Lakoff, Robin Language and Womans Place

LANGUAGE
and
Womans Place
m H O N BOOKS
H w r L Rar,Pubhbcm
wm~rprk,Hagemmn, SmFramim,
Contents
Preface
One can look at woman's position in our city from any number of
points of view and gain enlightenment from each. In this book I have
tried to see what we m learn about the wayhornen view themselves_ 2
and everyone's
-assumptions about the nature and role of wzmen&
the
use
of
a
l
n
n
our cwlt_urgJthat is to say, the language used
--+.-by and about women. While my ~ % S O Ufor
~ taking this particular tack
are based on my training in linguistics, I feel that such study is quite
justifiable in its own terms. Language is more amenable to precise
repduction on p p e r and unambiguous analysis than are other
forms of human behavior; if we tell someone he has done something
&t,
we often don't h o w how to describe exactly what he's done
so that we mn argue meaningfully about the truth of that d o n :
the evidence vanisha before it can be studid. But if we say to someone, "You said. . . which is insulting to women," provided he agrees
that he has made the statement, it-is available and open to close
analysis. Often, as psychoanalysis has shown in such detail, we say
things without knowing their sipnificance, but the fact that we have
said them shows that there is more going on in our minds than we
consciously take credit for. By looki~~g
at the way we customarily talk
if we are women, or talk a b u t women whoever we are, we can gain
insight into the way we feel-abut ourselves, h u t womenthrough close analysis of what we say and how we say it until in the
end we can ask and perhaps even answer the question: Why did I say
it? It is my hope, then, to look at some of these linguistic issus and
see what they tell us.
The ideas that are discussed in the book are the result of many
2 / Language and Woman's Place

.
m
n
ls
e
lhdul-mend
with
mention of whose names here is scarcely a just reward
for what each has contributed to my thinking. First of all,in both time
and importance, George Woff has been my teacher, adviser, and
friend, linguistidly and otherwise, for many years; most of what I
about language can be trad- @him. I have also learned by
- know
.
.- having to argue him out of male-chauvinist ways and assumptions
many times over the years; probably I would never have started
thinking a b u t the questions pxed here had he not fond me to
defend myself in arguments abut linguistic sexism.
Many of my oo11tagucs and friends have also been helpful; let me
single out a few for mention, though many others have baen helpful
as well, Charlotte WW,
Wallace Chafe, Herb and Eve Clark, Louise
Cherry, Alan Dcrshowitz, Richard DieBold, James Fox, David
Green, Georgia Green,John and Jenny Gumpen, Dell Hymes, Mary
Ritchie Key, John and Sally LawIer, Susan Matisoff, James D.
McCawky, Michelle Rosaldo, John R. Ross, Louis Sass, Julia Stanley, Emily Stoper, E l h l x t h Traugott, Monica Wilson, and Philip
Zimbdo.
I should also like to thank the Center for Advanoed Study for the
Behavioral Sciences, where I was a Fellow in 1971-72 and where I
didmg_t of the research yd writing underlying the first part of this
book; and the Natiod Science Foundation, which has supported the
for these studies under grant GS38476.
hours
f o
.manv=l%
9
PARl' 1
Language
and Womans Place
1/ Introduction
Language uses us as much as we use language. As much as our choice
of forms of expression is guided by the thoughts we want to express,
to the m e extent the way we feel about the things in the real world
governs the way we express ourselves about these things. TWOwords
can be synonymous in their denotative sense,but one will be used in
case a speaker feels favorably toward the object the word denotes, the
other if he is unfavorably d i s p a l . Similar situations are legion,
involving unexptedness, intwest, and other emotional reactions on
the part of the speaker to what he is talking about. Thus, while two
s o e a k e f g m a v q h u t the .=.th%
w .red-x~&&!ti%
u n r e w . The following well-known paradigm will l
x illustrative.
(1) (a) 1 am stroqg-minded.
(b} You are obstinate.
tc) He is pighded.
If it is indeed true that our feelings about the world color our
@pression of our thouhts, then we can use our linguistic behavior
4 / Longuage and Woman's Place
as a diagnostic of our hidden feelings about things. For often-as

anyone with even a nodding aquaintance with mdern psychoandytic writing knows too well-we can interpret our overt actions,
or our perceptions, in mrdance with our desires, distorting them as
we sx fit. But the linguistic data are there, in black and white, or on
tape, unambiguous and unavoidable. Hence,while in the ideal world
other kinds of evidence for wciologicd phenomena would be desirable
along with, or in addition to, Iinguistic evidence, sometimes at l a s t
the latter is all we can get with certainty. This is especidy likely in
emotionally charged areas like that of sexism and other forms of
discriminatory behavior. This book, then, is an attempt to procde
&@.gs_ti_c
e v i c h f~t ~ mw a g e use for ope type,of in_euity that
has-bemc m e d to exist in our smie~:
that
and w a m a I will attempt to
anything a n be done, from the linguistic end of the problem: does one
correct e wial inequity by changing linguistic disparities? We will
' fmd, I think, that womm e m e n c e linguistic dis~rhimtionin two
wigs: in the ~ a y . _ ~use a1e-, s ~and in &-way
! genergllar?guage use -.&em.
Both tend, as we shall see, to
'
gate women to c e m h fundims that of g&x
mat;and therefore
items%
o k e ~ n a
-&_~mm.adiff~that
-&be
&-M except
gth-referen% to the-@=-t
t h e - m e p l a.y -in.society.
-.
The data on which I am basing my claims have been gathered
mainly by introspection: I have examined my own meech anathat of
-=
,
I
Language and Woman's Place / 5
I hllVt aIso made use ofthe-mm&a:

in some ways, the spaech heard,
for example, in_-commmercials
or situation comedies q . . I ~ o mirn
mv
&e s m h of the television-watching cormgunity: if it did not
(not necessari)y as an exact replica, but perhaps as a reflection of how
the audience sees itself or wisha it were), it would not succeed. The
pociologist, anthropologist or ethethnomethodologistfamilar with what
seem to him more error-proof data-gathering techniques, such as the
-ding
of random conversation, may object that these introspective
methods may p d u a dubious results. But first, it should be noted
7'
'ad:
that any procedure is at some point introspective: the gatherer must

analyze his data, after all. Then, one nFcessarily selects a subgroup of
the population to work with: is the educated, white, middle-class
gmup that the writer of the book identiGa with lcss worthy of study
than any other? And finally, there is the purely pragmatic issue:
random conversation must go on for quite some time, and the recorder must be exceedingly lucky anyway, in order to produce evidence ofany particular hypothesis, for example, that there is sxism
in language, that there is not sexism in hguage. If we are to have a
g a d sample of data to analyze, this will have to be elicited artificially
from someone; I submit I am as good an d c i a l source of data as
myone.
T h e defenses are not mmnt to suggest that either the methodology or the results rue final, or perfect. 1mean to suggest one possible
approach to the problem, one set of facts. I do feel that the majority
of the claims I make will hold for the majority of speakm of E
n
w
;
that, in fact, much may, mutatis mutandis be universal. But granting
that this study does in itself represent the speech of only a small
subpart of the community, it is still of use in indicating directions for
further din this area: in providing a basis for comparkm, a
Wngdff point for further studies, a rnof discovering what is
universal in the data and what is not, and why.That is to say, I p r m t
what folIows less as the fd
word on the s u b k t of sexism in language
- - ~ n y t h h gbut thatf-than as a goad to further research.
a u g K k a&, she will nomdlxbebe
mIf t~~ * *
&d-d&~r
mule fun of. h this way wiety, in the form of a
chifd's parents and frimds, keeps her h~ line2 i n _ h e r ~ This
l . dk f - bprows is, in most of its as-&,
harmless and oRen necessary,
but in this particular instanm+the ttaching of special linguistic uses
to W e girls-it mbes serious v r o b l ~though
,
the ttachers may w d
unaware of this,.If&.
little a
1lmnsher1well, she is not
reWarded with unquestioned aweptance on t h e m of society; rather,
&-@ition
oft h i s m s $ y k of sspeacb will lata b an emwe
nthersuselaksp her in a demanhg@~n, to refibse to take her
@@y
as a human
use of the way she a&
the little
will
.- k accused of beb!~.unable to
girl-now grown to
."
,'
'
Lunguage and Woman's Hace / 7
ar ta ~pres~~herself
for&IIy.
I am sure that the preceding paragraph contains an oversimplified
description of the language-learning prmm in American society.
Rather than saying that little boys and little girls, from the very start,
l m two different ways of speaking, I think, from observation and
reports by others, that the process is more complimted. Since the
m o t h e r m d a t h e r ~ ~ a r 4 x h m b inn ht l ~i v m a f
themofb]~robablybothys and girkfirst
learn "wmm's language" as their first language. (I am told that in
Japanese, children of both sexes use the particles proper for women
until the age of five or so; &en the little boy starts to be ridiculed if
he uses them, and so soon learns to desist.) As they mow older, bys
especmlly go through a stage of mugh talk, as described by S p k and
others; this is -irrlirtle
aids more st_r&
in little b y s , in whom parents may often find it more amusing than
shocking. By the timechildrenare ten or so, and split up into samesex
peergrou~s._thetwo_lannu-arealmx!!l!r-t,
amrding to my
recollections and observations. But it seems that what has happened
is that the boys have unlearned their oriind form of expressionIand
*ted
new forms of expression, while the girh W n their old ways
-h.
(One wonders whether this is related in any way to the
o h - n o t i d fact that little boys innovate, in their play, much more
than little girls.) The ultimate r d t is the same, of course, whatever
the interpretation.
So a drl i s - h n e d if she dm, damned if s h e - b e t . If she refuses
to talk lke &-lady, she is ridicyled andsubjected--to c&cismmas
.unfer&ine; if she does lam, she is ridiculaj -gn&Ie_ to t
h
&
clearly, unable-to take part in a serious discussion: in some sense, as
less than fully human. These two choices which a woman has-to be
less than a w o r n or less than a psm-are highly painful.
An objection may & raised here that I am overstating the case
against women's language,since most women who getasfar edeg
leaml~swhhh m women's to neutral language under appropriate
sitlasltims (in class, tallring to professors, at job intemiews, and such).
But I think this objection overlooks a number of problems. First, if
aArlmust learn two dialects, she e e 8 in effect a bilingual. Like
many bilinguals, she+m@ynwm real!^ k masted ejthtt ~IWWG

though her command of both is adequtt enough for most
she may never feel m&xmf~~leushgeik,
and never bt
certain that she is using the right one in the right pIace to the right
Shifting from one hguage to another--u&s s
d awaren a to the nuances of social situation%e
g
!
g j - g to w i b k
that must be (subconh-~al.
It m a y be that
& o d y or otherwise) expended in this game
work, and hinders women fromc x p m g t h e m d v a
more
as well, w f@lyJ_or_as
f@y-as_thq m i a t 0thThus, if a &l
knows that a pmfesgor will be reoeptive to comments that sound
d ~ ~ l a r lobjective,
y,
ununotional, she will of course be tempted to usc
neutral Ianpage in class or in conference. But if she know that, as
a man, he will respoad more &ppmvh@yto her at other levels if she
us#l women's hguage, and sounds frilly and feminine, won't she be
codused as well as sorely tempted in two directions at on-? It is odten
-=si&
m.
..
)
I
'
mi men-n
perham WLhi-tic - M v e n e s s is ooe rwgx~why. (ZnckhWy,

I don't find this true in my cla99ca)
It will I
x found that the o v d
meaning both lanrmap
-4 m n w
W O I L L ~a
~ ndhgugc
the m e hand, and gamminn exr>rcsPim tbat sunnest triviality in

subject matter and u n h n t y a b u t it; and, when a w w l a n is being
by treating her as an o b j e c t e d or otherwis6-but
never a serious pasop th individual vi
Of course,other forms
of behavior in this
have e same p
m but the phummm
%mne q d d y cltm hgubtically.
The ultimate effect of hdisctqmeics is thatarc sys-Y
-h
i
the grounds that they are not
mm1e of holding it as demonstrated by their hguistic behavior
dong with other aspcts of their behavior; and the irony here i s that
P Y ~ - m a d e _ & k l tbgtb_ey deserve such treatment, b u s e of
. .
h k g & w m e i c i n @ B m c e cepnd/ord/~ucatim. But in fact
it m l y -use
women have 1-cd
their lessons so well that
8 / Language and Woman3 Place
they later suffer such discrimination. (This situation is of course true

to some extent for all disadvantaged groups: white males of AngloSaxon descent set the standards and seem to expect other groups to
be respectful of them but not to adopt them--they are to "keep in
their place.")
I should like now to talk at length about some spec& examples of
linguistic phenomena I have described in general terms above. I want
to talk first about the ways in which women's speech differs from
men's speech; and then,to discuss a number of cases in which it seems
clear that women are discriminatd against (usually unconsciously)
by the language everyone uses. I think it will become evident from this
discussion that both types of phenomena reftect a deep bias on the part
of our culture (and, indeed, of every culture I have ever hard of)
against women being accorded full status as rational creatures and
individuals in their own right; and h d l y , I would We to talk bridy
about what might be done, and perhaps what should not be done, to
remedy things.
2 / Talking Like a Lady

"Wornen's l m g ~ e "shows uo in all levels of the m g f
&dish... We find differences in the choice.and fregmcgd-.
it-;
in t h e _ s i t u a t i o n s . i n k
n
b
in htcwtimmland other s-m!
As an example of
lexical differen*, imagine a man and a woman both looking at the
same wdI,.~gn-U
apWh..s!~&of&-.
The woman may say (2):
(2) The wall is .muye,
with no one consequently forming any special impression of her as a

result of the words alone; but if the man should g ~ (
y21, .one might
well r;anclu&.he wainitatinn a woman sarcasticdqor.wa~
a.h.omo~-0xan.bm3r
.&mmtor. Women, the4 make far more ~re&e
discrizninations in .naming
- .-.-coloe than do men; words like beige, am,
aqtiumarine, hwttder, and so on are unremarkable in a woman's

of most men. I have seen a
rmrn hdplless with suppressed laughter at a discussion between two
other people as to whether a book jacket was to be described as
"lavender" or " m a u v e . " M e n f i n d i ~0
n
cp_nsidgr-such-a qua-ion trivial, irrelevant tofbe_real_w-ofld.
We mlght ask why fine_-on
of color is file-!_forfor
m u L m l f w ma,A clue is contained in the way m y rsen
ther "unwo_Idly" tqics, such w hi& c u l t u ~and
the
Church,
a
w
u
~
i d the
e world of men's work, relegated to women
--.--and men whose masculinity is not unquestionable. Men tend to relegate to women things that are not of concern to them, or do not
involve their ego& Among these are problems of fine color discrimination. We might rephrase this point by sayiag tha4sincewon~enare not
-make~nsot3~~-~t.mat_~~suc_h.=
w h t kind
of M ta hold, they are relegated the noncrvcial W i o n s as a mp.
Daeiding whether to name a color "lavender" or 4'rmruve" is one such
sop.
If it is agreed that this lexical disparity reflects a mid inequity in
the p i t i o n ofwomen, one may ask how to remedy it. Obviously, no
we could seriously recommend legislating against the use of the t e r m
"muve" and "hvender" by women, or forcing men to learn to use
them. All we can do is give women the opportunity to participate in
the real decisions of life.
Aside from specific lexical items like color names, we find diger~ betweu~the speech of women and that of men in the useof
s often dtscribe as "m~gl.ess."There )r
m y be no referent for them, but they are far from meaningless: they
context of an uttwanw indicate the r&tionship the
-fetlsdhimself
1 d e between himself and
what he is tatking a b u t .
AS an experiment, one might = m t native speakers of standard
American English with pairs a sentences, identiGal-syr?.WdIy and
terms of referential lexical items. and diB~ng_m_ereIyjn_the
choice
of"h%nhgless" particle, and ask them which was s p o h by a man,
a woman. Consider:
active vocabulary. but absent from that
-19
"
Language and Woman's Place / I 1

(3) (a) Oh dear,you've put the peanut butter in the d r i g e m t ~ f
again.
(b) Shit, you've put the p u t butter in the refrigerator again.
It is safe to predict that people would classify the fmt sentence as

part of "women's hguagc," the second as "men's language." It is
true t h a t m a a y ~ ~ . t are
y wbecoming able to use sentmces like L3 fb) publicly without flindjng, but this is a-d-ativdy
recent devdopm-mt, and while perhap tbe majority of Middle America might condone the use of (b) for men,they would still disapprove
of its use by women.(It is of intenst, by the way, to note that-men's
language ig i~mwingly
_hed4J!wmmb_u_tmm'slanme
is not being miopted by -apart+
thav who reject the ~ m e r i can masculine image [for example, hom06e~uals].This is analogous
to the fsct that men
s-'
hy whyen. but few men
b are rrr;Phing to become housewives or secretaries. T h e lanmage of t&
favored group, the pour, that.hoI& thepwer, along with its no&,' pistic behavior, is g e n d y adopted by the other group, not vice
versa In any event, it is a truism to state that the "stronger" expletives
art m e d for men, q d the "weaker" ones for women.)
Now we may ask what we mwn by "&xmg&'.
and ''weaker?
exv1etives.Jf these particles were indeed m m e s s , none would be
stronger than any other.) The
between using :'&%hi (or
"damn," or one of m y othm] as o
m to ';ohdear,'' or "godam? or "oh
l i e i n b forcduu~onc efihow-ont feelsperham one might say, choice ofparticle is a function of howone a l e _ w fto f
d about spmething, so t&it the strength of
maion w v g d in a senten- cormponds tq the stremgth of the
gartide. Hence in a r d y ~ o w - s i t ~ ~
thew-1w-&
"tfivialjzi~"
.
X
(that is, "women's") partid= constitutes a j0k4~or at any rate, is
highly inappropriate. (In conformity with cumnt linguistic practice,
thrwghwt this work an asterisk (I)
will bt used to mark a sentence
that is inappropriate in some sense, either because it is syntactically
deviant or used in the wrong aial context.)
(4)
(a) *Oh fudge, my hair is on h e .

