example companies ‘got into bed together’ (merged) were even ‘raped’(taken over unwillingly) and stocks were sexy, if they were though good to buy. The City language was a continual reminder that we women didn’t really belong there.
When the exact same words are spoken by a man and a woman, they are frequently perceived and evaluated differently. Back in those days there was a huge amount of swearing, telling of sexual stories etc on the trading desks. There were only a handful of women working there and so it was a question of put up and shut up or join in. The latter tactic didn’t work. The one female trader who attempted to join in was talked about behind her back as being course and unattractive. Double standards apply to language as well as behaviour.