This chapter discusses the various ways in which language portrays a negative image of women. Some of the ways in which language has been found wanting in as far as women are concerned are outlined as follows: Language creates false gender neutrality as this purported neutrality ends up showing a bias towards maleness anyway. Language generally makes women invisible and always overshadowed by men. It makes maleness the standard measure of humanity, and maturity is all about and thus maleness is seen as the norm. Sex-marking also encourages male visibility and powerlessness of women in a male-dominated world. The world is seen through an oppressive male worldview. Reform efforts have been piecemeal and as such have largely failed to reach the desired destination. The chapter closes by discussing the concepts ‘woman' and ‘generics' which have been found to be controversial in the life of women.
Top4.1 False Gender-Neutrality
According the Saul (2017), there has been a great deal of feminist concern over the supposedly gender-neutral use of terms like ‘he’ and ‘man’. It is believed that these terms have both gender-specific meanings, as in sentences (1) and (2), and gender-neutral ones, as in sentences (3) and (4).
Feminists, however, have pointed out that even the supposed gender-neutral meanings of these terms are not really gender-neutral. Janice Moulton (1981a) and Adele Mercier (1995) provide examples in which there is no doubt that a gender-neutral meaning is intended, but this meaning seems unavailable. As a result, the sentences seem ill-formed:
We are, then, making a classificatory error if we claim that ‘man’ and ‘he’ are gender-neutral terms. In order to avoid such a classificatory error, we need to do more careful work on what the meanings of these terms actually are. Perhaps the meaning of ‘he’ that has been called ‘gender-neutral’ is not really gender-neutral, but something much more complex. Mercier suggests, for example, that we should understand the ‘gender-neutral’ use of ‘man’ as referring to either (a) a person or persons of unknown sex; or (b) males or a combination of males and females. This explains why ‘men’ in (5) and ‘man’ in (6) are anomalous: these terms are being used to refer exclusively to persons known to be female.
The supposed ‘gender-neutral’ meaning of these terms, then, is not truly gender neutral. But, on its own, this does not show that there is a problem with those uses that have traditionally been classified as gender-neutral, as in sentences (3) and (4).