&) *Dtar me, did he kidnap the baby?
children, women are encourapd to be "little ladig." Little
Ides don't S C : as~_v~~~.if_gr&u_sly

@littlecbpys, and they are dmor s h ~ w i n g t e m"high
~~:
L
.
r
n
e
r
h *&
nl
.
f
m
spirits" are expected and therefore tolerated in little boys; docility and
resignation are the corresponding traits expected of little girls. Now,
we tend to excuse a & ~ . o f ~ n - b y . a _ m s - wwe
h ~would
~ not
excuse an identid tirade from a woman: womm-are al!ow_d
fuss
and .-hvLp??k
a man c q bellow in rage. It is sometimes
claimed that there is a biological basis for this behavior difference,
I) though 1don't believe conclusive evidence exists that the early differen- in behavior that have been observed are not the results of very
differenttreatment of babies of the two sexes f m the beginning; but
surely the=d
d.flemtgv$cl-b~ men . a 4 .women is alearned
trait.&-n-tic
differences again, and again
pointing out an inguitv that exists between the trea_tq~tof-rnen,~~d
' t m i c i ~ - e x ~ t i o nofs
and the treatment of wornen~~llowin~
men stronger means of expression than are open to women further
I ~ ~ k ~ oft
strength
i in
othe rnd worldfor surely we
b.
with .WE attention t_henore&nmg!~ mldfwd&~eo~e\
-xe
opinions, and a speaker unabl-for whatever rmon--to be
.forceful in stating his views is much less likely to be taken seriously.
AWty to use strong particles like "shit" and "hell" is, of course,only
incidental to the inequity that exists rather than its muse. But once
-,
apparently addental linguistic usage suggests that30men are
denled equdity partially for linguistic reasons, and that an examination of language points up precisely an area in which inequity exists.
Furthtr, if somume is allowed to show emotions, and consequently
d m , 0th- may well be able to view him as a real individual in his
"
1
right, they could not if he never showed emotion. Here again,
thm the _behayiora woman learns as "correct" prevents her from
~ ~ d y a s aindividual,
r l and fbrther is considered "miand necesriary for a womm preciwly kmw-spciety _does not
X
-!
h s seriously as@ individual.
Similar sorts of disparities exist elsewhere in the vmabulary. There
k for instance, a group of &adjectives which have, besides their specific
&gsl
another we, that of indiatting the speaker's
\
mz,
-..mhd
'.
12 / Language and Woman 3 Place
hnguuge and
Woman 's Pkrce / 13
,.
this case, the suggestion m l l y concerns only her, and the impresapprobation or admimtion for something. Some of these adjective are
&
I she d l make on paople. In this case, she may use (b), from the
neutral as to sex of speaker: either men or women m a y use them. But
-wanan's language." So the choice i s not r d y free: _woo& nzitrictal
mother set seem%in-its f i w t i v e w , EP be-llrrgeb cmf~~&&
- m m n l s l ~ e e ' ' .~UBBG? _tha~-ooncepts_tow~~~_~!~~
are w:
W Q ~ ~ U ' S ~ Representative
S . ~ ,
lists of both types are below:
are sot relevant to the r d world of (male) influenoe-md~wer.
neutral
wmen only
One m a y ask whether there really are no d o g o u s twms that are
gmt
adorable
available to men-terms that denote approval of the trivial, the perterrific
charming
4;that express approhtion in terms of one's own personal emo-1
.sweet
W reaction, rather than by gauging the likely general mction.
neat
lovely
There does in fact seem to be one such word: it is the hippie invention
divine
"p~vy,"
wbich seems to have most of the connotations t h t separate
"lovely"
and
"'divine" from 4'great" and "terrific" excepting only that
As with the color words and s w a r words already discussed,for &
it dms not mark the speaker as feminine or effeminate.
man to stray into the "women's" coiumn is apt. to-& damapjng to his
- - -
-..
reputation, though here a woman may freely use the neutral words.
But it should not be mferred from this that a woman's use of the
"women's" words is without its risks. Where a woman has a choice
ktween the neutral words and the women's words, as a man has not,
she may be suggesting very different things about her own w a l i t y
and her yiew of the subiact matter by her choice-of.w-g-of&e -&-st
set m word$ of the m n d .
(5) (a) What a terrific i d d

(b) What a divine k l d
It seems to me that (4 might be used under any appropriate conahtions by a female speaker. But Wri more ratrictcd. Probably it is
us@
appPq&tgly (even by the sort of s@er for whom ~t ms
nonnal) only in.& ~ - ~ ~ ~ & . t h e _ i dr e ftm~d. to to
asmt@Jy fivoll~,_trivial, or unimportant to the world a t k g +
_only~m-mwxaentforthe s e e r herself. ~wsider,then,a wad
advertising e m t i v e at an advertising conference. However ferninin4
an advertising executive she is, she is much more likely to express her
approval with (5) (a) than with (b), which might cause raised eyebrows, and the reaction: " T h a t ' s what we get for putting a woman in
charge of this company."
On the other hand, suppast a friend suggests to the samt woman
that she should d p her Fmch m
e
8to match her cigarette lighter.
(6) (a) What a terrific steel mill!

(b) *What a lovely steel mill! (male speaking)
(cl What a groovy steel mill!
I think it is significant that this word was introduced by the hippies,

>and,when used seriously rather than w c a t i d y , used principally by
paople who have w t e d the hippies' values. Principal among thew
is the denial of the P r o t c s ~ work
t
ethic: to a hippie, something can
bt worth thinking about even if it isn't influential in the power strucWe, or moneymaking.Hippies are w t e d from the a c t i v i h of the
r d world just as women -though
in the former case it is due to
a decision on their parts, while this is not unc~ntroverslallytrue in
the
of women. For both these p u p s , it is possible to express
4 W r m d ofthin@ in a personal way-though one does so at the risk
one's adibility with members of the power structure. It is
tme, arddmg to some s p k e r s , that upper-ch British men
m y LW the words listed in the "women's" column, as weIl as the
"C
e0hf words and others we have categorized as specifically
f a n %without raising doubts as to their masculinity among other
S W ~ I % of the same dialect. (This is not true for l o w e r c h Britons,
h e r . ) The reason m a y k that commitment to the work ethic aced
.* m l y be displayed: one may ly or appear to be s gentleman
$, h u r ~i ,n m t e d in various pursuits, but not involved in mundane
I4 / Lunguage and Woman's Place

(business or political) affairs, in such a culture, without incurring
disgrace. [This h rather analogous to the p i t i o n of a woman in
American middle-class societdso we should not be surprised if these
special lexical items are usable by both groups. This fact points indeed
to a more general conclusion. ThThese.wo@- ~ ' t , ~ l c g l l y4Temi-.
,
adha, they signal "lminvo~ved,"or "out of pwer."'Any
group in a wiety to which these labels ere applicable may pr&ably use these words;they are often considered "feminine," "unmascu.) line," k u s e
are t& .'~&~olv_ed,"
. 4 b of~w~crup
~~t
&"r excellence
Another group that has, ostensibly at least, taken itself out of the
search for power and money is that of academic meg. They are
frequently viewed by other group as analogous in some ways to
women-they don't really work, they are supported in their hvolous
pursuits by others, what they do doesn't really count in the r d world,
and so on. The suburhan home finds its counterpart in the ivory tower:
one is s u p p d l y shielded from harsh realities in both. Therefore it
is not tm surprising that many academic men (especially t h w who
emulate British norms) may violate many of these sacrosanct rules I
have just laid down: they often use 'Pvomen's language." Among
themdves, this does not occasion ridicule. But to a truck driver, a
professor saying, "What a lovely had., is undoubtedly iau&able, all
the more so as it reinforces his stereotype of professors as effete snobs.
: When we leave the lexicon and venture intosyntaxl-we find that
s y n b c t i d y too w o m e n ' s - s ~ his &i&. To my knowledge, there
is no syntactic rule in English that only women may use. But there
' is a t t e a me
s t d e t h t - a w m . ,w-usein..more. c o n v - t i d
situations than,@--.
(This fact indicates, of course, that the applicability of syntactic rules is governed partly by dcontext-the
pitions in society of the speaker and a d d r ~wi,th respect to each
other, and the impression one seeks to make on the other.) This is the
rule of-w-uestiononfi,-eationi
@
A tag, in its usage as well as its syntactic shape (in English) is

m - z a t
statement and a yes-no question: it is l w
m v e than the f ~ ~ ebut
r .more confident than the latter. Therefore it is usable under certain contextual situations: not those in which
a statement would h appropriate, nor those in which a yes-noquestion is generally used, but in situations intermediate between these.
One m a k a statement when one has confidence in his knowledge
and is pretty certain that his statement will be believed; one asks a
question when one lacks knowledge on some point and has reason to
Meve &at this gap can and will be remedied by an answer by the
add-.
A tag question, king intermediate between these, is&
wben the s&s;r is s ~ . a but lack
~
b h.the
w
-ofthiit
claim. So if I slly
+;
'
(T) Is John here?
1 will probably not be surprised if my respondent answers "no"; but

if I say
(8)
instead, chances are I am dreadv b i in f a v ~ of

r a positive an$=tinnonlvcqpAm-~m by-ths. Ad-.
I still
h . b h as 1 do.wlth_a.y-enogm-tion;
but I h . v ~ ~ o ~ - b ~ w l -edge_lnrthinlr.lL-t.mmm
much as with a
speech of mak academics. Con&,
1. W i t h the lexicon i t d f , thac scans to be a parallel ppbatomeno to tagquation

usage, which I drain from di~ussingin tbt body of the text because the factg are
c o n t r o v d and 1do not undasEandthem fully. The intensive m d wwhcre purists
. .
would insist upon an M u t e superlative, heavily s t m a d , seems more
of women's 1 P n rhan
~ of men's, though it is found in the law,particularly in the
John is here, isn't he?
for instance, the following mteficcs:
bico~tobavetheklgtdiWculryusingthis~t~mwhentbt~tmce~
,w ~ b j d v e - w i t h o u t refermce to tbt spealrer h i d :
,I
..,
,
/
/'
That ~llaaaia sla beautiful!

(dl Ffsdkmdurnld
S u b h h g an cquativt like m for M u t e su@atiw (like wry. mI&. utterly)
-to
be a way of
wt of committing o n d f strongly to an o p h h , rather
like tag questions (d.dkwim MOW,
in the text). Onc might hedge in thip way with
@act
rigbt in malring h e t i c judgments, as in (cl. or intclkctual judgmcnh as in
{dl. But it is somc01hat odd to hods in d e w r i b mu's own mo
d
l or emotional state:
who, atkr all, is q u d i h l to contradict om on this? To hedge in this sibdon is to wek
to awid making m y strong statmmt: a chamctaktic, as we have n o d d r d y and
note hvthcr. d w m m r n xr , p d ~
16 / Language and Woman 3 Place
declarative sktement. Atagqumtian, then,might be thought of as a

declarative statement wiiout the apsumption that the statement is to
be -xJeed_by_
the. a d d r e s s QW ha an out, as with a question. A
tag -w!leewa\t,
not forcine with the
h n f _ t b e speaker.
There are situations in which a tag is legitimate$in fact the only
kgilhak sentence form. So, for example, if I have seen something
only indistinctly, and have reason to Miwe my addressee had a better
view, 1 can say:
(9) I had my glasses eff. He was out at third, wasn't he?
&.metima we 6nd a tag wc_tion

used in casa in whlgkthe speaker
h w s a s w d as theaddmsee what the answer must be, and d w ' t
neecJ confirmation. One such situation is when the speaker is making
'hall talk," iryjngta ekkmnum&n from the addressee:
(10) Sure is hot here, isn't it?
In discussing perronal feelings or opinions, only the s m e r normally has any way of knowing the correct answer. Strictly spaking,
questioning one's own opinions is futle. Sentences like (1 1) are usually ridiculous.
(I 1) *I have a headache, don't I?

But similar cases do, apparently, exist, in which it is the-speaker's
omnims, rather hqxrxtio~s~ for which c o ~ o ~ a t i ios nsought,
as in (12):
(12) The way prices are rising is horrendous, isn't it?

While there are of course other possible interpretations of a sentence like this, one possil$itly_ is .@t the speaker h-as a particu-r
answer k.m~dd4'yes'' or "ng'''3E & ~ e ~ c ~ - ~ jt-way.
s @ t e
It is my impression, though I do not have precise statistical evidenw
that t h i s s o r t of lagguestion is much more apt to k used by women
than by men. If this is indeed true, why is it true?
These sentence types Novide a means whereby a speaker can avoid
cmnmi-,
and thereby avoid coming into cmfIict with the
I ddrcps& The problem is that, by
a speaker may also give

& t a d o n of not being really sure of himself, of looking to the
for confirmation, even of having no views of1 his own. This
criticism is, of course, one often leveled st womenJ0ne wonders
how much of it d e c t s a use of language that has been i m p & on
women from their earliest years.
Related to this special use of a syntactic rule is a widespread difference m _ t i b ! e j g wom-a's intonational pattern^.^ There is a peculiar
=ten= intonation pattern, found in English as far as I know only
amrme.wmen, which has the -foe-of a declarative aee!-@-a
&and is used assuch, b u t h tbe mhghflwtion &wid-of
ayes-ILOquestion, as well as g n g a w l l y hesipnt. The effect is as
though one were seeking c o n h a t i o n , though at the same time the
s p k e r may be the only one who has the requisite dormation.
po doing,
(13) (a) W h e n will dinner l

x ready?
(b) Oh . . . around six o'clock . . . ?
-
It is as though (b) were saying, "Six o'clock, Ifthat's OK with you,

if you agree." (a) is put in the position of having to provide confirmation, and (b) sounds unsure. Here we fmddsunwillingnessto
opinion carried to an extreme. One likely consequenae is that t h s e
sorts of speech patterns are taken to-rflqt-something r d - a h u t
and play a partin not taking a woman -seriously ortrusting
-character
herrth gny redrespor@ibiiiti-eIsbc_e:;shg can't make up her m-#'
and "isn't sure of herd." And here again we see that people form
judgments a b u t other people on the basis of superficial linguistic
behavior that may have nothing to do with inner character, but has
been im@
upon the speaker, on pain of worse punishment than not
being taken seriously.
Such f a t u f a are-probablypart of the general fact that women's
2. For analogrtesoutside of English to t h e uses of tag questionsand special intonation patterns, d . my dimmion of Japanese particles in "Langua& in Context," Lan@fUge48 (1972), 907-27. It is to be expected that similar
will be Found in many
0 t h bgmges
~~
as well. See,for example, M.R. Hrmas's very intemting diwssion of
d i f f m bawcen men's and women's spsech (mmtly involving lexical &hilarities)
m y languaga, in D. Hymes, td., hnguage in Culture aad Saciely (New York:
b 8t Row, 1964).
18 / Language and Woman's Plarce
s m h sounds much more- "polite" than men's. One aspect of politeness is as we havejust daeribedl I=-a
decjgm -opc@posiosi
yo~-mFn_d-ofxiewa, Q I - C ~ ~.n .
anyone else. Thus a tat-question
is a kind of polite statemenb in that it d m not
~ force agreement or
belief on the addrewe. A request may be in the m e sense a polite
command, in that it does not o v d y require obedience, but rather
suggests something be done as a favor ta the speaker. /4n overt order
(as in an imperative) express~sthe (often impolite) assumption of the
smer's superior position to the add-,
carrying with it the right
to enforce compliance, whereas with a request the decision on the face
of it i s left up to the addressee. (The same is true of suggestions: here,
the implication is not that the ddressee is in danger if he does not
comply-merely that he will be glad if he dms. Once again, the
decision is up to the addressee, and a suggestion therefore is politer
than an order.) The more particles in a sentence that d o r c e the
notion that it is a request, rather than an order, the politer the result.
The sentences of (14) flustrate these points: (14) (a)is a direct order,
(b) and (c) simple requests, and (dJ and (e) compound requests.'
(14) (a) Close the door.
(b) Please close the door.

(c) W
ill you close the door?
(dl Will you please close the door?
(el Won't you claw the door?
Let me first explain why (el has k e n c W e d as a compound

request. (A sentence like Won 'tyou pIeuse close the door would then
cwnt as a doubly compund request.) A smtence like (14) {c) is close
in m s e to ''Are you willing to close the door?" According to the
normal rules of polite conversation, to agree that you are willing is to
agree to do the thing asked of you. Hence this apparent inquiryz
functionsas a requat, laving the daision up to the willingness of the
addrase. Phrasing it as a p i t i v e question makes the (implicit)
assumption that a ''ya''answer will be forthcoming. Sentence (14)
(dl is more polite than (b) or (c} because it combines than: pleaw
3. For mow dapilcd discuspion d thcdic problems, = M,"Lansuage in Cwtext"
Lunguage and Woman 3 Place / 19
indicating that to accede will be to do something for the speaker, and

will you, as noted, suggesting that the addressee has the final decision.
If, now, the question is phrased with a negative, as in (14) (e), the
speaker seems to suggest the stronger likelihood of a negative response
from the addressee. Since the assumption is then that the addressee
is that much freer to refuse,(14) (e) acts as a more polite request than
(14) {c) or {d): (c) and (dl put the burden of refusal on the addressee,
as (el does not.
Given these facts, one can see the oomdon M~-yntag questiogs
and-tag
- or&m and other rquues-s_tg.In all these cases, t h e e e r is not
commit*
-as-witha Gm&-&@-tive
or d b m t i v e . And the more
g g (;ompounds a request, the more cbaractecjstic
o f women's
s e h ~ h less
g of men>. A sentence that begins Won't you please
(without sped emphasis on please) seems to me at least to have a
-y
w u m w u h e sound. L&le girls are indeed taught to talk like
ladies, in that their speech is in many waysmore polite &an that
4CIS
or men, and the reason for this is that politeness i n v o l ~ ean
absence of a strong statement, and women's speech-is devised to
w e n t the expression of strong statements.
3 / Talking about Women

We have thus far confined ourselves to one facet of the problem of
womea and the English language: the way in which women prejudim
the case against themselves by their use of language. But it is at l e s t
true that others-as well as women t h m s e l ~ md a t t a s s
bv the way k w a c h they r e f f wommq.
~
Often a word that may.&
of
m
a and ~ 0 - Led
w ~I@~f -thin!!- .a ~ d l L - ~ h e n
C M t o o m ~ L m L ~ ~ a - s @ - @ _ m e a n i n 8 that, by implication
-than
outright @ass
is derogatory to women asa group.
When a word quires a bad connotation by d t i o n with someunpl-t
or embanassing,people may m h for substitutes
h t do wt have $he unwmfor@jc-effectect-that is, euphenj-e, Since
Ff?
.fi
Y.
attitudes toward the original referent are not altered by a change of

m e , the .
~
~
.
m
e
M
t
h
e a m
new =hemism-.
It is no doubt possible to pick out
areas of particular psychoIogid strain or discomfort-+as where
problems exist in a cdt-y
pinpointing items around which a
gnat many euphemisms are clustered. An obvious exam& concerns
the various words for that ho&-f!!dcon.~.enllmceceh,to.which hvman.
--a~Ahnmatd
toilet, bathroom, rest room, comfort station,
lavatory, water closeb, loo, and all the others.
In the case of womeg~, it may be encouraging b W.narichnensnf
gq,dhemim;but it i s . & i s ~ t ~ , m - for "woman"
--does
---exist
-.- - .and is very much dive. The word, of course,
is
which seems to be replacing "wcnnan" in a p t many
"w'
r. F:' .#&mian, occasionaily shortened to gent. But I don't think this is

~> ? dfair comparison. la$&m!dhrn~_e
cmnqon
genl(lgEd,
%
td
,
A.
d,
since gent exists, the reason is not ease of pronunciation. Lady
h d y a euphemism for woman, but gentleman is not nearly fre-
, 'quent enough to classify as a euphemism for man. lustas we do not

lrJl whitcs bTapmsh-Ameriw'' the? & no felt n@ to refer to
"'gentlemen." And just as there is a need for such
--only
- terms as "Afro-Ameriams,"there is similarly a felt need for "lady."

One might even say that yb a deroeat~rys i t h e t exists a @
-- el
'
wxsa.ry.. (The term WASP, white Anglo-
Saxon Protestant, may occur to the reader as a p s i b l e derogatory

tena which has no parallel euphemism. But in f-, WASP is not
prdld in usage to nigger, poIuck, or y2d One can refer to himself

as a WASP,as one cannot refer to h i d m a nigger without either
-r m l v k t h e r e ~~~ W ~ ~ b i 9 ~ ~ 5 ! t e artotal
_ lack
t of self-pride or bitter mrwm. Thus one can my: "Sure
in
-.,+..,which
- .-the won! ts-u-d
I'm a WASP,and proud of it!" but probably not: "Sure I'm a nigger,
Related to the existence of euphemistic terms for "woman" is the
aad p r o d of itl" without special w a s t i c inflection in the voice
e x i s m of .euph&tic-=
for w o e ' s principal role, that of
suggesting that it is an imitation of the ad-.)
To avoid having
' * h o ~ - e "Most occupational terms do not have ooexisting wto resort to terms like "Afro-American," we need only get rid of all
phemisms: these,wm to WG-.&Q
_king.only.the occupation
expfwsions like "aiggef'; W ~ d y ' in' its euphemistic sense
i
s
considered
embarrassiu
g-,em@ng.
Thus
there
is no euphe.---- .- . .. - ....
-from the vocabulary of Enash. we n+ only fust MA+
of "broad"
mism for "professor," "doctor," ''bank president"; but we do find
a d its h t i m s . But of course, as already pointed out, we anmt
"mortician" and "funeral director" for "undertaker"; "custodian"
a & k e this commendable simplific01tim of the lexi~onu~less
we
and "sanitary engineer" for "janitor"; "domestic" for "cleaning
~ m m o v e f ~ ~ r n i n d s t h ~tbatblacb-are-m~qand
i d e a
woman"; and 80 forth. Similarly one keeps running into hopeful
tbat women are broads. The pfwcn~eof the words is a signal that
suggestions, principally in the pages of women's magazina that the
m
g is wrong, rather than (as t
m often interpreted by welllot of the housewife would be immasuribly improved if she thought
d
g reformera) the problem iW. The point here is that,-udof herself as 'kmgmaker." 4 : t ! 0 ~ ~ executive,"
ld
"household &we
khgmom_re8pect for. WOE*
an4 a t e -pm_t time, less
neer,"
or
any
of
several
others.
I
am
not
sure
what
to
make of& fact
--w t b e m a a b t h e i r * m i n
relation to
that none of these (unlike thost of the ttma Me occupational euphemBEL we cannot &-+id ladies any more than we g y ?voidd b--ds
isms) have taken hold: is it because the "housewife" doesn't consider
In the pt,some ethnic groups that today are dativdy reqxstable
her ststus demeaning?Then why the search for euphemisms? Or dms
were apparmtly considwed legp so. And in looking at reports of the
she feel that there is no w p e through a change in nomenclature, or
k m s used to describe those group at the m k time, we h d two
lack pride in her job to such an extent that she d m ' t feel up to
..'
facts: first, there is a much m
ter incidence of derogatory
making thc effort7 This is a quation for the sciciologist.
@* for that p u p (as might be expected);and second (which one
It m a y be objected that lady has a rmmdine counkrpm, namely
misbt not be led to expect automatidy) there wrist euphemistic
contexts.
Am& mbtdh&_veediff~-t_
_wmo_tati=-wh~e
22 / Language and Woman5' Place
terms for that group that are no longer in general use. One can only
m
un-:
n e
conclude that eu~hernismgv
example I have in mind is that of the words used to describe Jews.
Aside from the uncomplimentary epithets which stdl exist t d a y ,
though not encountered very o h , one finds, in r&g
novels written and set more than half a century ago, a number of euphemisms
that are not found m y more, such as "Hebrew gentleman" and "Israelite." The disappearance of the euphemisms concurrently with the
derogatory terns suggests that women will be ladies until some more
dignified status can be found for them.
It fight also be claimed that lady is no euphemism because it has
exactly the same connotations as woman, is usable under the same
--.tic
and contextual conditions. But a cursory inspection will
show that this isppt always the case, The decision to use one term
rather than the other mav considerably alter the sense of a sentence.
The following are examples:
(15) (a) A (woman) that I know makes amazing things out of
(MY)
shdaces and old boxes.
(b) A (woman) I know works at Wmlworth's.

