Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

A-Z 349
for the study of Latin. They used masculine gender pronouns, not because they could
refer to both sexes, but because males dominated the world of education and literacy. No
early grammar book has as one of its rules any that says that masculine pronouns include
females when used in general reference, and the usage only became a general rule in
1746 when John Kirkly made it the twenty-first of eighty-eight grammatical rules, on the
grounds that the male pronoun was more comprehensive than the female.
Later grammarians added to this feeling the notion that the use of they violated rules of
number agreement—a consideration which, as we have seen above, did not concern
Shakespeare, and one which appears to make the unwarranted assumption that number
agreement is more important than gender agreement. Finally, in 1850, an Act of
Parliament made it a law that ‘words importing the masculine gender shall be deemed
and taken to include females’. The second argument in favour of the use of male forms as
generics states that we all know this to be the case.
2 However, the evidence appears to suggest that the terms in question are false
generics. If they were true generic terms, there should be nothing odd about sentences
like Man breastfeeds his young; man suffers in childbirth’, Diana Nyad became the first
man to swim from the Bahamas to Florida. Studies like that of Schneider and Hucker
(1972) provide empirical evidence against man as a generic. They asked two groups of
college students to select from magazines and newspapers, pictures to illustrate a
sociology text book. One group were asked to find illustrations for headings like
Industrial man; Political man; Urban man. The other group’s headings were of the type
Industrial life; Political life; Urban life. In a majority of cases, students of both sexes
chose pictures of males to illustrate the titles including the term man, while choosing
pictures including both sexes to illustrate the life titles. This shows that the term man is
semantically loaded in favour of males, that is, it makes users think predominantly of
males.
It is also odd, if we assume the generic status of the male forms, that she should
nevertheless be used so often in generalizations about secretaries, nurses, primary-school
teachers, baby-sitters, shoppers, child-minders, and cleaners, in fact, about just those
workers who are most frequently female.
The effect of the use of the false generic is held to be that women are often being
made invisible by the language, that is, the language has only a negative semantic space
for women (Stanley, 1977); women are—MALE. As Graham (1975) argues, if you have
a group C divided into two halves, A and B, then A and B can be equal members of C.
But if you call the whole group A, one half A and the other half B, then the B half will be
seen as deviant, the exception, the subspecies, the outsiders (Graham, 1975).
It is, furthermore, very easy to find evidence in support of the claim that when women
are seen through language, they are seen in an unfavourable light (compare Spender
1980). Indeed, the term woman itself had negative connotations for most of the culture
until the 1970s and retains these connotations in some groups in the early 1990s. The
polite term, or euphemism, for a woman used to be, and in some circles it still is, lady,
and there were (are) very clear rules for how a lady should behave and talk (see Robin
Lakoff, 1975).
Some of these behavioural standards are reflected in linguistic usage; thus Stanley
(1973) counts 220 English words for sexually promiscuous females and only twenty for
sexually promiscuous males. This reveals some of the culture’s general attitude to males