The clearest reason for objecting to ‘manageress’ and ‘lady doctor’ is that the use of these terms seems premised on the idea that maleness is the norm, and that women filling these jobs are somehow deviant versions of doctors and managers.
English, like most — but not all — languages, requires a great deal of what Marilyn Frye calls ‘sex marking’ (Frye 1983). For Frye, this is a key factor in perpetuating male dominance: male dominance requires the belief that men and women are importantly different from each other, so anything that contributes to the impression that sex differences are important is therefore a contributor to male dominance.
Susan Erlich and Ruth King (1998), for example, discuss the case of ‘chairperson’, intended to serve as a gender-neutral replacement for ‘chairman’. Instead, it is often used to indicate women who fill the post of chair, while men are referred to as ‘chairman’. They take this to show that reforms cannot succeed unless attitudes change as well.
Moreover, feminist work on language has also indicated that there may be problems which are simply not amenable to piecemeal linguistic reforms. Some difficulties that have been raised go well beyond a handful of problematic terms or gaps. Deborah Cameron offers striking examples of writing that takes males as the norm without using any particular terms to which one might object, such as the following, from The Sunday Times:
Words by the Bee Gees, Listen:
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/JHLMGBwAbhA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
English, like most — but not all — languages, requires a great deal of what Marilyn Frye calls ‘sex marking’ (Frye 1983). For Frye, this is a key factor in perpetuating male dominance: male dominance requires the belief that men and women are importantly different from each other, so anything that contributes to the impression that sex differences are important is therefore a contributor to male dominance.
Susan Erlich and Ruth King (1998), for example, discuss the case of ‘chairperson’, intended to serve as a gender-neutral replacement for ‘chairman’. Instead, it is often used to indicate women who fill the post of chair, while men are referred to as ‘chairman’. They take this to show that reforms cannot succeed unless attitudes change as well.
Moreover, feminist work on language has also indicated that there may be problems which are simply not amenable to piecemeal linguistic reforms. Some difficulties that have been raised go well beyond a handful of problematic terms or gaps. Deborah Cameron offers striking examples of writing that takes males as the norm without using any particular terms to which one might object, such as the following, from The Sunday Times:
The lack of vitality is aggravated by the fact that there are so few able-bodied young adults about. They have all gone off to work or look for work, leaving behind the old, the disabled, the women and the children. (Cameron 1985: 85)Source http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-language/
Words by the Bee Gees, Listen:
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/JHLMGBwAbhA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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