(lady)
(cl A (woman) I know is a dean at Berkeley.
(lady)
(The facts are true for some speakers of Engiish. For others, lady
has taken over the fhnction of wornon to such an extent that lady can
be used in all t h e sentences.)
In my speech, the use of lady in (15) (cl imparts a frivoIous or
nonserious tone to the sentence: the matter under discussion is one of
not too great moment.In this dialect, then, lody seems to be the more
colloquial word: it is less apt to bc wed in writing, or in discussing
serious matters. Similarly in (15) (a), using lady would suggest that
the speaker considered the "'amazingthings" not to be gerious art, but
merely a hobby or an aberration. If w m a n is used, she might be a
serious (pop art) sculptor.
Related to this is t h e _ ~ . o !a&-in
f
job tqnigo_logy. For at last
-.:',
s p k e r s , the more duneaning the jgb, @t
more the pe_sson

it
1%-femal!,
- O f d w w l is .@dy
to
be
!
&
a
s
a lad!P
cleumitm
lady
&
at
1
t
%
common
as
cleaning
wman.
sala..
" w
y as saleswomarr. But one says,-n~m-a~y,-~mn
&tor. To my
%9doctor is to k very conbending: it constitub an insult. For
there is no such dichotomy. GarBagemon or raluman is the only
$
+ *
ty,
never *garbarge gentleman And of course, since in the
I
*
$
Qmm
i t
,.,*OM
+,
the male is unmarked, we never have %an (mak)dmtw.

Numerous other exampla can be given, all tending to prove the
same p i n t : that if, in ap&iulg-ee-g,-bth
w m u n mdkdy
-!-e!-*e.
eof thektter3!?@
to_tri*-the-subiect
under -on,
o h subtly ridiculing the woman involved.
Thus, for exampie, a mention in the San Franchim Chronicle of
January 31, 1972, of Madaiyn Murray O'Hair as the "lady atheist''
reduces her position to that of atkrbmhed eccentric, or at any rate,
cme who need not be taken seriously. Even w m a n atheist h w d y
Mensiblt: first, k a u s t her sex is irrelevant to her philogopha .
@h,
and -4
b u s e her name maka it clear in any went.
But lady makes mattem still worn. Similarly a reference to a wmun
m$tor is only mildly annoying (since there is no term 3 M l e scttlp
tor, the d k q m q suggests that such activity is normal for a man,
but not fm a woman), but still it d d be used with reference to a
hartist. l&qm,!pt~r~.m
@e &hgr W d , strik-es me as a slur
e . t hw i k M h t e or not, implying that the v ' s art is
-.%m&hg
Q e does to fend off the bor&~-oC ~ ~ h b a ! or at any mte, nothing of moment in the art world.
ahave shows, not dilettantes So we h a of mewomon
but OWa wt+Iody shows

d m of wage in which lady contrasts with woman is in
-tis
It seems that.~ - z ~ m t ~ ofn
women
s
who have
a d o u s -_ICnot
merdy that of spcading time with one mother)
-y
in their title, but leas serious
my.
the
Lodies'
Awriliarry
of
a
men's
p
u
p
,
or
the
T
h
u
day
*
. & ; h n i ~ Ludk Bmwning and Garden Sockty with *Ladies9Lib or
is Curious about this split i s that lady is, as noted, in origin
-2

a euphemism for woman. What kind of euphemism is it that subtly
denigrates the people to whom it refers, suggests that they are not to
be taken seriously, are laughing stocks? A euphemism, after d,is
supposed to put a better face on something people find uncomfortable.
But this is not really contradictory. What a euph-mi= i s - s m s e d
to do, actually, is to remove from thought rhgt part -of the-ccn.n_otations of a word that cfeates the discomfort. So each of the euphemisms
for toitet, starting with toilet, seems to be trying to get further from
the notion of excrement, by employing successively more elegant
terminology that seemsdesigned to suggest that the piece of furniture
in question has really other primary uses, for performing one's toilette, for washing, for comfort, for resting, but never for those other
things. Perhaps the notion of the nonseriousness of women is not the
thing that makes ma-the devises of euphemism--as well as
women, uncomfortable. Perhaps it is some other
aspect
of the
man- woman relationship. How can we determine whether thisis in fact the
case?
One way of identifying the precise source of discomfort is, perhw,
by b k i n g at the derogatory terms for something. Many of the terms
for blacks refer to their physical characteristics. And the latest euphemism for blacks, AfroAmenbans, seems to be a s p S c attempt
to get away from color m a .(The term black is not a euphemism,
but rather an attempt to confront the issue squarely and make color
into a source of pride.) And as has often been noted,derogatory twms
fmxmmum v e r y ~ - w ~ - - ~ x uthe
a lr:d e r will have no
difficulty recalling what I d u d e to here.
The distinction between Iady and woman. in those dialects of
American English in which it is found, may k traceable to other
causes than the sexud connotations present in woman Mest people
who are asked why they have chosen to use lady where woman would
be as appropriate wiH reply that Judy seeqd more polite. The concept
of politeness thus invoked is the politeness used in dignifying or
enpobllinga _conceptthat normay is not thgught of as having dignity
or nobility. It is this notion of pofitenesr that explains why we have
cleaning lady, but not, normally, Iady dmror. A ddoctor does not need
to be exalted by conventional expressions: she has dignity enough
Language and Woman's Place / 2 5 ,

professional status. But a ~1mawwis in a very
situation,. inwwc~ her m i o n ! -~tcgoryrequires enn*
perhaps we can say that the y r y noh-of w~manh-md~
to manhood,
---.
--.
enpobl@g_si-ei_t_lac-&inherent
qwn:hence the word woman require the exigteuce-of
bdy. Besides or p s i b y because of being explicitly
nnotation,_lady w r i e s with& werbns recaUinn
: the exalted stature of the person so referred to,
above the common sphere. This &a
the term
but we must also remember that these imvlicati~~_are
ey suggest that a "lady" is h e l ~ l ~ ~ . cannot
a p d do thi-ngs
-In
this repect the use of a word like lady L @d
ta
ect of 0 - d-q ...
for womm-or ladies. At first blush it is
the object of the flattery feels honored, cherished, and so
but by the m e token,she is also consided helpless and not
b control of her own destiny. Women who prosf- that they like
thcrc little cowtaies, and object to being libsatcd horn their deepar plesning and see how much ,
shouldPrefkg
t
-tike
fgis brinp us to the consideration of another common substitute
namely&
One seldom hears a man past the age of
-r~.
ref&
to as s boy, save in expressions like "going out
rPlfbB the boys," which are mant to suggest an air of &lacmt
s
*
and krespwsibility,_But womeq of.@-are "&Is"

one
eSbl h v e a man, not a b y , Friday, but a girl, never a woman or even
~ W YFriday;xm~q
,
bvcgi,rI friends, but men do pot-in a nonsex-
a -hyd&rkk
e t i c in
It may be that this w of girl is wphe-
io which lady is a euphemism:in strwiughe idea
itremova the sexual motations lurking in woman.

ofthe ennobling present in lady, girl is (pre8umabIy) flattering
se of its stress on youth. But here again there are
_and-bturit~,$lrl.bn.n@
ta
boy's errand). It seems that again, by an
( h u t which we shall have more to say
assigned women to a very unflattering
Lunguage and Woman's Place / 27
place in their minds: a woman is a person who is both too immature

adntoo far fro.m.rd- life to be entrusted with responsibilities and wi@
decisions of any serious nature Would you elect president a persw
incapable of putting on her own mat? (Of course, if we were to have
a mamed woman president, we would not have any name for her
husband parallel to First Lady, and why do you suppose that is?)
Perhaps the way in which lady functions as a euphemism for
woman is that it does not contain the sexual implications present in
woman: it is not "embarrassing" in that way. If this is so, we may
~
l
~the h$m,
i
lady
n wdl replace wman as the primary
word for the human female, since w m a n will have become too blatantly sexual. That this distinction is already made in some contexts
at least is shown in the following examples:
deals with women as primarily sexual kings, one is in &ect automatically relegating them to object status; if women are there for the use
and enjoyment of men, they are not Mly human beings in their own
right. But women are in mast other respects evidently human. So a
man feels somewhat ambivalent-more or less consciously-and
reacts dl the more strongly for that reason. Hence, perhaps, the rather
hysterical ridicule heaped on Women's Lib in the media. In any case,
throughout EngIish one finds evidence of many sorts that women are
viewed (by women as well as men) as secondary beings: as having an
existence only when defined by a man.
These facts about women's position should cause us to question one
of the commonest criticisms made of women's behavior, as opposed
to men's: one ofiw hears t b t women- --are vain -+
and
self-centered,
>
.
.
-G t h e r s view them.A
c o n q e d only about their ap7
little thought should convince anyone that, in-~tXEii%w~~are
and that
vanity
i$ not
self-centered and egocentric
- -- -.. ----women's seemingthat at -all.
* As noted above, a woman's reputation and position in society de~ d ghost
_
wholly on the i m p d o n she m a - u m n . others, how
others view her. She must dress decoratively, look attractive, be cump h t , if she is to survive at all in the world. Then-hq.ovwatt_ention
'1
to appearance and appearances (including, perhaps overcorrectness
I and overgentility of speech and etiquette) is merely the mgtofbeing
f ~ ~ n to
e dexist only as a rdlwtlon inthe e ~ l e sof others. She d w not,
' cannot, do anything in her own behalf or purely for her own pleasure
or aggrandizement. (Rather ironically, the only way she can increase
her own comfort, pleasure, and security is through her husband's
advancement, and thus she can achieve material comforts only
through someone else's efforts. What seem to t~ selfcentered efforts
are really aimed at the opinions of others, and what appear to be
efforts for someone else are really the only ones permissible for a
woman's own behd. It is no wonder women lack an identity and feel
they have no place of their own.)
In fact, men are the vain sex. Men may derive pleasure directly
from their own works. Men do things purely for their own satisfaction,not caring nearly so much how it will look to others. This, surely,
(16) (a) She's only twelve, but she's already a woman.
*lady
(bl After ten years in jail, Harry wanted to find a woman.

*lady
(cJ She's my woman, see, so don't mess around with her.
*lady
It may be, finally, that the reason the use of lady rather than wman
-in a sentence creates the impression of frivolity discussed aboveprecis& because of the ejqhmnistic nature of lady. In serious discussion,
one does not typidly employ euphemisms. So, for instance, a sentence like (1 7) la) is more suited to cocktad party chitchat by returning tourists than to learned discussion by anthropologists, who would
be more likely to use a technical term, as in (17)O:
(17) {a) When the natives of Mbanga want to use the little boys'
room, 6rst they find a large pineapple leaf. . . .
(b) den the natives of -ga
wish to defecate, first they
find a large pineapple leaf. . . .
Perhap the discomfort men suffer in contemplating, more or l a

unconsciously, the wuality of women is traceable to guilt feelings on
their part. The guilt arises, I &odd think, not only h u s e they think
sex is inherently dirty (that is another problem) but becaw if One
Language and Woman's Piace / 29
is the true egocentricity. Further, it seems to me that the dtimatt

vanity or self-centerednessis to be found in eccentricity. The eccentric
alone truly cares only for himself and his own pleasure: he dms not
concern himself with how his actions affect others or laok to others.
And -city
is far more_cmmmo4
-mdf~~rnore_~@lerated
in men
' than in women. A stmq-ingenml
a mark degaantric' it&& again valued in men much more than in women. For these
mans, womm-are not vwy sucasfid in business or politics, where
b t h vanity and eccentricity of certain sorts can be marks of d i s t h e
tion rather than objects of ridicule.
i Sociologically it is probably fairly obvious that a W O _ I most
s u b c ~ l t w ~ j _ n ~ osociety
_ u r achieves status only though her father's,
husband's, or lover's position. What is remarkable is that these facts
1 show~up~lingll.tical1v
in nonabvio~s~ways.
Suppose we take a pair of words which, in terms of the possible
relationships in m earlier society, were simple mal8-female equivalents, analogous to b d : cow. Suppose we h d that, for i n k d e n t
restxieiy has changed in sucb a way that the primary meanings
now are irrelevant. Yet the words h e not been discarded, but have
acquired new m h g s , metaphoridly related to their original
sems. But suppose these new metaphorical w m are no longer parallel
to a c h other. By seeing where the padelism breaks down, we mn
intuit something about the different roles played by men and women
in this culture. One g m d example of such a d i v e r g m through time
is found in the pair master and m&ty--Once used yith referen6 to
one pasan's power over another, these words became unusable in
their original sense as the muter-ant
relationship became nonexistent. But the-wordsre still w o n as used in Sentences (18) and
(19):
(18) (a) He is a master of the intricacies of academic politics.

Ibl *Sbe is a mis...
(19) (a) *Harry declined to be my master, and so returned to b
wife.
(bl Rhonda declined to be my mistress, and so returned to her
husband.
Unlas used with reference to animals or slaves,-muster now ReEecallv refers to a m q w k h a s acquired consummate ability in some
fie14.nomdh,,nopq.d.
But its_W.nine
-not be usad
in this way. It is practically..mtrictd to its sexual sense of "v-''
We sm.-0.~5 with two terms,b t h roubly paraphrasable as
"one-whohas power owrerother." But the masculine form, once w e
person is no longer able to have absolute power over another, becomes
usable metaphoridly in the sense of "have power over something."
The feminine counterpart also acquired a metaphorical interpretation,

but the metaphor here is sexual: one's mistrw "has power over" one
in a sexual sense. And this expression is probably chivdrous, rather
than descriptive of the real-world relationship between lovers. In
terms of choice, of economic control, and so forth, it is generally the
man who holds the power in such a relationship; to call a w0m-v one's
" r n i ~ t n s 'is~ the e q u i y a l e n t _ n f . ~ . ? p 1 m 'herefaci.ng
'
a xequst
Both are done for politeness and are done purely
because both participants in the relationship, in both mse, know that
the supposed inferiority of the mistress's lover d of the w of
"please" is only a sham. Interesting too in this regard is the fact that
,*
m a s t e r ~ & t & & m r n e , ~ w d , something inanimate and abstract. B u C m & & ~ w a d i g e
umnh.tbe.e v e t o precede it, One cannot say:
.*
(20) +Rhonda is a mistress.

One must be someone's m i s t m .
And obviously too, it is one thing to be an old master, like Hans
Holbein, and another to be an old mistrew the latter?again, r e q u k
a a u l i n e pogsessive form p
e it, indicating who has done the
discarding. OM in the first instance refers to absolute age: the &st's
Wetime versus the time of writing. But old in the second redly means
"discarded," "old" with mpect to someone else.

Others, too, have been struck by the hidden assumptions in the
word rnbtrea In an article on the OpEd page of the New York
Times, July 20,1972, Rebecctl Reyher suggats tbat a way around this
clilkulty is to adopt a @lei term for the man in such a relationship:
Mud. But further thought will make it clar that the use ofthis new
Lunguage and Womans' Place / 3 1

term will not obviate the problem: the roots lie deeper, in the social
nature of the relationship it&. As long as it is the w o r n who is
dependent on the man, sccially and economically, in such relationships, there will be no possibility of coining a parallel term for mistress. Just as we will have the sorts of disparities illustrated by sentences (1 8)-(19), we will find further disparities, for the same reasons.
Note, for instance, the difference in the acceptability of: He's a real
stud! as contrasted to: *She's a real mistress!
So here we see several important points concerning the relationship
between men and women illustrated: first, that
are defined in
tams afwhatthevdoh_theworld,_womenint-mnuxf_themn with
whom they are asspckted, and second, that the n o ~ o nof "power" for
a - w isdj&gnt.from that of "power" for g w*:
it is acquired
and manifested in different ways. O n e might say then that these words
have retained their principal meanings through h e ; what has
changed is the kinds of interpersonal relationships to which they refer.
As a second example, the examples in (21) should be c o m p l d y
parUsemantically: (21) (a) He's a professional.
(6) She's a professional.
Hearing and knowing no more about the subjects of the discourse

than this, what would one assume a b u t them in each case? Certainly
in (a) the normal conclusion the casual mvesdropper would come to
was that 'he" was a doctor or a lawyer or a member of one of the
other professions. But it is much less likely that w e would draw a
similar conclusion in (bJ. Rather, the first assumption most s p k m
of English seem to make is that "she" is a prostitute, l i t e d y or
figuratively speaking. A m , a man is defined in the serious world by
what he does, a woman by her sexuality, that is, in t e r n of one
particular aspect of her relationship to men.
This discrepancy is not confined to English. Victor Wen has informed me that a similar situatim pertains in Chinese. One may say
of a man, "He's in business," and of a woman, "She's in business,"
lexically and grammatically pardel. The former means about what
its English equivalent means.But the latter is synonymousto sentence
(21) (6).
r,
James Fox tells me that in many cultures, BS in English, people may

be referred to metaphorically by animal names, suggesting that they
have some of the attributes of that animal, real or part of the folklore.
What is interesting here is that where-animal names may.be applied
to both men and womer-whether or not there are separate terms for
male and female in the animal-the former m a y have connotations in
all sorts of areas, while the latter, whatever other connotations the
term may suggest, nearly always make sexual reference as well.
Compare in this regard dog and bitch fox and vixen, and the difference between he's a pig and she's a pig.
The sexual definition of women,however, is but one facet of a much
larger problem. L n g e r ~ ~ a s of
p tlife, a wo-manisident&d in t e r n
offe men she relates to. The opposite is not usually true of men:they
act in the world as autonomous individuals, but women are only
"John's wife," or "Harry's girl friend." Thus, meeting a woman at a
party, a quite normal opening conversationalgambit might be: "What
~ C K your
S
husband do?" One very seldom hears, in a similar situation,
a question addressed to a man: "What does your wife do?" The
question would, to a majority of men, seem tautological: "She's my
wife-that's what she does." This is true even in cases in which a
woman is being discussed in a context utterly unrelated to her relationships with men, when she has attained sufficient stature to be
considered for high public office. En fact, in a recent discussion of
possible Supreme Court nominees, one woman was mentioned prominently. In discussing her general qualifications for the oflice, and her
background, the New York Times saw fit to remark on her "bathingbeauty figure." Note that this is not only a judgment on a physical
attribute totally removed from her qualifications for the Supreme
Court, but that it is couched in terms of how a man would react to
her figure. Some days later, President Nixon announced the nominations to his Price Board, among them one woman. In the thumbnail
sketches the Times gave of each nominee, it was mentioned that the
woman's husband was a professor of English. In the case of none of
the other nominees was the existence of a spouse even hinted at, and
much less was there any clue about the spouse's occupation. So here,
although the existence of a husband was as irrelevant for this woman
appointee as the existence of a wife was for any of the male appointees,
32 / Language and Womun's Place

the husband was mentioned, since a woman cannot be placed in her
p i t i o n in society by the readers of the Times unless they know her
marital status. The same is not at d true of men.Similarly in the 1971
mayoral mnpaign in San Pmcisco, the sole woman candidate was
repatedly referred to as Mrs. Feinstein never Feinstein, when her
opponents were regularly referred to by first and last names or last
nama done: Joseph Alioto, or Alioto, not Mr. Aliora Agatn, the
woman had to be identified by her relationship to a man, although this
should bear no reIwanoe to her qualifications for public office.
While sharp intellect is g e n d y considered an unqualified virtue
in a man,any character trait that is not related to a woman's utility
to men is considered suspect, if not downright bad. Thus the word
bra& is seldom used of men; when used of women suggests (1) that
-a a intelligence is u n e x m - in- a wornmi _C2_ that it isn't M y a
gad trait, If one d l s a woman 4'mart," outside of the sense of
"fashionabIe," either one means it as a compliment to h a domestic
thrift and other housekeeping abilities or, again, it suggests a bit of
wariness on the part of the s p d e r .
Aiso relevant here are the cormations (as opposed to the denotative meanings)-offhe~o*-=ter
and buckelor. Denotatively, these
are, again,parallel to "cow"versus "bull":one is mascultne, the other
feminin~and both mean "one who is not married." But there the
nsemblance ends. Bpchelor is at least a neutral term, often used as
~ m p l i m e n tSpinster
.
normally seems to be used pejoratively, with
connotations of prissiness, fussiness, and so on. Some of the differences between the two words are brought into focus in the following
examples:
(22) (a) Mary hopes to meet an eligible bachelor.

