First Year Courses & Programs

Basic Writing (ENGLWRIT 111)

Unit 4
Language and the Construction of Gender:
Being Female

Work Schedules / Exploratory Writings / Related Sites

You are about to join an on-going conversation about "truth" and "reality," especially the truths and realities of gender. To this conversation, you'll bring your own experiences and use them to challenge (I hope) the culture's "dominant stories" and "normalizing truths." Note the ways in which these writers differ from as well as agree with one another. Note, too, that they speak specifically not only about the social construction of "women" but also about the social construction of "men." And while they are concerned with women's and men's different positions in conversations like these, their observations apply to numerous other individuals and groups whose identities are socially constructed.

Deborah Tannen is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and the author of numerous popular books as well as scholarly articles on cultural and gender differences in conversational styles. In "Talk in the Intimate Relationship: His and Hers," the chapter you will read from her book That's Not What I Meant: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships, Tannen makes the point that "male-female conversation is cross-cultural communication," whether the man and woman come from different social cultures or not.  Girls tend to grow up playing cooperatively in small groups or pairs, she tells us; boys, in large groups where competition is keen.  Whether we consider these tendencies natural or socially constructed, the divide they lead to between men's and women's ways of talking is no less difficult to cross.

Blythe McVicker Clinchy is a professor of psychology at Wellesley College, a private women's college in eastern Massachusetts, and a co-author with Mary Belenky of Women's Ways of Knowing.  Like Tannen, she believes girls are socialized in this culture to value cooperation; boys, competition.  But whereas Tannen focuses on the different ways of communicating that result, Clinchy focuses on men's and women's different ways of knowing.  She calls the masculine way "separate knowing"; the feminine way Clinchy calls "connected knowing."  Like Tannen, she is careful to say that neither way is better than the other and that both are vital.  She does say, however, that most teachers have traditionally privileged "separate knowing," with the result that men's and women's educational experiences are generally not just different but unequal.  More political, perhaps, than Tannen, Clinchy and her studies suggest that because women's ways of knowing go largely unacknowledged, what they know goes unexpressed. 

Linguist Dale Spender's "The Politics of Naming" narrows our focus on communication to single words.   The word choices we make, the vocabulary available to us, the names given persons, events, and phenomena around us do not reflect objective reality.  They do not match it.  Instead, words symbolically represent objective reality and therefore both contain and convey our interpretations of it.  In short, every name is a tiny but infinitely powerful "story."  Like all stories, names define and limit our worldview.  And according to Spender, like all stories, new names are determined by our stock of previous names, not by the object or phenomenon to be named.  The group who constructs and controls a society's vocabulary thus controls the way members of that society continue to understand, express, and ultimately live their lives. The group historically in control of the English language and its vocabulary -- especially the public vocabulary of politics, economics, religion, and science -- has been the group in control of those social arenas, the dominant group of Western society, that is, wealthy white men.  A feminist as well as a linguist, Spender goes on to discuss the ways in which a male-created language system has frustrated women's attempts to express female existence, and how women have struggled to create a vocabulary truer to their experiences, a vocabulary including such terms as "sexism" and "sexual harassment," unknown as late as the mid-1970s.  But Spender's concept of a vocabulary's power to silence those outside the dominant group goes far beyond gender bounds:  imagine a world that had no word for "racism" but did have a word for "drapetomania," meaning "the strange desire of slaves to run away."  That was our world of the United States not so many years ago.

Adrienne Rich, poet and English professor, urges teachers and students alike to start "Taking Women Students Seriously."  It is no coincidence that Tannen, Clinchy, and Spender all refer to Rich in their essays: she has been an eloquent and ardent advocate for women for over thirty years.  Unfortunately, the essay you will read here, though first presented as an address to teachers of women at the New Jersey College and University Coalition on Women's Education in 1978, is still timely today.  The silencing of women's voices in the classroom, the erasure of women's achievements from college texts, and the violence against women on college campuses all serve, asserts Rich, both to indicate and to perpetuate the unequal education women receive as well as the subjugation they experience.