(b) *Fred hopes to meet an eligible spinster.
It is the concept of an eligible spinster that is momdous. If someone

is a spinster, by implication she is not eligible (to marry); she has had
her chance, and been passed by. Hence,a girl of twenty cannot be
properly called a spinster: she still has a chance to be married. (Of
wurst, spinster may be us& metaphorically in this situation, as described below.) But a man may be considered a bachelor as soon as
Language and Woman's Phee / 33
I
I
he m h e s m d g e ~ b l age:
e t o h a bachelor implies t h t one bas the
of marrviag ar GQL.
j s_ ~ ~ h a ~ _ a ~ & a t h e i d a a
hchdos exktmce atuactiv~in the popular literature. He has been
pursued and has successllty eluded his pursuers. But a spinster is one
who has n d been pursued, or at least not seriously. She is old unwanted goods. Hence it is not surprising to h d that a euphemism has
arim for spinster, a word not much used today, bachelor girl, which
attempts to mpture for the woman the connotations bachelor has for
a man. But this, too, is not much used except by writers trying to give
tbeir (slick magmine) prose a "with-it" sound. I have not beard the
word used in unselfconscious speech. Bachelor, however, needs no
euphemisms.
When bachelor and spinster are used metaphorically, the distinction in connotation between the two becomes even clearer:
(23)
dm
John is a regular bachelor.

(b) Mary is a regular spinster.
(a)
The metaphorical connotations of "bachelor" generally-suggest

ual fmm;of ' ' ~ ~ ~ r , " p u n or
~ idibacy.
sm
So we might use
a sentence like (23)ra) if John was in fact married but engaged in
extramarital affairs freely. It is hard to think of other circumstances
in which it might be used. Certainly it could not be used if John were
married but determined to remain celibate. (23) (bJ, on the other
hand, might be used under two conditions: first, if Mary were in fact
unmarried, but still of marriageable age (that is, not yet a l i d
spinster), and very cold and prissy; second, if Mary were married,
with the same characteristics. The use of "regular," then, seems to be
an indicator that the noun it modifies is to be taken purely in its
connotative rather than denotative sense.
These examples could k multiplied. It is generally considered a
faux pas, in proper w i e t y , to congratulate a girl on her engagement,
while it is correct to congratulate her fiand. Why is this? The reason
here seems to be that it is impolite to remind someone of something
tbat may be uncornfottable to him. To remind a girl that she must
catch someone, that perhaps she might not have caught anyone, is
d e , and this is what is involved, effectively, in congratulating some
34 / Lunguage and Woman's Place
one. To congratulate someone is to rejoice with him in his g o d

fortune; but it is not quite nice to remind a girl that getting married
is good fortune for her, indeed a veritable necessity; it is too close to
suggesting the bad fortune that it would be for her had she not found
someone to marry. In the context of this society's assumptions about
women's roIe, to congratulate a girl on her engagement is virtually to
say. 'Thank g d n e s s ! You had e close cdl!" For the man, on the
other hand, there was no such danger. His choosing to marry is
viewed as a g o d thing, but not something essential, and so he may
be congratulated for doing a wise thing. If man and woman were equal
in respect to marriage, it would be proper to mngratulate either both
or neither.
Another thing to think a b u t is the traditional conclusion of the
marriage service: "1 now pronounce you man and wife." The man's
position in the worId, and in relation to other people including the
Ibride, has not been changed by the act of marriage. He was a "man"
I
i before the ceremony, and a "man"he still is {one h o p ) at its conclusion. But the bride went into the ceremony a "woman," not defined
by any-a&er person, at least Iinpistically; she leaves_ i
j a "wife,"
dlefifed -hterms of the "man,"her husband. There are many other
aspects of traditional mamage ceremonies in our culture that might
be used to illustrate the same point.
And, having discussed bachelorhood and spinsterhood, and the
marital state, we amve at widowhood. Surely a bereaved husband and
a bereaved wife are equivalent: they have both undergone the loss of
a mate. But in fact, linguistidly at any rate, this is not true. It is true .
that we have two words, widow. a d widower; but here again, -widow
ishr.gmrnoner in use. Widows, not widowers, have their partrcular
rgl~
in folklore and tradition, and m o m g behavior of particular
sorts s e t y s to expect4 more strongly, and for a longer time, of a
widow thna widower. But there is more than this, as evidenced
by the following:
(24) (a) Mary is John's widow.
(b) *John is Mary's widower.
Like mistress, widow commonly curs* a possessive preceding it,

the m e of the woman's late h u s W . Though he is dead, she is still
defi-ned by-her re-htionsbip to him. But the &lea& husband is no

longer defined in terms of his wife. While she is alive, he is sometimes
defined as Mary's husband (though less often, probably, than she is
as "John's wife"). But once she is gone, her function for him is over,
linguistically speaking anyway. So once again, we see that women are
.always defin&b-terms
of the men to -who9mthey-are rela-@& and
hen- the woe! thing t-ht c q happen_ to a woman is not to have a
man in this r&tion&ip-that
is, to be a spinster, a woman with
neither husband nor lover, dead or alive.
What all these facts suggest is merely this, again: that men are
assumed
----- to k a k t m h m x e ~ ~ . m ~ t _ twhi el ly- m , and that
therefore their not being married in no way precludes their enjoying
sexual activity; but if a woman is not married, it is assumed to be
because no one found her desirable. Hence if a woman is not married
by the usual age, she is assumed to be sexually undesirable, prissy, and
frigid.
The reason for this dstinction seems to be found in the point made
erulier: that women are given their identities in our miety by virtue
of their relationship pcith-meg*.not vice versa.
It has been argued that this claim h u t dsparities in use between
man/hushnd and uwman/wife, as well as bachelor/spimter and widow/widower does not apply in other languages, where they are not
found, although otherwise the speakers of these languagesare as sexist
as any. Then, the argument mtinues, aren't these so-called proofs of
linguistic sexism invalidated, in the face of, for example, the French
man et femme = "husband and woman"? Or in the face of the fact
that widower is not morphologicall~marked vis-a-vis widow, in many
languages?
My answer to all these arguments is no. We must look at the total
picture, not its individual parts. Perhaps the French speaker says
"mari et femme"; can a female speaker of French say "mon mari
tmvuille'? Only if she can (and if a large body of the other claims
M e here are invalidated in French) can we claim that the fnguktk
disparity between "man" and "woman" d m not hold in French.
Further, it should be clear that the presence
-of a marked trait (like
\ the special ending on the masculine widower) is linwistic evivien3-of
'
&p&t~; but the absence pf such a trait i s got evidence of its
36 / Language and Woman b Place
opposite..A language generally makes a distinction, or utilizes a

marked form, for a reason; but the lack of such marking may be mere
accident. Obviously, any fairly inventive mind, given fikeen minutes,
codd point to a dozen uses in English that are not sexist, but might
conceivably have been so; but no one will use these nonoccurrenm
as proof of the nonsexisrn of English.
Now it becomes dearer why there is a lack o f m e l i s r n in men's
and women's titles. To refer to a man as Mr.does not identify hjs
mM@l status; but there is no such ~ a m b i i ~term-@y
u _ s worn- one
must decide on M a or M k To remedy this imbalance, a kll was
proposed in the United States Congra by BeHa Abzug and others
that would legtslate a change in women's titles: MiEs and Mrs. would
both be abolished in favor of Ms.Rather less seriously, the converse
has been proposed by Russell Baker, that two termsshould be created
for men, M m and Sm, depending upon marital status. We may ask
several questions: (a) W h y does@e.&nball.-exist in-Befirst PIE%?
(&I -do
we feel.that 3aker's suggestion (even if it did not come
from W e r ) is somehow not to be taken 8s &o_usly as Abzug's? And
(c) sl9es-Ab~vg'~_proW
h a x a shamxsf M g ~ p t e idn colloquial speech? (One must distinguish between acceptance in official
use and documents, where Ms. is already used to some extent, and
a q t a n c e in colloquial conversation, where 1 have never b a d it. 1
think the fatter wiU be a long time in corning, and I do not think we
can consider Ms. a real choice until this occurs.)
(01 A title is devised and used for a purpclse: to give a clue to
participants in-wal_@teracbon how the o t h e r p n to be regarded,how he is to be addressed. In an avowedly class-conscious
swiety, social ranking is-a $gn@gtnJ determining factor: once you
know that your addressee is to be addressed as "lord," or "mister,"
or "churl," you h o w where he stands with respect to you; the titk
establishes his identity in terms of his refationship with the larger
smid group. For this reason, the recent suggestion that both Mr. and
Mrs /M& be abolished in favor of Person is unlikely to be s u m f u l :
Pemn tells you only what you already know, and d m not aid in
eptablishing ranlciag or relationship between two people. Even in a
s u p p d y classless society, the use of Mr.(as opposed to simple last
name or first name) connotes a great deal about the relationship of the
two participants in the di&urse with respect to each other. To introduce yourself, "I'm Mr. Jones" puts the relationship you are seeking to establish on quite a different basis than saying, "I'm Jones," or
"I'm John." and each is usable under quite different contextual conditions, socially speaking.As long as s&al distinctions, overt or covert,
continue to exist, we will be unable to rid our language of titles that
make reference to them. It is interesting that the French and Russian
revolutians both tried to do away with honofic titles that distinguished class by substituting "citizen(e3s)" and "comrade." These,
however, are not purely empty like "person": they imply that speaker
and addressee share a reIationship in that both are part of the state
and hence, by implication, both equal. In France, the attempt was not
long-lived. (Although tovarkhch is normal today in the Soviet Union,
X don't know whether it is really usable under all conditions,whether
a fwtory worker, for instance, could use it to his f o r e m , or his
foreman's wife.)
Although, in our society, naming conventions for men and women
are essentially equal (bth have h t and last names. and both may
have additional names, of lesser importance), the social conventii3s
~ v ~ ~ & . t h e _ c _ h _ ~ . ~ . o f f o r@-not
m . o@elLin.
f ~ ~ - Wh exes.
Thus, as noted,.a man, Mr.John Jones, may be a d d r d as John,
as Jm.s as -MI-,
Japes, and as-Mr. John Jones. Tbe first n o d y
implies fanili*ty, the second intimacy mupled with Jones's bfe.nority (except in situations of nondirect address, as in professiod
citation; or among intimates, as a possibly more intimate form of
address even than firkt name alone, without inferiority being impIied);
the third distance and more or less equality.The last-isnever used in
direct addres, and again indicates c o n s i ~ l d
e is-wTo
~address
someone by k t name alone is to assume at least equality with the
other pawn, and perhaps superiority (in which uw the 0 t h ~
will respond with Mr. and last name). Mr. Jones is probably the
Itast-marked form of address, a means of keeping distance with no
necessary suggestions of status. To a d d m someone as Jones socially
or in business may be an indication of his inferior $?atus, but to refer
to someone that way p r o f m i d y (as at a linguistics conference,
40 / Lmguage and Woman's Plrrce
I think this tendency to use first names sooner and be more apt to
use them, rather than k t name alone or title plus last name., in
referring to and addressing women, is evident in other areas than
academia. On t d ~ ~ o n . d i p z u s s ishows,
w
or commmtmy, or t o p i d
oomedy (of the Bob Hope kind), a-prwwm . ~ i l & ~ ~ d &
to by her first name where a man &t
not. Again, this is not a
hard-and-fast z e , but
the.
-rded
to the
w-qmandue her age, pwitim, and attractiveness: it seems as though
the. rn~re_a-&&ve-a woman is, the less she c
ebe-t+&en_dously,and
&e js iswidered a-decoration, able to be addressed by
first name only. I feel that, other things being equal, there is a gmiter
likelihood of hearing Gloria Steinem d a d "Gloria" by someonewho
does not h o w her very well than of hearing Norman Mailer called
"Norman" under the same conditions. (Of course, nobdy is likely to
call the former Prime Minister of Israel "Golds.") This usage is
phap to be corn@
with the tradition of calling children freely
by their h t names, and may be p a l l e l to the use of "girl" for
''woman'' discussed arlier.
Aside from making apparent a dilemma arising from a social
inequity, the facts noted above are of interest for other reasons: they
show that titles are very much alive in our s u e y classless sc+
ciety, and apparently d l diffcrenccs in their use reffect grmt chams
in social psition among m.The use (or misuse) of titles supplies
much information to people, and hence tities are important in our
language as in our smiety, and not a b u t to be lightly M e d .
1f then, we can muonably assume that a title supplics information
about the person to whose name it is attached, we may further mume
that this information is necessary in telling people how to interact
with this person. And if this sort of information is felt to be necessary
for one class of people and not another, we may a p t to find a
distinction made in the titles for the first class, if at dl, but not the
8econd.
So it is with -Since
a s_grliifica@p@ &_the
ogiaion
- - one no+y
forms about a woman's character and social
-&-~~her
mata! _ststis not the case with &it is abuiow h t tbe title pf a d d m should supply this i n f o d m
(It may seem as though a man's marital status is, under certain
mditions, of crucial interest to a woman, and therefore this point is
suspect.But I think we have to distinguish between importance in the
e y e of a single pmwn in a particular situation, and importance in the
e y a of society at large, in a grat many posfible situations. At almost
every turn, h u s e of the way m i a l and business events are arranged,
one needs to know a woman's marital status, and the position held by
her husband. But one d m not need the m e information about a
man, since his 4status'can be gauged, generally, purely by reference to his own accornplishments.),Onceagain, it would
that
trying to legislate a change in a lexical item is fruitless. The change
to Ms will not be g e n d l y adopted until a woman's status in society
changes to assure her an identity based on her own accomplishments.
(Perhaps even more debasing than the M ~ / M i s sdistinction is the
fact that thd w m in rnarrvinn relinquishes her own name, while the
man d w not. Tbis suggests even more firmly that a woman is her
husband's possession, having no other identity than that of his wife
Not only does she g v e up her last name [which, after all, she took
from h a father], but offen her k t name as well, lo become M a John
Smith)
Although blacks are not yet fully accorded equal status with whites
in this society, nevertheless bhck, a term coined to elicit racial pride
and mue of unity, seems to have been widely adopted both by blacks
and wbites, both in formal use and in the media, and increasingly in
c o l l q i a l conversation. Does this constitute a counterexample to my
claim here? I think not, but rather an element of hope. My mtjs
&t lirpktic and socisocial
c h @ g o hand in hand: one cannot, pureiy
by -~:e
6~ _ l ! & ! e - f s t a t ~ The
.
word b+
in
its current
~as_not~hwud_~untiI.
the -late 19608 or evmA9_70L_t_o
agy sigpis-mt extent. I think if its use had been proposed much
eatlier, it would have fded in q t a n c e . I think the reason p p l e
other than blacks can understand and sympathize with black racial
pride is that they were made aware of the depths of their prejudice
during the civil rights struggles of the early 19608. It took nearly ten
years from the beginning of this struggle for the use of black to
1 ,
achieve wide acceptance, and it is still often used a bit self-consciously,

as though italicized. But since great headway was made first in the
sucial sphere, linguistic progress could be made on that basis,-and now
this linguistic progress, it is hoped, will lead to new social progress in
turn. The women's movement is but a few years old, and has, 1shodd
think, much deeper ingrained hostility to overcome than the civilrights movement ever did. (Among the intelIigentsia, the black civil
rights struggle was never a subject for ridcule, as women's liberation
all too often is, among those very iiberals who were the first on their
blocks to join the NAACP.)The &el-&
the
black
struggle should
-in&ca@ that socia!c~_a~must
precede lexical change:
-+._ women must
achieve m e measure of greater social & d p d e n e _ o f mm
- before
_ME
- a n &n wider acceptance.
(bl There is thus a very g o d rason why a hstinction is made in
the case of women, but not men, in the matter of marital status. But
this fact suggests an answer to the second question posed above,
regarding why -Msis fdt to k a moreseriois_~~m@ ean&t$s
suggestion. It is obviously essier to imagine obliterating an extant
distinction than creating a new one: Herer@ l g m to _ignore the
marital status of a woman than to lx$n to pay attention to that of
a man. Moreover. we may also assume that for a woman, the use of
Ms is aiiberating device, one to be desired. But (as Baker suggests)
the use of two titles for men is an encumbrance, a remover of certain
lunds of liberties, and something dehitely undesirable. So the twb
suggestions are not equivalent, and if either were ever to be accepted,
the choice of Ms is the probable candidate.
{cl The third question regarding &he chances Ms. has for ml
acceptan%has, in etTect, already h e n answered. Until swiety changes
so that the distinction &ween married and unmarried women is as
unimportant in terms of their social position as that between married
and unmarried men,the attempt in all probability m n o t s u d . Like
the attempt to substitute any euphemism for an uncomfortable word,
the attempt to do away with Mirs and Mrs is doomed to failure if it is
not accompanied by a change in society's attitude to what the titles
describe.
4 / Conclusion
Linguistic i-mbabccs are worthy of study because they bring into
sharper--focus-real-world imbalances and inequities. They are clues
that some external situation needs changing, rather than items that
one should seek to change directly. A competent dmtor tries to
eliminate the germs that cause measles, rather than trying to bleach
the red out with peroxide. I emphasize this point because it seems to
be currently fashionable to try, first, to attack the hsease by attempting to obliterate the external symptoms;and, second, to attack every
instance of linguistic sexual inequity, rather than selecting those that
reflect a real disparity in social treatment, not mere grammatical
n o n p d e l i s m . We should be attempting to single out those linguistic
uses that, by implication and innuendo, demean the members of one
group or another, and shodd be seeking ta make speakers of English
aware of the psychological damage such forms do. The problem, of
course, lies in deciding which forms are really damaging to the ego,
and then in determining what to put in their stead.
A good example, which troubles me a lot at present, is that of
pronom-1
n.eutraliz;ttion. In English,as indeed in the great majority
of the world's languages, y h e n ref-%
is made individually to
membeg
of
a
sexualIy
mixed
group,
the
normal
solution is to resolve
-the indecision gtopr_ono_un_choiw in favor of the masculine:' the
r l
4. Wallace Chafe has given me an interwtlng emnpIe relative to this discussion of

pronominal neutmiizntion aid sexism. In Iraquoian, neutrabtion is through the use
of the feminine pmnoun. The Iroquoim miety is sometimes (inaccuratdy) referrtd to
as matriarchal; in m y case, women play a special role. Thege two facts together would
stem to be a vindication for those wbo claim that neutralization in favor of the
masculine pronoun, as in English, IS a mark of the atxism rampant in our cultu~e.But
elsewhere in Ircquoian, this claim is belied. There are numerous prefixes attached to
nouns, distinguahing number, gender. and me. Whtn the noun rcfm to masculine
human
these prefixcs are kept separate of onc mother. But in referring to
femintne human beings, animals, and Inaimate objects, these numerous prefixes may
be collapsed. This suggests that here women are considered in the category danimals
and things, and lower or less important than men,contradicting the implications of the
p m n o m i d system. So this l o w s that even in a mavluchd sosidy, sexism -is
and
w,
Language and Womanb Place / 45
masculine, then, is "unmarked" or "neutral," and therefore will be

found referring to men and women both in sentences like the following:
women, as the special m a of mistress or professional, to gtve a few

examples, do. It is not insidious in the w e way:it does not indicate
to little girls how they are expected to behave. Even if it did, surely
ather aspects of linguistic imbalance should receive equal attention.
But mare seriously, I think one should force oneselfto be realistic:
certain
-aspect-offlanguage -qe available to the native speakers' conscious
and others are too common,too thoroughly mixed
-. - -analysis,
throughout the language, for the speaker to Ix aware txch time he
u& than. 1t-is realistic to hope to change only those linguistic uses
of which speakers themselves can be made aware, as they use them.
One chooses, in speaking or writing, more or less consciowiy and
purposefully among nouns, adjective and verbs; one does not choose
among pronouns in the same way. My feeling is that this
of
prxmjml neutralization is lmth less in need of changing and less
o m 7_ta change than many of the other disparities h t have been
discussed earlier, and we should perhaps concentrate our efforts
where they will be most fruitful.
But many nonlinguists disagree. I have read and heard dissenting
views from too many anguished women to s u p p that thls use of
he is really a triviality. The claim is that the use of the neutral he with
such frequency maks women feel shut out, not a part of what is being
described, an inferior species, or a nonexistent one. Perhaps linguistic
&ing
has dulled my perception, and this d l y is a troubIeswle
quea~tian.If so,I don't know what to advise, since I feel in any
that an attempt to change pronominal usage will be futile.My rccommendation then would be based purely on pragmatic considerations:
attempt to change only what can be changed, since this is hmd
-ugh.
I think in any case that linguists should be consulted before any
more fanciful p h s are made public for reforming the inequities of
w h . Many of these art founded on misundentanding and create
~d-desmed
ridicule, but this ridicule is then carried over into other
which are not ludicrous at all. but suffer guilt by m t i o n . For
htance, there have been serious suggestions lately that women have
not had much influence on the affairs of the world because the term
for tbe thing is b&-forv.They suggest that the problem could l
x solved
(25) (a) Everyone take his seat.

(b) If a person wants to ingratiate himself with Harry, he
*herself
*she
should cook him moo-shu pork.
In (25) (a), her could of course be used in an &female group; the

point is that in
-a mixed
mup, eveg one predomim-tly f e e , Ag-+l
n o r m d j be the "m.mect" fo-rm. Many speakers, feling this is awkward and perhaps even dscriminatory, attempt a neutrahfltion
.- with
their, a usage frowned u e n . by most authorities as inconsistent or
illgzjd. In (25) (b). herselfand she might conmivabiy replace himself
and he, but the effect of the sentence would be changed, not too
surprisingly: the ingratiation would be understood as an attempt at
(sexual) seduction, or an attempt to persuade Henry to marry the
"person."
That is, although semantically both men and women are incIuded
$ the g o u p referred to by the pronouns in t h e sentences, only he
and related masculine forms are commonly possible. An gnalogous
situation
-o c c u ~ ~ - i _ n a n ywith
l ~ gthe
~ words for hurnan being:
in English, we 6nd rnan and mankind which of coufse refer to
women members of the species as well. This of course &ts
us
innumerable joka involving "man-eating sharks," and the wide
spread existence of these jokes perhaps points up the problem that
these forms crate for a woman who spealrs a language like English.
I feel that the emphasis upon this point, to the exclusion of most
other linguistic points, by writers within the women's movement is
misguided. While this lexical and panmatid neutralization is
related to the fact that men have been the writers and the doers, 1
don't think it by itself specifies a w c u l a r and dernmning role for
has gmmmatid rdlIt aLPo snggcsts that pronoun n e u t d d o n is not really the
of hgmse-in English as d as Itaquoimcrucial ism: thae arc other
which ase bma iniliators of the rdatidPPbctwccn hguktic usage and cultural
asmmptionr
46 / Language and Woman b Place
by changing the word to her-story.

It should not be necessary to spend time demolishing this proposal,
but it is so prevalent that it must be stopped soon. First of all, the
argument at very best confuses cause and effect: it is very seldom the
case that a
form of behavior results from k i n g ~ v awcertain
name,but rather, names are given on the basis of previously observed
behavior. So anteaters are so called because they were observed to eat
ants; it is not the case that the name "anteater" was given them
randomly, and they rewarded the giver of the name by eating ants,
which they had not previously done. But in any event, the argument
is fallacious. The word history is not derived from !yo English words,
his story; rather it comes from the Gre&-ygrd histooa, fr&a root
meaning "know." The Greeks, in coining the word, did not think it
had anything to do with men versus women;so it could not have been
so called because men were the only ones who played a part in it, nor
could it have been so called in order to ensure that only men would
have this role. In many languages, the equivalent of the English word
history is related to it in appearance and origin; yet in none of them
does it appear related in any way to the masculine pronoun (cf.
French histoire). Yet the world's history is the same for speakers of
all languages, generally speaking. This kind of thinking is both ludicrous and totally fallacious, and is discussed at undeserved length here
only because the attention it has received has distracted people from
thinking of more serious problems. And more recently still, I have
read a suggestion that hurricana be renamed himicanex, since the
former appellation reflects poorly on women. If this sort of stuff
appears in print and in the popular media as o h n as it does, it
becomes increasingly more difficult to persuade men that women are
really rational kings.
If we rn accept the facts already discussed as generally true, for
most people, most of the time, then we can draw from them several
oondusions, of interat to readers in any of various fields.
'
1. People working in the women's libwation movement, md other
wid reformers, can see that there is a discrepancy between English
b used by men and by women; and that the social discrepancy in the
b t i m s of men md women in our society is reflected in hguistic

disparities. The linguist, through linguistic analysis, can help to pinpoint where these disparities lie, and can suggest ways of telling when
improvements have been made. But it should be recognized that social
change creates language change, not the reverse; or at best, language
change influences changes in attitudes slowly and indirectly, and these
changes in attitudes will not I
x reflected in social change unless
society is receptive already. Further, the linguist can suggest which
linguistic disparities rdect real and serious social inequalities; which
are changeable, which will resist change; and can thus help the workem in the red world to channel their energies most constructively and
avoid ridicule.
2. For the teacher of second languages, it is important to realize that
social context is relevant in Ieming to speak a second language
fluently. It is also important for a teacher to be aware of the kind of
language he or she is speaking: if a woman teacher unwnsciously
teaches "women's language" to her male students, they may be in
difficulties when they try to function in another country; if a female
anthropologist learns the "men's language" of an area, she may not
be able to get anywhere with the inhabitants because she seems unfeminine, and they will not know how to react to her. Language
learning thus g m beyond phonology, syntax, and semantics, but it
takes a perceptive teacher to notice the pitfalls and identify them
correctly for students.
3. And finally, we have something for the theoretical linguist to
consider. We have been talking about the use of language: what can
be more germane than thls in formulating a theory of language? We
have shown that language use changes depending on the p i t i o n in
smiety of the language user, that a sentence that is "acceptable" when
uttered by a woman is "unacceptable" when uttered by a man,or that
one sentence may be "acceptable" under one set of assumptions in the
subject matter, "unacceptable" under another. That is, it is a mistake
to hope (as earlier linguistic theories have sometimes done) that the
acceptability of a sentence is a yes-no or */nona decision: rather we
must think in terms of hierarchies of gramrnaticality, in which the
acceptability of a sentence is determined through the combination of
many factors: not only the phonology, the syntax, and the semantics,
48 / Lunguage and Woman's Place
but also the social context in which the utterance is expressed, and the
assumptions about the world made by all the participants in the
discourse. It is sometimes objected that this is the reaim of "pragmatics," not "linguistics," that it reflects "performance," not "competence." My feeling is that language use by any other name is still
linguistiw, and it is the business of the Iinguist to tell why and where
a sentence is acceptable, and to leave the namecalling to the lexicographers. If a linguist encounters an example like The way prices are
riping is horrendous, iPn P it? and feels indecisive about its acceptability
in various situations, it is his duty to tell exactly where his doubts lie,
and why. It is as important for him to catalog the contextual situations
under which a tag question like this (or tag questions in general) may
be used as to determine the syntactic environment in which the tag
question formation rule m a y apply. To stop with the latter (as is done,
for exam& in standard transformational grammar) is to tell half the
story.
Or to take another instance: we have discussed a wide variety of
problematical msa. Why can't you say: John is Mary's widower?
(And tbis sentence is had under ani conditions, and hence is not a
question of 4 ~ ~ r m a n c e .W" h) y have the meanings of master and
rnktm~
changed in a nonparallel fashion over time?Why d m He's
a pmf~'ona1have different implications than She's a pmfeabnal?
Suppose a linguist wishes to avoid making reference to social context
in his grammar.How can he deal with such cases? First, there is the
problem of the nonparallefisrn in the use of widow and widower. He
might mark the latter in his lexicon as [-NPgenitiv-]
or a similar ad hoc device. Or one might say that widow had underlying it a
2-place predate, while there was a 1-place predicate underlying
widower. That this is ludicrous,in that it distorts the meaning of the
latter sentence, is evident. In the case of pmfmwnal, the theorist who
excludes social context would have a slightly different problem. He
has to indicate in the lexicon that there are two words pmfksswnal
presumably accidental homonyms. One is restricted to women, like
pwgnanr; the other is restricted to men, like virile (Of course, there
are obvious semantic reasons, going back to facts in the real world,
in the
of pregnant and v i d e that make their gender ratridom
non-ad hoc. Since this is not the case with professional, he has already
introduced arbitrariness into this lexical item.) Then one sense of
pmfesswnal, the one restricted to women, is defined as: "lit. or fig.,
s pmtitute." The other sense, specific to men,is defined: "engaging
in d
n business activities . . ." or whatever. And sirmlarly, he
would in the case of master and mistress have to construct a very
strange theory of historical change in order to allow these words to
diverge in sense in the way in which they have.
This is not to say that these facts cannot be handled in some ad hoc
fashion; my point here is merely that to take such a course is to violate
the principles of valid linguistic description. First, the linguist talring
this position has been forced to resort to numerous ad hoc devices
purely in order to avoid generating impossible senten- while generating those that are grammatical. Second,and perhaps more seriously,
he would be overlmking the real point of what is going on. Each of
the nonpardlelisrns that have been discussed here (as well,of course,
as the many others 1 have mentioned ekwhcre, and still others the
r a k r cltn no doubt supply himself) would in such trmtment be
nonparallel for a different reason from each of the others. Yet the
speaker of English who has not been rrused in a vacuum knows that
all of these disparities exist in English for the same reason: @och
reflects in its pattern of usage the diflerence between the role of women
in our society and that of men. If there were tomorrow, say by an act
of God,a total restructuring of society as we know it so that women
were in fact equal to men, we would make certain predictions about
the future behavior of the language. One prediction we might make
is that all these words, together, would cease to be nonpmllel. If the
curious behavior of each of these forms were idiosyncratic, we would
not expect them to behave this way en masse. If their peculiarity had
nothing to do with the way society was organized, we would not
expect their khavior to change as a result of social change. Now of
course, one cannot prove points by invoking a cataclysmic change that
has not murred and, in all probability, will not. But I do think an
appeal is possible lo the reader's intuition: this seems a likely way for
t k forms to behave. In any event, I think this much is clear: that
there is a generahation that can be made regarding the aberrant
behavior of all these lexical items, but this generalization can be made
only by reference, in the grammar of the language, to social mores.
The linguist must involve himself, professionalIy,with socio1ogy:fint,
because he is able to isolate the data that the sociologist can use in
determining the weaknesses and strengths of a culture (as we have
done, to some extent, here); and then becstuse if he does not examine
the society of the speakers of the language along with the so-caIled
purely linguistic data, he will be unable to make the relevant generalizations, will be unable to understand why the language work the way
it does. He will, in short, be unable to do linguistics.'
Why Women Are Ladies
5 . This is not the only known situation in which the linguist must work with the
concepts of wciology. To give another cxampl~in his paper "Anaphoric Islmds" in
Binnick et d.,eds., Papers from the F#h Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic
Society, May 1969, Pastal discthe distribution of terms like dogmeui. wvmbnrmeat, pigmeor (as opgosed to dog chicken, pork). He suggests h t - m w t must appear
if the item is not @arly
eaten by the speakers of the language. This is mother
example in which referencemust be made to p u d y cultuml, extralinguistic facts a b u t
a society in order
to judge the well-formedness
1/ Introduction
of lexical items.
In the preceding discussion, I talked at some length about the linguki tic uses that characterize traditional "women's language," as well as
the ways in which we speak differently of women than of men. I tried
to give evidence that the discrepanciesthat appear to exist are harmful
to women's self-image and to the image people in general form of
women's character and abilities.
One of the problems I have run into in presenting these ideas is that
often, _w_&ileeveryone acknowledges the existence of nonparaud us-ages such-asthe ones I dsribed, people also feel that no inequity
t&@;-rnen and women are "separate but equal," and no redress need
&-$ade;
viw, in fact, ia diflerence. In additiw, people very often fed
affronted at my criticisms--this is true of th men and womenbecause they have been taught that the disc pancies actually favor
W o m e n , and here I am trying to change them; I am striking a blow
against womankind and maybe even mankind, since it benefits women
and everyone else to have these distinctions. The argument m a t offen
\ dnu-
the notions of "politeness" we were all taught as

%d~IIwrneu's speech differs from men's in that women are more
W!Si*ich
is preckly as it should be, since women are the preserva of morality
- - and
civility; and we speak around women in an espe
;*:
52 / Language and Woman's Piace
cidly "polite" way in return, esc ewing the ~*$r of

n
men's language: no slang, no swear words, no off-color remarks.
' Further, many of the ways we choose to speak of women reflect our
higher estimate of them than of men,and exalt and flatter, rather than
humiliate. So, the argument runs,my position, that women should be
aware of t h e e discrepancies in language and do what they can to
demolish them, is the one that denigrates and degrades women.
L appreciate the superScial force of that argument; and certainly,
if a woman
feels she has
no
other strength or status in the real world
-- - - . _ .
.than
a~
~lady,"
ubitcr
of
morality,
judge of manners, she might w d
- -be affronted by the comments I make. My hope is that women will
recognize that such a role is ingdciet for a hum*
and will
the0 realize that using thhloyage, having it used of them, and thus
being placed implicitly in this role, is d m 3 in that it is constraining. There's nothing wrong, obviously, with having a natural sense of
rhythm; but to impute this quality, sight unseen,to all blacks and thus
to each black in turn that one encounters is insulting. Similarty, if
some women want to be arbiters of morality, thstt's tine with me; but
1 don't Wle the idea that, bemuse 1 came into the world with two X
c h r o m ~ ~ ~ mIehave
s , no choice but to be an arbiter of morality, and
will automatidy Ix treated as though 1 were.
Hence this discussion. What I want to talk about is precisely the
&Jio~ship- between - worn& language, Language r c f m i q to
women,and politeness and to reflect on the reasons behind this &tionship. The question is complicated by the fact that politeness is
many-faceted, j u t as there are m a n y forms of women's l a n m e and
many distinctions among the u s e so identified in the precedhg part
of this book. For instance, almost no one 1 know of my age and
general educational status would be caught dead saying "divine," and
mme even claim not to be able to identify "mygenta," while hawing
what a universal joint is (in their car, rather than their m h clip).
But qucstion intonation in declarativorequiring situations is
common among us still, and much as we feel the need to extirpate it,
it flourishen as long as we don't hm perfect seV-mniidmce. Using
"divin-e" is not a mark of feelings of inferiority, but rather a mere
w&t-o
class-female
f
clas Using quation intonation inappropi,
* ?
Why Women Are Ladies / 53
.
:
i7
atdy isboth. The. latter dig harder than the former.

Similarly, as I shall discuss at length, there are many types of
behavior that can be called "polite." Some forms of politeness are
linguistic, some purely nonlinguistic, and many mixed; some are plite in same settings, neutral or downright rude in others; some are
polite in same saoieties, rude in others; and B n d y some are polite in
some societies at one stage of a relationship, but rude in another
society at a padel stage, perhaps polite in the latter society at a
different stage. What I will propose are some tentative "working
rclles" for the types of politeness that are found and an attempt to
d#rcribe the situations in which each is appropriate. I will then talk
about the relationship between women's language and language about
women, and t h w d e s of politeness, as compared to and contrasted
with what one finds in men's and in neutral language. Finally I will
m e rather tentative speculations on what is p i b l y going on:
why the discrepancies exist, and why they are deleterious to society
in general as well as to women in particular, and are not the innocent
httery they are thought of as bkng.
Let me summarize here far convenience the forms that I see as
cornqxjsjng
"women's languagg~"most of which have already k e n
digcussed at lenlength.
1. Women have a large stock of words related to their s p i f i c
interests, generally relegated to them as 'Pvoman's work": magenta,
&T, dart (in swing), and so m. If men use these words at all, it tends
9 .bt twgue-in-cheek.
2. "Empty" adjectives like divine, charming cute. . . .
3.-@stion intonation where we might expect k1aratives: for
iance tag questions ("It's so hot, isn't it?") and rising intonation
s m e f l t contexts ("What's your name, &f?" "Mary Smith?").
4. T'he-w.of hedges of various kinds. Women's speech ens in
P m d to contain more instances of ''well7 "y'know," ''kind&" and
W fbrth: words that convey the sense that the speaker is mcemtin
b u t what hc (or she) is saying,or esnnot vouch for the armracy of
the statement. T'hese words are fully legitimate when, in hct, tbis is
@a~%
(for example, if one says, ''John is smta tall," meaning he's
ather d y impressively tall nor actualIy short, but rather middling,
though toward the WI side: 5 feet 9 rather than 6 feet 5, say). Thme
IS another justifmble use in which the hedge m i t i p l a the possible
unfriendliness a unkiodnss of a statement-that is, where it's uscd
for the sake of politeness. Thus, "John is swa short," where I man:
He's 5 feet 2 and you're I f~ 1, Mary, n D w will it look if you ~o
' out with him? Here, I know exactly how short he is, and it is very
1 short, but I b h t the force of a rather painful assertion by using the
1 hedge. What 1 mean is the class of c a m in which neither of these facts
I
prtsmns, and a hedge shows up anyway: the sperker in p e r f d y
I
I oatun of the truth of the &on,
and there's no danger of offense,
but the tag a
m anyway as an apology for making an assertion at
aIl. Anyone may do this if he lacks self-confidence, as everyone d m
in m e situations; but rnj impraion is that women do it more,
p&isely because they are - ~ a l i z e dto believext asserting t h b b
selves strongly isn't nice or ladylike, or even feminine. Another mardfeatation of the m e thing is the ue-of_'Y guess" and "I think"
prefacing
-- - declarations or *'I wondd' prefacing questions, which
themelves arc hdg& on the spcreh-ac~of saying and *g.
1
g m " m a n s something like: I would Like to say . . . to you, but I'm
not sure I can (because I don't know ifit's right, because I don't know
if I have the right, because I don't know how you'd take it, and so
on), so I'll merely put it forth as a suggstion. Thus, if I say, "It will
rain this afternoon." and it doesn't, you can later take me to task for
a m i s l a n g or inaccurate prediction. But if 1 say, ';I guess it will rain
this
- .aJtemoon," then I am far less vulnerable ta such an attack. So
these hedger do have their ua when one really has legtimate n d
for protection, or for deferena (if we are afraid that by making a
certain statement we are overstepping our rights), but used t o _ e ~ _ p *
hedges, like quation intonation, give
- the
- - impression that the s m e r
I r k s authority
or
doesn't
know
what
he's
talkipg about. A m , thee
- -are fmiliar misogynistic critiabut the use of these hcdgn arig
out of a fwof seeming tm mascullu by b r i g assertive and saying
things directly.
5. Relatcd ta thls is the use of the intensive ''so.'' Again, this is gore
frequent in women's than-men'; i&e,
though certainly men ern
use it. Here we *eve an attempt to hdge on onds ~tron~fwhgs,
as
+-----

hough to say: 1feel stmngly about this-but I dare not make it clear
strong. To say, "I like him vcry much," would be to say prsisely
you like him to a gnat extent. To say, "I liLC him so much"
on that intensity: again, a device you'd use if you felt it
unseemly to show you had strong emotions, or to make strong assertions, but felt you had to say something along those lines anyway.
6. E&yg-coffect grammar women are g ~suppps-?d
t
to trlL rough.
has barn found that, from a very young age, htk!xys "'dmp'' heir
much more than do little girls: bop say a'singin"'""gain'," and
literacy and culture arc viewed as being somewhat suspect in a male.

m
t is, in culturn w h ~ lem i n g a vdued for itself, men are apt
to k the g u d h s of culture and the prtservers of grammar; in
u l l t u m where book irmh' is the s c b m l ~ ' domain,
s
this job will
be relegated to the women- Jspersm remarkssomewhere that women
are more prone to neologism than men and hence more likely to be
the originators of linguistic change; but I think he was thinking in
terms of European society of the last century, where indeed the men
were virtually always more highly educated than the women, and
education a mark of status.)
7.S u.- m
-- -l i.t e forms. This is the point alluded to earlier: women are
svepoKd to s&
more politely than men. This is related to their
h p r r e c t n e s s in ~~,
of c o w ince Y s considered more
mamSr; in m i ~ e - c society
h
m S ~ C ~ *L ~ p e r 1 ~~. -u itt goes
*:
don't use @--color or indelicate expressions; women
arc the -exat euphemism; more positively, women arc the
m i t o r i of
~ tact and k n m the right things to aay to othm pmple,
men carelessly blurt out whatever they are thinking. Women are
=-
.ad ta uphold the other &a1 conventions; certainly a WOW who

aih at thae tasks is apt to be in mare trouble than a man who does
Sfk in a ~ E U I it's "just like a man," and indulgmdy ovslmkld unless
56 1 L~nguageand Woman's Place
ius behavior is really boorish. In a w m , if's

death in mnvati
circls
*
to refuse to go by the rules
-d,~m_I_ttell
jokes. AS we s h d ~see in a ~ ~ this
1 poinf
% is
justan
of the two immediately preceding. ~~t it is ani-
in m i d d l ~ &g&t-socjety
l ~
that, k t , womrn wur*t tell
are b u n d to ruin the pu&hline,
up the order
so on. M ~ m v w ,t& -don't
- - -' b-t " joks.
short,
- have
of hmor.
9*
-9
italics, and f he mo- ladyme and frminine you
ayr the more in itaha
You
supto spak.
is
way
of --guncmainry
your o W l l ~ f ~ p ~ : ~ n , - this
&~~&
Shtement may ~ P W confradict~ry:italic$ if mything,
to
strengthen (note those italics) an utterance. ~~t
say
Somdbglike: H e are directions a n g you how to react,
my
Wing-efhing
by itself is not Wrely to -vioce you: pd betfcr use
to *e
sum You see what I mean. B is
horn,
for
Lmethat k w n g shldmt~in Eogli& -mition h d to use
jtalics far more than do established a d m d m t htvs
of pmae.
my
kesuse the f o m are afraid, even as they h g that they
are not bdng lisfened
that their words pre apt haveno sect.
Then
are doubtla 0 t h deviecs
~
that are p ~ * of
i womm% jan&me-'f
be desrribed in wrifing b w thm i no Pasy way
'O give examples:this is
of - d l y
femaleintomtion pnt-.
Catainly jt
be said that ~msll
ha-ve at- t h e &@ a -~- d- e r
~
~F~ than do ~
men, both withinsm&&
0
and
~
full-ta
patterns. I am not s u n why this i
p&bly
intanatiOd
~ S r i eist ~W-wa-sgq -n_dalr
-,incase
-'he lrst
was
- not
-- r s- d-v t- d . That is, if you have mn
to be afrsi
you'= not being iistmed to, or not king tden ~ O ~ you
Y ,
in
ways for the hearer to figurr out what
Saidyell" try every m-s
to
that your masage is r e a j v d and
responded to- ( n u s , if you're spca*ing to someone you are afraid
dm't undmtand English v W well, you'll be more pmne to
than You would be if there w m no language pmblm.~
Pahaps women d i r e that they arc offm not being listened h,
buse
they d d o ' t be saying anything that really mat-
m
' a!ic
kkthey
xs
wY
em
"
my
Women Are Ludies / 57
collsciousl~,use voice patterns that

tered, and therefore, more or
have a dual effect: first, of being very attention-~tchingin the
that if what you have to say won't be perceived, at least the addressee
will hear how you're saying it; and then, since pitch and stress carry
some semantic for-, the speaker may hope that some ofthe message
through by that means, though it might be lost if stated
will
that
only once, by words alone. It may be for this reason as
women are more prone to gesture as they speak than are men. All this
is speculation, thou& I think interesting s ~ u l a t i o n A first &jjectimthat might occur these poi- is that men cEn
vifiua]ly e v - q itemon this list; some men, surely$use *One- some
and some maybe even use all. The latter is very often the
use
academic men; and I think that the d&iive f a o r is less
Pwely gender _thanp e r i n the real world- ~ u itt ~ P P C that,
~ S as
a result of natural gmdw, a woman tends to have, and b a i d y tends
to feel she h a , little real-world power compared with a man; so
gwerdly a woman wdl be more apt to have these uses than a man
~t is q u d l y true that different women speak women's language
to differing extents; and interestingly enough, it seems
-women
-me among the least apt to k ~ m e ofthis
n
language. But
this may be because women who have succeeded in academe have
power than other women who have no outside roles; and that
in determining their ml-world power, women as a basis the Power
ofthe men they know. Since the men that women academics are most
likely6
to h o w are &e ~
academics, on this~
basis of comparison, with
to have more power
relatively real-world-p~werless,they
than other women, so they are less apt to have to resort to wornen's
-ge.
And, in my experience, academia is a more -ditaria
edety than most, in terms of sex roles and e x ~ t a t i o n s .
. la any event, it
be clear that I am not talking about hundred~crcentmrfektjons,_but .~ather.-generaltende~ci~.
If you are a
-w m , it is more likely that you will speak this way than if YOU are
a m,but that is not to say that I predict you do speak this way if
I you'm a woman, or don't if you're a m. Further, You could
I thk way to some -tent; or could speak it under some circumstances
btit mt others. @or insmce, in the office where you're in charge you
58
Language and W m n b pi-
mkhtavoid it, but might use it habitually at horn+ pcrhp not cva
rdizing You are d n g the switch.)
It
r m d ~ s ~ & g a t c dby Chni, Knmu (in &,!&ohgY
T d June
~ ~1974)
s that t h m c l a k a= i n m ( c . H~ rasan ~:
Iht in qurtionnaim
thq6
1
1
4OUS Women did not indimk t b t
'hey used Y~omm's"
lan~@
nor did men indiate t h t thyna y
h e mit~p s v l i ~to w o ~ nerr
h
a several
.
to be
in reply to tbk. First, it
have&d d r d ~ - - ( h ( m a m o tw t h w foa that wornmust. What I have said ir that wornen
t*
or
~ i Lo or
k ~ ~
tb,
in a wider range of linguistic, psychotogical, rind
slvimma-hpt
k k d v e n c a s , for me thhy,
contexts than men do. (Obvi0dy therr will be ~ ~ t j O n S S )
h n d ,
device of the intervim in t h e usrp b uapd w,,g
People how they fdabout hguistic forms makm t h xvaious
about t h a ; they m y feel that if thy my *ye,- fhg
be dirap
p m of, a r t YOU*^^ not a nioc p
n if you donst
4drig&,,
howwa
"right" may k oonstrued in a givm
nk
not
be explicitly m h e d but
skew the figthe me+
h d
very
PP~C simply m ' t aware of w b t they say; it L
~aL ~ ~
linguist to have the 'kr"for h t . And it is pmbaMy tree that
W m t a y Q~W
the questions
W are, the more
tion
conscious or not) oan be a p t e & h d qURStiOn6 nik
ing
over one's masculinity or femininity, or the pmpr
OmYs
a e artain1~a k m s i ~ ~SOg it's
. ~ 8 . f e10 ae
wh
a questionnaire at f e value.
robl la with many tests h t have bceo &for r r o a ~ tion of "women's language" is t h t they have -dd
httm
-plea
beu m ~ l eI know of uscd fmhman mmpositjOnthmcs).
loosurp*W~, t h e tatstend to show that little or no m n c b
isf 0 by ~the subjects
~
between the sn of the M& writs of
the pi- and the
ascribed to him or her. This finding, howeva,
is deceptive.
If You look at the list d distinguishing criteria for womcnlg la,,me I gave mk,You will note that most ofthe cMtwtim
a
W-r~oEh b ~-&@t*.or @ 1-t hi&Iy s o d , S Q ~ .
~~
'
*-
why Women Are Ludies / 59
hi^ is because h e y are pm@im2rkers~t_h_e~

Sk%aItothe ddressee
1 how
the S+Gyfals about what she (heyof courgy in the
cases of
language) is g y i n s and how the speaker h o ~ - o r
I
cxpce& that the h m e r will react. Such mmmentary

informal stylepcrson-to-person f r h d l .~ s ~ and
?
a pan of
though incr-gly
'
rmely th- days, lettms-rather than fomsl

stylc--llstur~ pnd most forms of h t i n g . In ~a*iculm*frrshmnn
is notodous for its awkward f o d t ~owing
,
-@tion
in writing, and is the last place one would look for persmd
,b-tiOn,
indicative of the writer's feeling of comfortable rap
port with a potential reader.
~ w m aptions
n
minus the -us
of mwhich have
usedas a testing device, will also produce suspect results, because
they are not part of connected dialogue and ka- they are
1list4 above were not intended as Ya-or-no cerhhla+ ne
What 1 said was that mast women would use most ofrange of PYChological and social environments than most men
wo-d,j
(a vev hdgy statement, but what did YOU e x ~ t ? ) kuse
,
themselves
in
a
wider
range
of
tend to feel
to
judge
whether
~0m-g
c j ~ u m s ~ tc ehsmen do. Hence, one
&Y
is "
~ lmBuage,"
0
~ w e , ~' ' or "neutral"
~
~
~
refefena to the &-World -text in which it was uttered-a camof judgments that would be virfudy
plcn .nd subdc
impansible
in a ~ t u rway
~ l in experim=d situation.
nere's another poht, and that is tht* ~ ~ ~ . t y P i d - b W ~
far more idUentidthan-a (mere) statistid CKEbti(1n-Let's say*
forthe d e of argument, shat no real female Perm in the United
=ttuady
any form or dialect of women's l m ~ a g eYet
there are the innumerable women we See On tel&ion, who whether
we like it or not form role models for Young girls. Maybe Edith
h k m is not p-ted
as wholly believable or admirable figure*but
certainly she is pr-ted
as a conceivable female tw,one that *me
spire
to fit into. Edith Bunker is o b i o d y an
one might
atrme
but almost every woman you =in the media has many
these stermtypiofwomen's language b d t into her speech.
as a
women, I fw,have great influam Over the Young: I
'
unw
Sw
62 / Lunguage and Woman 's Place
ing as it is, is not mdoxjca!: if he speaks (tind p-&ally khaves) as

men in his culture are,suEposed~o,hegwemJy gains peop~e9srgs%t.
But whichever course the woman t&e-to speak women's language
or not to-she will not k r e s p t - e . So she cannot carry out the order,
and the order is transmitted by miety at large; there is no way to
question it, no one even to direct the question to. Bateson claims that
if someone is exposed to a double-bind in c h i l d h d , he may become
schizophrenic and that, indeed, double-binds are found in many
schizophrenogenic families.
Now clearly it would be ridiculous to claim that therefore women
are typically schizophrenic in a clinical sense. But certainly it is true
that more women than men are institutionalized for mental illness;
women form the huge majority of psychiatric patients. It may be that
men and women start out with the same psychologid equipment, but
fighting the paradoxes a woman necessarily faces tends to break down
a woman's mental r a o u m s ; therefore a woman is more apt to run
into mental difficulties and, when she faces real stress, to have fewer
inner resources I& to overcome her problems. So it is just possible
that e e t y is putting a far greater strain on its women than on its
men, and it is time to ask whether this is m e , and if true, how the
burden may be equalized.
Finally, it should be noted that tbe &tinction between men's and
w m ' s . b g w g e b a s p p t o m of a problem in our culture, not the
problun itself. Basidly it reRects the fact that men andwomen are
expected to have different interests and Werent roles, hold different
t y p of conversations, and react Merently to other people. This
point is made e s p d l y clearly and n i d y by Roy Miller in his book
The Japanese Language. Although he is discussing the situation in
Japan-d
in Japanese society the roles of men and women are
much more rigidly stratified than they are in ours-nevertheless an
analogy ktween what he is saying and what I have said can easily be
drawn. Let me repduce the relevant passage in f d :
Another irnprtmt part of the systcm of speech levels is the d i s h d o n
between men's and women's speech. Partly these differen- operate
within the larger system of speech Imls. For uample, women make
more WE of the deferentid pre6x o- and of elegant and exalted verb
1
i

forms than do men, etc., and certain of thme aspects have already
touched u p above in our brief summary of the levels system. But
sexual diffefentiatiw in Japanalso includes different sets of sentencefinal particles for men ( . . . m . . . yo, . . . ze, etc.) and for women
( . . . wu, . . . no), as well as different repertories of interjections for
each group. Women also favor variant pronunciations of certain forms
(godmasu for gozairnasu). But in general the differences between men's
and wornen's speech are too far-mhing and too c l d y interdependent
upon content and style to admit of any simple summary. Put most
briefly, women in Japanese Society traditionally talk about different
things than men do, or at the very least, they say different things even
when they talk about the same topics. This maka it dimcult and even
pointless to attempt to give typical equivalent exprasiollg in men's and
women's speech, since in most situations the aontent and topic will differ
as much as would the formal vmbd expression.
The following brief text is a good example of fairly elegant but otherwise quite run-of-the-mill women's speech:
A. [I am omitting Miller's Japanese didague here for convenience, and

using only the English translations Miller gives alon@e.l My,what
a splendid garden you have here-the lawn is so nice and big, it's
certainly wonderful, isn't it?
B. Oh no, not at all, we don't take care of it at all any more, so it simply
doesn't always look as nice as we would like it to.
A.Oh no, I don't think so at all-but since it's such a big garden, of
course it must be quite a tremendous task to take care of it a11 by
yourself; but even so, you certainly do manage to make it look nice
all the time: it certainly is nice and pretty any time one sees it.
B. No, I'm afraid not, not at all . . .
This English version,.a fairly literal if not word-for-word translation of

the Japanese, will make it clear that in every sense this is a very special
kind of discourse. What is being said here is not at all important; the only
thing of any concern to either speaker is the way in which it is being said.
and the number of times the same thing can be repeated. And it is really
pointless to ask what the equivalent of all this would be in men's speech,
because Japanese men would not carry & in this way a b u t anything,
particularly a b u t gardens. A male equivalent text for speaker A would
simply be, ii niwa da n6, "it's a nice garden,isn't it," and that would be the
end of it; to this the reply of speaker B, if any, would most likely k a
sub-linguisticgrunt, as a sign of acknowledgementor of polite denial.'
1. R. A. Miller, The Juwnese Language (Chicago: Univeisity of ChiPress,
1967), pp. 289-90.
We will return to this point later: it will be seen ta bc equally valid,

if sometimes less striking, in American dialogue. But I think Miller's
major point is unquestionably valid: typical "men's talk" is done for
a different purpose than typical "women's talk." The differen- be
tween the two arise largely out of this.

i
of certain kinds about the types of behavior and judgments that occur.
The rules are as follows:
1. . F a ~ t y keepalof.
:
2. D e f e ~ egixe
: opttns.
3. .Camaraderie: show syrq~athy.
The first of these rules is perhaps the one most prominent in eti- 4.
qwtk books and other considerations of formal politeness. We-- it
in
languages that d~Eerat.i_a&between a fqmal pd-qinfo@
Politeness
yw: when the formal yol! is in use, the effect is to create dismcq
speaker and addressee. Legalese and medicalese, for various
With thcpe facts in mind we can rehlm to our original quation:
mwms known best to their speakers, also utilize this rule in their use
Why are women supposed U) bc more "polite" than men,and ~ h y ~ s
- --.
-of technical terminology. This &&a~ces swaker both from addressee
itocnsidqd
men to be rapre
*'pj-itel' in the presence
- n e c e x q for
-.- ..
.
&
fm what he is sayinaimplying that
no-motive content
of women? And, a related quation: If, as is oftensuggested, politeness
t d i u m m n c e , .and thus the_p&cipants can remain doof. In this
is developed by sodetia in order to reduce friction in pemnal intemcway, it is wise to talk about ca~cinomaratherthan cancer, which
tion, why do many feminists fed .bronted by these-spxial womencarries unpleasant emotiod connotations. By using these terms, the
related fonns of 'politeness," and why do they feel that they must be
doctor (or anyone who uses jargon, including of course all of us
abolished if true equality between the sexes is ever to be attained?
academics) main@+in~
both distance from and superiority o v g his
The fact that dfferent cultures may adjudge the same act in the
addmsee Another example is what might be called the Academic
m e circumstanoes polite or rude indicata that there must be more
RMve:
"In this paper-it has been shown. . . ." Neophyte authors are
than one rule of "po1itenm"-that ig that same culturcl will apply
often
advised
to use active sentences: the reason is that the active voice
one nrle preferentially, at a given state in a relationship, where anindiwtes
involvement
on the part of the speaker or writer, and thereby
other will apply another. Also we are aware that certain ofthe ingrediinvites the participation, or sympathy, of the read= or hearer. But if
ents of "politenas" may be cambind with one another, a may
you ~
U cooland_above
Q it all*you ~ the pwi~e,
and this
coexist---others are mutually exclusive. Again, this suggests the exisis
what
academics
are
prone
to
do.
Another
such
device
is
the
academtence of several rules, working together a q m a t e i y as the case may
ic-authorid we (in p a p - b y a sing& author), parallel in function to
&.IAayE&e _Rof Politen-es%when fully wd correctly fornuthe plural lrous (as opposed to t u ) in French, and to be distinguished
lat&should h able to predict why, in a particular culture, a particuh
t the
~various other non-kt-person plural we's (the editorial and
lar act in a particular circumstance is pdik or not poli* and should
myd
we; the we reserved for tdking to children. as in "Now let's tie
also be valid for both lingustic pdi&kkhaviar (saying "'please"; using
our shoes, and then we'll take a nice nap").
"formal" pronouns in languagca that have such fonns) and nonlin& q p e m f i f o r m s a n d avoim-w of collquiflisrn are pother
guistic politma. (opening doors for others; bringrng wine to your
-vnig
cJs$anoe, and the use oftides (Mr., Dr., Sir, and
dinner host). As a first attempt,
- - I s u ~ athree
t
such rules; I feel that
-- --Iw on) plus last name still another. Nonlinguistidly, formal dress,
at least these thre-are needed. Although at first glance it -s
Which is always uncomfortable and generally conceding, plays just
possible and attractive to compress them into one,closer examination
- . . W s role.
reveals that by doing so we would lose the ability to make predictions
find example of the use of Rule 1 is the impersonal pronoun
2 /Forms of
Why Women Are h d i e s / 67
66 / Language and Womani Place
particularly wheg ugcd as a substitute k r y o or

~ J To Americans, the British seem eapaially devoted ta Rule I politen=, and one
indication of their addiction to this rule is, in fact, the many ways in
which one may be used in standard British English, and not in Ameriuu,English at all:
fedsawful about &a$" -s,
if I r d novels
by British authom mmtly, to be the ~anslationalequivalmt of "I
feel awful about that." I think I have also seen in Wtish novds
dialogue such as "One shouldn't have done that now, should one?"
as an admonition to a second m n---.
-- ) The acmnd rule, that of deferencc, may be used alone or in co~ a hwitbeither
~ .
of thgqtb-er two rules, while Rule 1 and Rule 3 g e
rnutuallv exclusiye. The application of this rule m a k s i t Igqk as
'bouphthe d o n _ a g k b m v ~ - b d -~~~r -vw~ b tt ~ d o i,s -bxlef~
up to the ad--.
Ofcourse, this is very often mere s h m or m v e n tion, when the speaker knows very well that he has the power to
enforce a decision. Most forms of Rule I behavior tend to sugget t h t
the speaker's social s t a t l a is suprior to that of the add=;
generally Rule 2 mli-as fan_veysLwhet~gr-edIyor-cpnvention~IyIthe
s u H o r j t r qf t_he_add-=-oyer
the -s&er.
Examples of Rule 2:
hesi-m
m-d--~tiongeneral@!Questiqintpution
-. and tag
qugtioninu are Rule 2 related devices as long as the speaker is not
r d y uncertain about the truth of his assertion. Hcdgse similarly,
work U s way: they l a v e the addressee the option of deciding how
seriously to take what the speaker is saying. It is for this reason that
"John is sorta short" may tte, in the right mtat, a polite way of
saying "John is short," rather than a scaled-down comment on John's
actual height.
Finally, and parallel to the use of technical t e r m that was cited
above as a Rule I device, we find eupboisms wed in acrorw~yie
Rule 2. They are simllar in that both skirt ur issue, and thus are ways
of discussing a touchy subject while pretending to be doing something
else. But tech~liealterms evade the issue by saying, in effect:Well,this
would bc touchy if we were emohondly involved, but no, we m
remote, so touchiness dmn't arise. Euphemisms grant that the sub- - - - j
a h-rpucjhy, but pretend
-- -...
that .it is mt the matter under- discussion.
Hmce we find academic writing replete with t s h n i d terms when it
-0%
''a
'
js objectivity and scholarly almfness that is dsirrd; but we find

mktail party chitchat full of euphemisms, since when we gossip we
m'tafter remotbut we do want to avoid offense by avoiding
m i n g bead on with idas that may not be fully palatable when made
explicit. Thus, neither the doaa writing m sexual practices in a
b m e d text nor the hostess talking about the doings of her friends to
mutual friends might want fo use the straight four-letter word that
most directly describes the situation. So the doctor expounds: "Cooplation may also be enhanced by the use of oleaginous materials," and
the host- gushcr, "Selma told me she found Jimmy and Marion
do*lg it with mayonnaise!" hphemkms, then, are Rule 2 related
-use
they &w the addressce the option.-of- wming notbe
-.what
-he actually is hearing, although again the pretense is
m v d o n a l : both speaker and addressee know full well what it is
that they are discussing, or else, of course, the discussion would
founder, as it occasionally does when the euphemisms become too
thick or too arcane for perception.
The third rule i s snnetimcr said not to be part of politeness; but i<>
American society, gestures of friendliness are certainly considered in
this category; it is Only in (Rule 1 linked) f o r d etiquette treatise)
that the two are not connected,and &SI is as we would expect, since
as I said, Rule_! .md R-de 3 a 5 mutually exclusive. You cannot be
mtending the hand of friendship and step&..g back aloofly at once.
e* you an combine Rule 3 with Rule 2: you can be friendly and
ddkcntial, just as you can wmbine Rules 1 and 2, to be aloof but
deferential. As we shall see, how many and which of the rules you
.pply in a givm situation are determined by your subculture as well
as by your personal pychological makeup.
& p m of Rule 3 is to make the addrmJeel that t h e e f l
k hrnd-wnts_to.lx.fnk~dly with him>+i_s*-&Min- hjm, and
on. Like the other rules it m k red or conventional. For instance,
k k d q n n g is a well-known nonlinguistic Rule 3 device. And it can
be done where real camaraderie is fdt, for instance, between friends,
O W of whom is glad to see the other after a long absence; or it can
be doac by a salesman to a (male)prospect, concurrent with telling
b~dirty joke mother Rule 3 related device, and here mnventiod
k;
'
68
hnguage and Woman's Place
why
omen Are Ladies
/ 69
y, but so are sneezing
again.~ ~ - ~ ~ ~ n e n iseRUI
r a ~ i y
rather than either the t
the euphemisms of Rule 2- .Saying the
f"-wa
cover their mouths
We're i~ l&-s tog&s~~w_t

a
with each
~'E-@-S_~~QQ-~-W
and f i r ~ t n ~ o inn some

e
is a Rule 3 device. The first
hq*tY
between 8 w k - r and h a
implies fun e~dtarianisrp. co
in a
' h s where
him (or her) by first name.
*o
is =vmtimal,
since the
3 d w i m Oikc k b * p p i ~ gor friendly taing) they may

in for a big surpri* when the friendhip m d d d y
It should be cl- by now that
sprite rh
.n
to
arriveeven at a m h m d Mnition of politma ( a d clarly
.re
plenty of raid* ~ d l r m swhich
,
I will not WOW
h
a
)
.
so
a tag q"atim when used for @ten=
purely in the realm Of ~ u f e
o f p l in~ a ~ U C invo~vm
U
~b ~a1 (the r p u ~ a
indiatiog some dishe) md Rok 2 me is e g p ~ ~ baovcnl Y
b O n d ~ thou& the addm
t rrfipe). And .nhjoactim,
like
"You wan* =mu, b b ~ h~ a'eiemer~bofboth ~d~2 md R& 3.
But - b i n i ~ Rule 1 and 3 S ~ ~ uniikely:
I S
we might md
opvim:
''Wmna w e w , Rofessur SonepF* or p r h p s : *Wma
nm
5'
mpnkf+
baby?"
a Aould be evidmt tbat differentculturn -idcr
----_ rule
di_ff-t
~ r i o n or
~ ,applicable under d i f f m t -&tirms.&, for
-pL*
jet
mnsidfl Ih
of belching &a a _-_._ in
American h e t y frowns m this; c h i d chinae
soday,
On the
hand, c0t1sidcrait the polite
to do. ~ . our
o *r
-unt
for the way thtsc two c d t m behave?
Here we b v e a simtim that migbt be viewed in ~ i t dhtwo
~
You might f* that my intarn( physical p m , made uplicit
evident
the- outside world, wss na h~~ on atha peopfe,S
pnvw. So YOU would attempt to suppnss
cond
soch .et
- -
1
-
"
>-
-" --
,,- -
.-
3klching h viewed as a ~ ~ f i a t i oofn

, pu bvcid r n d i n g nice YOW host, made him feel a ~ ~ ~ a t r d .
act may determine ~
h it isk
so you oatego- a @C&U
one
ml%
or
rude
accmding
to
be rnnsidered p&e atxording
another.
of ~ r -d a
-m
'-- the mla'
it-ey b~ t k t tpen $ O*
.
V@
O_US
poinG @ a
-- i s pre~ggl'&&P_aP~~i.
=.&?his
m y mer betyam culturn. I am sum at^
hat that the d a as s h are~universal: in no h e t y * it is my
. . prediction,will there be no Rfle- of m y ofthest
~ s o c i c t may
y apply Rule 1 Nsy chme it ge% U, the vq
~uga
of in-y,
and another d s*h
to Role 3 with
m&l% of t h two
~ h~~athetid'I-able
Arity.
-, it is malogous to the meeting of matter and antimatter:
a
&es p ~This. b p p o s tbc time: me s ~ k e *
to indiwk warmth and friendship; the md
~~c(hing
.
ba& away, ending the exchange abruptly, muttering, "lie
~h~ first speaker waders off,musing, "Now what's
m
a
w with him?"
der what happens when an American, a
and a Japa.
and to
suppole
they all want to make a good
tbk -,
. wer
9-
70
I
--
L ~ ~ u u attd
g e Woman'r pba
be
e" accordillg to their own shdards.

m, vnlss
the
membrrs Of the group are v e q sophisticated slid hare h d prior
to the other cultures, the Am&can
to the
Overly bra,
fmiliar, and prying; the ~ a p . ~
W~H
cloyingly
the gem^ will srem datmt
uninterested io th
others to 'he poht of m g a ~ eSO. fhey will pan, raeb thinkng the
my
is being communiaM (since he knows it's cold as well as I do);

fa*m, rm tryiqto inwith him and forma f r i e n d Q however
&O*-ljved. In the h t k t a n = politeness is not involved; in the
might my I v u mpged in a Rule 3 type of*mtion since
-d,
expressing a desire for qua in am hi^.
1 ws
to m k
T J ,is~an
~ important point, since we shall find it
&e ru]m by which we structure polite Utteritl'lCtS, and decide whether
ficy appropriate,fthe p d d ratr of ru*s We
for deciding the contextual appropriateness of utterances in circumstances
is not at issue. In the latter caw, we seek to -*
of information we
rnuni=te iIIformatiorr:to apprise an
bye,
but he & not have and needs to know*by the least circuitous
~f we are m n m e d with the pure transmission of famd
knowledge, my ~ ~ i c a t i that
o n h not meet the criteria just
be an aberrant or failed communication, while if we
other purpose, the same utterance may k eminently
talking for
detestable
d indjvidud Prsonalify
defceb And if
mats olha m a h of the d m
'hama are t h e
impressions will be *forced,
national
StermfW
am famed: Americans arc -too pemal~;
tm humble"; G m m s an *'too s t i ~ "A ~ W Iw ~
h t, is
bppening
is fiat a c h is mnforming to a cultural at-ofwht
Enutihltes
polite khavior bward a slight q u a i n h o e . ~t fhir r% ofa rk
tionsbipya @ITnanwill m~hssiz
Rdc 1.1 1 . w - ~d~a .Man
3. (These are ofcourse the l m t y p i d
thm
ofWcipan&in acub- ~ h rul
m .ppliCBtim fo.
idi-~ncratic reason* i di8-f.)
N*,
incram in fnmiliait~,the Japanese will s m
towud &e
i
" of RYL 3 ~
dong aifh ~ R& 2; ~he
~
~
a
.Ivan
prably* S~I'U a bit more defmfial
will, but
he
seas &ndly and deferatial,
%
,
.Am
a
h-al
o f q h t . n d i p , will
dmp tbc Rule
and S f M aululring the Poof ~~l~ 3, bu( it
him mme time So it is not that & thrc+ cdtorr.
lvc (brrr
differat d c " I.to bow be polite; it's just
h t they havedssmt
mnditim on the applicability of the
they
As Miller noted in thc excerpt givm
ev+
mnv-&8
---- - Eolimaska
mior cri&X&n --- for -tabdip
of a
-a
--.
hd: .. .
@ ~ m ~ - o n ~ . : ~ ~ ~ d o r i p f ~but
t i o n t ue
-,
4'
,,
sm
Women Are Ladies / 71
--
IS by which factual information may best be

by.^. P.~ r i o in
e hisqa~
I.P*C--~~
veyed has been
cpQV-tion."
h this work, Grice proposes four w e Rules ofConv-ti~,
w&h we can summark as follows:
A
system of
'me
1. Quality. &y only what is true.

2. Quantity. &y ody as much, and just as much*as is
3. Relevance. Be relevant.
4. -a.
Be ~ ~ i c u o uDon't
s . be ambiguous. Don't be obscure.
Be succinct.
earl^ these rut=, like the Rules of Politeness proposed earlier#
hve
much to be desired h terms of specificity: how
one
if
a potential CMIVerSatio~
contribution is "relevant'? "Nw"?
of
they are useful guidelines. G h
notices that a mat
-v-tion
is in violation pf the* rul* Y& 1s-.not
- - nodly
.
nor
is here usually-any problem in understand%>'
purpase of such non~o~nforming
contributions. He
, lag* force or
givesas one axample the case of a letter of recommadation for a
fellowship h t states: "Miss X has nice bandwriting." Now at fint
I
1a.gagad
in@ about me's a d d r e , and garnering
jnhlitioo &,,t his
feelinis hward-o~e. So it isgt PO_** arbt
yo"
say,
but
nfhrr h o w ~ u
k a~d ,yW ~ P also,
S , why you say it+1f1 my,6 q t * s
-Id OUf *' fO Someone who is haitatiq to
of two -a
put On*
P ~ o ~ ~expming
I Y
M - w o r ~informatiOfl
but
it
1
just met at bus ,op, no mfnrmatiOn
a.
pmY;
\
72 / Language and Woman's P h

---glance, this is a violation of quantify and/or ~ l - c e .
It is not
n-sarY
fo know about a fellowship candi&te's h d h t i n g in
order to Judge if the candidate is worthy of receiving suppoa. What
Gri@ says is that, by its very (apparent) irrelevance, the statement
else, approximately: ''On a fellowship rmmmen.
i m ~ l i something
a
dati0n one is supposed to M y only favorable things about the ,-an&
date- Well? this is the only paint in Miss X.s favor that I h o w of
Elgo. this stakment implies another: 'Miss X do- not
get
the fellowship, since she has no relevant good qualities. **
is what
Orice refers to as a conversational imp]icatm.
The important quation for US here is: Why (or when) is if useful
ms
W h y n N d~q~speak
logidy, dirmiy, - a d -fo
the mint?
Here we have a situation in which the ruler of cooversation would
Come into conflict with one or more of the rules o f p o l i t m ~W
. e have
a violation of the third rule of politenss, applied indimtly; that is,
to my what we have to say explicitly would be making Miss X look
bad, and feel bad, if she knew. There is a colloquial pdnciple that
expre~sathis notion: "If you can't say something nieg don't say
mything at all." A ~ h r f illustration

l
of the coneict
be found in
CBYE in which it is the addressee whose feelings would be dirw~y
impinged upon. So I might say, "It's d d in her%'' and mean by it
any of the followine:
1- Why didn't you close the window?
2- You borrowed my favorite swater.
3- Let's go into mother rmm.
. -4. You're going to make me catch cold.
And so on. Now,saykg any of 1 4 wdl violate some rule ofpolib
nessj probably 2 or 3 or a combination. C b w l y , i g p l i g t u r e -geems
fehorsrdand!h!k2 1 ~ t e d.device; a. m
w
s ofletting
the add&&
ha-lhe-hefit of the doubt, come to his own conclusions (again,
often merely by convention, since there is usually only one meaning
to be derived from the utterance). So we can say t h t Gria's &nvm
s a t h a 1 Principis are usable only in case them is no possibility d
~ n h c with
t the Rules of Politeness, or in situations in which polik
mnversation is not felt to be required, where pure information L to
L,

be transmitted, information about the outside world, rather than
about the personal and interpersonal feelings of the speaker and the
addressee. And, consequently, the less speaker and addressee wish to
cmnmdmk about.&eir personal feelings, the more likely i t is that
the R k o f .Conversation will be in effect, permitting the participants
in the discourse to say what they need to say, and stop there. So Rule
- 1- politenessisrmnsrmant withapplic-ation-of the Rules-of Conversit-etions e l l for
use
- --the
.--- of
d m ;but Rule 2 and
staiments whose meaning is derivable by the notion o f . ~ v ~ t i o n a l
implicature.
So, to paraphrase Miller again, what you are talking about has a
great deal of influence on how you will say it: directly and straight,
or indirectly and repetitiously. The former exemplifies the strict use
of Grice's principles, the latter of conversational implicature. We may
-also note that it i s m o p th_e_misomistic
~
stereotrpes in our cdture
that women cannot follow the rules of conversation: that a wow's
discourse is necessarily indirect, repetitious, meandering,u n c l c , exnggeratec-the antitheis of every one of Grice'sprinciples--while
of
- .--I
.
-oc
a-man's s m h is c l ~@ect,precise,
, -and
to
the
point.
Now
--.obviously to hold this belief l i t d y is idiotic, since everyone knows
plenty of women who habitually speak straighter than plenty of men.
But, as I remarked earlier, stwsotyp%~we-_not to lx ignored: first,
h u s e far a stereotype to exist, it must be an wggeratbioof somethrng that iain facl in existand able to be recognized;and second,
k a m e one measures oneself for k t t e r or-womaccording to how
well or p m l y one conforms to the stemtype on!: is supto
--
CQnfOrmto.
3 / Women and Politeness
Another, l a s valueladen way of lmking at things is to say thath e of men's .s-his

@t jt*nctions in. agrd with
k r u l e s of conversation,and of women's speech, that it tends to make
wider use of the p - e r a - o f

-
impfiatwe. There is no p n k u l a r
u m t h t k c is ex& rimv inherentin the men's way:
if pop* think a,it is h
u
,
men in this culture tmd to impase thcir
vdue judgments m everyone, a,that the men's way of doing things
becomes the "good wayl" and the women's way the bad way. It would
be bcmr to think of the situatim in these terms: there are twop&Ible
m~ersational_y&es~with,
of course, idmite possibilities for mixtures
md intmwotions); om sQlLICnds_tg p d 0 a . k b-m--en'ssh,
moI_qj~w~~
This
' s might
.
be t w i n &her of two ways; more
men midit habttur?ly adopt one_~tyIe
usualIyJ-morewomen t h other;
.
w,mm-in geggd w o ~ i dtgtd to gse moreof g ~ g-r--h
though
sp_metimesfalljlgintotheother;
the ..me
with women. The &XJ
-- - .
m t a be the truth that underlies the stereotype. In ~ m a d in
tdtional Amculture (we are not talking about a d e m i s here,
for m n s a h d y noted) women will tcqd tor&r i t h refarnee
tc.'bs rula of politeness, aaversatio~+ :mpliicature, - and
- -intcrprsoo.l-exploration; men will lend to spaL with r e f - ~ to the qle3
of mnversation and straight factual communication. It seems to be
true of bDth men and women, however,that when the cmch coma,
the rule8 of politenas will supersede the rules of convemation: better
be unclear than rude.
If this is a viable hypothesis, there is a relationship uwng several
t h g s that are stated to be generally true of_w_o_mm: they aremge
interested .in intwpxsond &scovm?MA
B fiscscqiofl-ofuWd
things and women are ladies, more polite than men are. The first
creates the second, and the second no doubt expeditts the first in turn.
Again, it is important to remember that neither of these two_styics
3 &oladolador.M~.eacb-iS
valuable in its own context. But men and
women botb --if tbey cannotsdt& m d 1 y hmam styk-t~
the
Qthsr 8s tksitmtion warrants. It may be that the traditional woman
could not easily switch styla w h a n s c g s q , and the stereotype is
true in that sense; but it is equally true that the traditional man cannot
switch out of his straight-fmm-the-shouldcrpmq and this is just a
damaging. But, as with joka as we shall see Mow, men make
8-tYJXh
~d = U P tYPi@y don't i ~ _ v e t ! u W e ~
&&tthe
_t!
d v q but about other m ~ . L H ~it cis e
the dominant group in a
Why Wowten Are Ladies / 75
gociety that establishes stereotypes of the other groups, and decides

which groups, on the basis of thcse stereotypes, are "god" and "bad."
The job of people who find themselves, as members ofnondominant
group, bdng stemtyped is not nmasarily to decide that there is no
truth underlying the stereotype and that therefore the stereotype is
bad and must be destroyed {though this may sometimes be true); but
it may a h be w o r t h ~ h i l ~ ~ a s s uthat
m e thepdw-me tm&&fid
the stereotype, butthat what i t - r e g r w t s j ~ agood tgjt ether than
the bad one it had beeJl assumed by the-dominant group to be. Women
sometimes realize this: thus, it had been axiomatic in our culture for
some time that wameo kk&qgrmiy_eness and that this was a bad
thing a b u t women, a reason why they'd never make it in the r d
world, and never had. Women had two-le
options for deahng
with this stereotype: to b y i t & m v i ~ h e y ~ r just
g _as pum-acious
as-men, or to d m it and take nom$gressiveness to be a virtue.
Different groups have done different things in this regard, but certainly the l a w psition is a strong one. We must not continue to be
brainwashed.
We may ask how these two styles g@b1isht j ~ e s n s e l v ~sex-linked
q
early
traits. Is it inherent, and thus inevitable? Or is it learned at
age? Evidence for the latter i that same women don't learn the
pdorninmt f d e style; this is a hopdul augury, since we might
eventually Ihow to educate dl children to be e q d y fluent in
both speecb t y p . The distinction aDmars at s verv earlll-w: psychologists studying children in nursery a c h d have found that little
h y s & m d y tend to mmmuniate about &emd tbings-building
garages, having battles, and so on-while little girh are r n ~ ~ a to
pt
talk about their own and other people's feelings, about each other, and
a b u t their socialization patterns (whois b t friends with whom, and
rn on). As mentioned previously, other studies have shorn that little
girls are ''politer" in speech than b y s of the same age, so we m a y
m u m e that these two styles of behavior_= leamd_t~&hq~
as we
~ u o to
ns
A -
w~dd
expect.
Another question raised at the outset of this discussion has not yet
k e n answered: Not only are women more polite, but men @resup
posed to bemore polite are-md women than they are with achotker.
1--
I/
1I
I
further, this sort of politenas is problematic: if-tbspuqwg4f mlib

~ & r ~ & c . k c - mpmnote
d
friendship, y b y d w ma-@
women wliteness SO often seem qEensive or constraining? If politeness is supposed to bring p p l e closer together, allowing them to
interact more easiIy with one another, why d w this special kind of
politeness seem so exclusiv-syhy do WQRWXL_tgaLsweqwsver a r o m f d of men whenit. isxdkd&aC'-ladies pr@ent"?
and I think that examining it will lead us
to some interesting conclusions. We might note, first off, that there is
no commrable exclusive female tactic: there's no conversational style
you are supposed to drop when a man enters the room. (There are
tabooed topics, of course, mostly sexual, or rather, gynecological:
women go along with men's assumption that female sexual anatomy
is pmticuIarly revolting.)
On the basis of ethologid studies on primatap, a theory has ken
propogal that, while unattractive in many ways and cert&ly open to
criticism in several of its aspects, nevertheless if &en not totally
litmdy offers a mans of understanding some of the strange and
rather p a r d o x i d things that s m to be going on. This is the notion
of male bonding, as propsed by such anthropologists as Lionel Tiger,
in hs book Men in G r o u p Tier says that in primates the males o h
seem to have the task of hunting together in p u p for food, while
the females stay behind, functioning as individuals, caring for the
young. He hypothesizes that this general situation necessarily pertained in p u p of primitive human kings, at least untii the advent
of agriculture: the men hunted .togeth-er-in pack .w_hi&t.h-e womeg
B y e d &bin4 .+ng
fo_r_ _the$ jndj~d-@-_li*~-gtcs and misinkthe
c3&d-m.
Now in order to hunt s ~ y ~ c u l a fsince
l yman
had only primitive weapons, 4 was not very strong or swift in
cornparism with his prey-the mate members ofthe tribe-had to work
tomther, develop effective techniques of cooperation, and -1
to
enjoy one another's company and minimize interpersonal friction.
The
sin= _they worked lwgely done-or, if they chose to
work together, they did not cooperate at one single task as the men
did, but rather esch did her individual job in the company of others
--did-w&~eedto develop technipus of w m h g as a mup. Now
obviously, within the male p u p , some members might be singled out
as, say, the best archers or the fleetest runners; so that within the
general atmapbere of cooperation you might find competition; but
basidly the nudes directed their efforts toward a common g d ,
among the females, each had her own god and succeeded as an
individual. Of muse, having no records of human life in those primitive times, we have w means of knowing whether this theory is
correct; but Tiger discusses some characteristics of modern life that
might be viewed as stemming from those habits inculcated in the
s p i e s miIlennia ago. In this view, it is the preswtday r 4 e x . s ~f
-men
to w o ~ ktonetber in_ind~t-ty~.wIitics,
&ion,.ae qilitq-y
powerful poup, to retain its pow&, must
haw some sort of cohesive force underlying it, inducing its members
to work as a team. And indeed, in virtually every culture we look at,
we see that men are in control of d the major institutions. Margaret
Mead and otbers have discussed a few isolated societies in which
women seern to be in charge, but these are small in size and few in
k k of s u m of these societia is in part due to the fact that women
i *
norm.) Tiger suggests that these groups work. by relying on male

bsnding, and that this is in fact whv women_ h d it so h a d to @
accexEd as mgn&befss.why in fact often they opt out entirely: they feel
they are out of place. Further, this is why men like to go on "stag"
hunting and Wing trips, and g e n d y congregate in all-malegroups.
There are occasional exceptions, and of course the more a society is
able to divest itself of millennia-old habits, the more women will be
integrated into the formerly all-male groups. If p p l e can become
vegttarians, or avoid war, they presumably can compmate for the
rdexes of male bonding; but none of these departures from the ageold norms is very widespread in mciety as yet.
This thesis is viewed with alarm by many feminists, principally
h u s e it seems to suggest that things are hopeless: 'This is m
ingrained habit," such a theory suggests, "and you'll never change it,
78 / Language and Woman's Piuce
because it goes deeper than the roots of the human race." W n l y

that is the position Tiger holds. But it is not n e m m y to accept such
a pessimistic point of view. One can, as a feminist, agree that there
is something going on in the overwhelming majority of cultures today
that can be described as "male bonding," and may want to agree, too,
that this goes back as far into recorded history as we can see, and,
from primate evidence, perhaps back to the very dawn of mankind.
But man has changed much about himself:from (probably) an original fruit eater, he has M e an omnivore; from a tree dweller, a
ground animal; and so on. We might work toward either of two goals:
to reduce the necessity for bonding among men, or to encourage it
among women, and among d people. Or we might try d l these
options, mitigating men's desire to bond, and strengthening women's.
Considering the changes that have occurred only in the past decade
in our views on, say, sexual normality, it d m ' t seem t m far-fetched
that o w views on the ways,necessity, and pleasures of bonding might
be similarly altered, if people set their minds to it, before too long.
Never underestimate the influence of the media.
We would like,that is, not only for men to accept women as integral
parts of their groups, but for women to be able to group with other
women men do with
-- - men. As Phyllis Chder points out, thls is-n~t
at p e t normally the case:
Women,although similar to mch &win many ways, areasme iwla~ed
from each other ie-terns of g-%IS [italics hen] than men are. Women
are not consolidated into either public or powerful groups. Women as
mothers are "grouped" with their children (who grow up and h v e
them), and only temporarily, and superficially with other women: for
a m p l e , in p a r 4 at women's auxiliary functions,and at h e t e r o s ~ ~ d
pama.=
I think that a start is being made, in women's groups, to overcome

this tendency of women not to bnd. The women's movement, in
referring to and addressing women universally as "sisters," is working
to establish a sense of female camaraderie, though it is still a camara2. Phyllis Cheder, Wmen and Madness (New
p. 270.
Ywk: Doubleday & Co., 1972),
'
derie of the underdog, just as a WASP mde doesn't think of himself

as a 'bbrother" of other WASP males, but a black male will consider
himself a "brother" of other black males. "Sister" redly means something like: T o i l who are one with me in our oppression," rather than
merely being an expression of pure unity. It is in any case a good
beginning. But perhaps even more important, for women and for the
human race generalIy, is establishing patterns of bonding ktween
both sexes, so that women, with their special abilities, sensitivities,
and talents, may be integrated into the "red world"; and men, with
theirs, may learn to function more smoothly in the home.
The notion of bonding, if we can accept the fact that something of
the sort occurs in present-day American traditional society, can also
serve to explain some of our findings abut poIitenas. We can see that
Rde.1 acts as-a_kdofd i s m w e r of hnding, saying as it does: Keep
away. Rule 3, on the other hand, encourage3 bonding relationships.
-- (Rule 2 would seem to be able to reinforce the effect of either Rule
1 or Rule 3.) We have noted that women's pliteness is principally of
the Rule 1 plus -Rule 2 type, establishing and reinforcing distance:
deferential mannerisms coupled with euphemism and hypmxrrect
- -markers
- of
and superpolite usage. Wopen's lanpage avoids
- . the
-warderie: backs!apfi& joke-telling, nicknaming, slang, and SO
forth. In all-female groups, we find devices that recall mde intimacycreating gestures: ernbwces for backslapping, discussion of personal
things. But in mixed groups, all manifestations of camaraderie disappear: this is really the principal problem: why& mix* grcups-there
is n ~ ~ n g i d e n ~ ~3hhaui~x,.
E d e . (Again I am talking about
traditional society.) And even in all-women groups, my imprgakn.is
%I typically there is less show of camaraderie than in@l:men p u p s .
Perhaps more interesthgIy, the women's type of camaraderie seems
less able to be used conventionally: men can tell dirty jokes and slap
tach other's backs even when they can't stand each other, this is
presumably how a great deal of the world's work gets done. But
women embrace and share confidences only when there are real feeE
ings of sympathy between them.
One counterexample that has been suggested to me is the use of
words like "dear,':-yhoggy," "luv," agd so forth- kttwWeen
p p l e who
80 / Language and Woman's Piace
are not sexually or emotionally h t w t e . Interestingly, both sex- may

-Be
in i&
between-or within sex lines. But it still seems that women
use thw expressions under different conditions &an-men &. Wqmen
who are mzhlly subordinate may use it to either men or women:
saleswomen and waitare particularly apt to do this. ~ u men
t
(heterosexual mates, that is) don't use it to other men-at-all; and when
.they use it to women, the woman is definitely in an i n f ~ o polsition.
r
I have known maie professors who habitually addressed their femaie
students as "dear," but I have rrever heard of a female professor
addressing her male students thus. (It is barely conceivable that an
elderly female professor might so address favorite female students,
though I know of no such instances; I can't imagine her addressing
a male student that way, though.) Docton and dentists (male) and
especially, I am tald, gyneco10gists are prone to address their f d e
(never male) patients this way; patients may never respond in kind.
This is probably related to the fact that men generally feel free to
address women by first name alone or nickname much sooner in a
relationship than a woman will feel free to so address a male. This is
sometimesjustified by the user on grounds of "friendship"; but if first
name done is not mutual, we b.ve-a- relation_&jp not of Rde 3
solidarity but rather one of Rule 1 class distinction, in which the
person who is addressed by first name is considered inferior to the one
who is not. Compare, for example. the forms of normal address between adults and children, particularly primary schml children and
their teachers.
Since "dear" and its cohorts are not mutually exchanged, we must
assume that a nonpardlel relationship exists-as it always does between doctor and patient anyway, but the more markedly when the
patient is female.
Then this aspect of the "ladyship" of women may be explained
through the concept of male bonding: male politeness is differen-t from
~ ~ x e d p o l i b g e ~ ~ s i malepoliteness
n~that
makes use of Rule
-female
3 to encourrge -hnding relationships,
- .-and
- . the
others
- .- -do not,
- and thus
&ourage them. It is for this reason that ygrnec feel excluded by
d d t y p e "plplite:: behador toward them. Men, in effect, say: "s&
xww "ourfriendship-d-mn't include you."
A particularly striking instance of the way this principle operates

may k seen in jokptelling behavior. A joke is g e n d l y considered
'btasteful" when it will not &end anyone who is likely to hear it. It
is the definition of "anyone" which has changed of late and could use
some more changing. W l y we rnean_:&yone
who counts." The
rettson we tell jokes is to become p r t of a (Rule 3 governed) bonding
relationship. Really or conventionally, joke telling brings the teller
and the hearers together. You are nemous to some extent while a joke
is being told: as the teller, for fear you'll get it wrong; as the hearer,
for fear you won't get it. Both of these possible responses are dangerous k a u s e they would inhibit the formation of the bond, making it
difficult or impossible for hearer and teller to relate mtisfactdy to
each other. But if the joke is offensive to -s0rnmqeoue
in the aupience,it
is guaranteed that the teller will fail in his intention to establish a
bond, at last for that person. And when a teller is confronting a huge
audience, in the media, then of course he can't tell how many members of the insultable groups might be out there listening: he can't
jeopardize his chances of establishing bonding relationship by telling
jokes that might offend a sizable portion of his audience.
In the past, it was implicitly assumed that members of various
outside group were not available for bonding with members of other
groups. !b if you were a WASP,it was all right to tell anti-anybody
else jokes;if you were Jewish, you could tell anti-Irish or anti-black
jokes, and so on. But lately we have become more sensitive: we have
included, at least for the purpose of conventional bond establishing (as
opposed to real camaraderie) all ethnic groups among the "anybody"
who cannot be offended, at the risk of ruining the effect of the joke.
not comvrisemaf_the
There is, however, one group-that
"anybdy:' from all available evidence. This is not a minority, but is
usually about half of any audience. That group is, of course,wo-.
There is a wb~legenreof antiwomen jokes, based on sexud Ster-e
types as antiethnic jokes were (and are) based on ethnic stereotypes:
women as a group and any woman because of belonging to that group
are d n , fuzzy-minded, extravagant, imprecise, long-winded . . . and
numerous variants on those themes, concerning jealousy of other
women, hat buying, driving, and so on. There are to my knowledge
82 / Language and Womans' Place
no parallel joke t y p w d o-n stereotypg of men in general. Even

female comedimes don't tell such jokes,probably because men make
up the jokes,or at Ieast men seem to establish what constitutes acceptable topics for joking about.
A comedian may be very sensitive to ethnic slurs, never be caught
dad telling Polish jokes, anti-Semitic jokes, or any of the other nono's, but he will include lots of antiwomen (these days, anti-"women's
Iib") jokes in his repertoire. No one (with the exception of a few of
those chronic female malcontents who obviously have no sense of
humor) will be offended,andgenerauy the women .im&gaudhnaill
(They'd better, or they'll be accused of
-hu& as loyLasLu&h~mgn.
typical female humorlessness or stupidty because they "don't get it.")
I think considerable damage is done to malleable young female egos
in this way: jokes are not harmless, as ethnic minorities are fully
aware. This sort of reaction to antiwomen jokes shows that-women
~~~rmt--t_ed,~by~mm.Q K ~ Ythemselves, tobe m o n g t h . e r n b 1 e
peo~& to- paticipte in the bonding indu& by joke @ling. And it
is related to this that women are notorious for not being able to tell
jokes well: this is often ascribed to their illogical habits of mind, but
probably has at l a s t as much to do with the fact that women don't,
can't, gain from telling joka: in fact, in many circles it's considered
a dangerous sign of nonfemininity if a woman can tell a real joke (not
merely recount an anecdote) without lousing up.
At first glance, there may seem to be a paradox implicit in the
claims I have made, namely:
1. That women are person-oriented, interegted in their own and
each other's mental states and respective status; men are object-oriented, interested in things in the outside world.
2. That men enter into bonding relationships and form relationships
of camaraderie, in a way that they do not with women, nor do women
really with one mother.
But actually there is no paradox. In looking at each other's psyches,
and r d o n s to one another, women retain their individuality; they
are not fused into a group,-There is not necessarily a sense of cmperation in this process, but rather a sense that each individual is keeping
track of the other individuals. In this sense, women's greater ability
express and share emotions is 1 s to be ascribed to camaraderie

than to separateness, one individual getting and giving impressions
from and to other individudq and as a means whereby individuals can
come to work together when needed.
Mpn, on the other hqd,areeot so much-concerned a b u t what's
going on in one another's minds, but rather on how the group can
work as a whole to get something done. This leads to the submerging
of everyone's feelings and some gruhm of reaction, of course, which
the rules producing camaraderie are expressly set up to help gloss
over.
Again, there should be no sense on readmg this that one style is
better, more logicat, or more socially useful than another; both, and
mixtures of both, are needed in different circumstances.Women must
be more flexible-and so must men.
to
4 / Conclusion
This, then, is finally the point for the reader to ponder: I have given
reason to believe that the kinds of "politeness" used by and of and to
women do not arise by accident; that they are, indeed, stifling, exclusive, and oppressive. But I don't feel that we must maintain the kinds
of social dationships we have always assumed. If we are aware of
what we're doing, why we're doing it, and the effects our actions have
on ourselves and everyone else, we will have the power to change. I
hope this b m k will l
x one small first step in the dwection of a wider
option of life styles, for men and women.
Bibliography
Bateson, G. Steps to an Ecolqg of Mind, Part 111: "Fom and Pathology in Relationship." New York: Ballantine, 1972.
Chesler. Phyllis. Women and Madnes~.New York: Doubleday & Co.,
1972; Avon paperback, 1973.
Grice, H.P.'The Logic of Conversation." Unpublished manuscript,
Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley,
1968.
Haas, M.R."Men's and Women's Speech in -ti,"
in D. Hymes,
d.,
Language in Culture and Society. N w York: Harper & Row,
19W.
WOE,R. "Language in Context." Imnguage 48 (1972): 907-27.
Miller, R. A. The Japanese Lunguage. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1967.
Postal, P. "Anaphoric Islands." In Papers from the Fifth Regional
Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic k i e t y , edited by R. Binnick et
d.Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 1969.
Tiger, Lionel. Men in Groups. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd.,
and New York: Random House, 1969; Vintage paperback, 1970.

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LANGUAGE

2 / Language and Woman's Place

4 / Longuage and Woman's Place

as a diagnostic of our hidden feelings about things. For often-as

Language and Woman's Place / 5

I hllVt aIso made use ofthe-mm&a:

that any procedure is at some point introspective: the gatherer must

6 / Language and Woman's Place

Lunguage and Woman's Hace / 7

many bilinguals, she+m@ynwm real!^ k masted ejthtt ~IWWG

perham WLhi-tic - M v e n e s s is ooe rwgx~why. (ZnckhWy,

the m e hand, and gamminn exr>rcsPim tbat sunnest triviality in

8 / Language and Woman3 Place

Language and Woman's Place / 9

they later suffer such discrimination. (This situation is of course true

2 / Talking Like a Lady

with no one consequently forming any special impression of her as a

aqtiumarine, hwttder, and so on are unremarkable in a woman's

Language and Woman's Place / I 1

10 / Language and Woman's Place

It is safe to predict that people would classify the fmt sentence as

(a) *Oh fudge, my hair is on h e .

children, women are encourapd to be "little ladig." Little

Ides don't S C : as~_v~~~.if_gr&u_sly

12 / Language and Woman 3 Place

Woman 's Pkrce / 13

(5) (a) What a terrific i d d

(6) (a) What a terrific steel mill!

I think it is significant that this word was introduced by the hippies,

Language and Woman's Place / 15

I4 / Lunguage and Woman's Place

A tag, in its usage as well as its syntactic shape (in English) is

(T) Is John here?

1 will probably not be surprised if my respondent answers "no"; but

instead, chances are I am dreadv b i in f a v ~ of

1. W i t h the lexicon i t d f , thac scans to be a parallel ppbatomeno to tagquation

John is here, isn't he?

for instance, the following mteficcs:

That ~llaaaia sla beautiful!

16 / Language and Woman 3 Place

declarative sktement. Atagqumtian, then,might be thought of as a

&.metima we 6nd a tag wc_tion

(I 1) *I have a headache, don't I?

(12) The way prices are rising is horrendous, isn't it?

Language and Woman's Place / 17

I ddrcps& The problem is that, by

a speaker may also give

(13) (a) W h e n will dinner l

It is as though (b) were saying, "Six o'clock, Ifthat's OK with you,

18 / Language and Woman's Plarce

(b) Please close the door.

Let me first explain why (el has k e n c W e d as a compound

Lunguage and Woman 3 Place / 19

indicating that to accede will be to do something for the speaker, and

3 / Talking about Women

20 / Language and Woman's Place

Language and Woman's Place / 21

attitudes toward the original referent are not altered by a change of

r. F:' .#&mian, occasionaily shortened to gent. But I don't think this is

, 'quent enough to classify as a euphemism for man. lustas we do not

- terms as "Afro-Ameriams,"there is similarly a felt need for "lady."

wxsa.ry.. (The term WASP, white Anglo-

Saxon Protestant, may occur to the reader as a p s i b l e derogatory

prdld in usage to nigger, poIuck, or y2d One can refer to himself