Language as a Tool for Gender Equality

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Summary

Language is a vehicle for human interaction. While it describes the natural world in part, it also defines social conventions like the patriarchy. The article highlights the need for feminists to identify, challenge and change the ways in which language perpetuates inequality between men and women.

Language is one means by which we conceptualize, contextualize, compartmentalize, understand and relate with the world around us. Sometimes, they are fashioned around the material facts of life (such as sex, geography, shapes, and colours), other times, they were formed to give an essence to a particular human social activity (marriage, baby shower, love, and justice). Gender relations between men and women fall between both purview and while the unequal dynamics that punctuate this relationship cannot merely be analysed or erased through language, language plays a significant role in creating and maintaining these dynamics.

As feminists, we must be cognizant of this system and take steps, in small and big ways, toward changing it.

The most prominent, perhaps, of such expressions that serve to perpetuate an unequal dynamic between men and women is the phrasing of men as ‘heads’ and women as ‘necks’. Some social scientists might opine that humans tend to arrange themselves along a hierarchical line, and therefore, a family unit may follow suit, but such a view has a number of blind spots. First, such a dynamic is more likely to occur in a large gathering of people, especially one organised towards a particular goal. To expect the same arrangement to be manifest in a typically man-woman relationship, presumably based on attraction, misses the mark, not to mention its erasure of personality differences. Even if it were so that one person in a typical heterosexual relationship is more assertive, it does not follow that they have to be the ‘head’ of such a relationship, especially when they might have shortcomings in areas where their partner’s strength lies.

Second, such a view is apparently almost used to support men being the default ‘heads’ in a relationship and not women.

In a home that presupposes raising healthy children who will go on to become good and valuable members of society, there is no reason to model a belief of ‘daddy’s’ words and decisions being the final say, and neither is there any need to devalue the financial or non-financial contributions of the mother.

Second, as observed in many present-day hunter-gatherer societies, which reflect those of humans’ early origins, their social formation is more egalitarian in nature.

Following the culture of an automatic deferment to a man as the head is the language around women’s sexuality and its framing as something to be given to men, solely for their pleasure, ripped out of the context of women’s humanity and agency. Women do not ‘lose’ or ‘give’ their virginity to men. It is not something men ‘take,’ rather the decision to have sex for the first time is one a woman can choose to make at her own discretion. Sex is neither a favour given nor taken and to frame it as something ‘transferable’ not only undermines women’s agencies but waters seeds of belief in ‘the corruption’ of women, which also opens them up to slut-shaming. With the exception of sexual violence or assault, no woman loses her virginity any more so than a virgin man does.

When a man and a woman come together to start a family, except in cases of semantic ease, no woman carries the ‘baby of a man.’ A child belongs to both a mother and a father, with the mother carrying the greater burden of bearing the child. The biology of a child, from genetics to chromosomes, is equally made up of both its parents’ properties. A woman’s womb is not a gestational rental for the ‘offspring’ of a man.

Sending off a woman to her ‘husband’s house’ might have been historically situated in the fact that women, especially single women, were not afforded a space of their own. Even in a communal family home, their lives still revolves around relatives and domestic activities. When it was the norm for women to be raised in preparation for marriage, there was no need for their education and there certainly was no need for their independence. Women moved from their parents’ or familial homes’ to their husbands’.

Nowadays, this system has greatly changed, but in a conceptual sense, some still continue to refer to the marriage institution as a ‘husband’s house’ even when, evidently, the economics and logistics proved otherwise. Even when a couple has pooled their finances to buy a house or rent one, because a man is considered an ‘institution’ unto himself, the woman is addressed as being ‘with him’.

It surely is not meant to be a matter of being hard-hearted or unnecessarily fighting an ego war as it is often erroneously presented by people, but even mentioning ‘they moved into their new home’ is as innocuous as possible, and doesn’t undermine the contribution or lack thereof of the other party, rather than saying the blatantly risqué ‘she’s in her husband’s house.’

The continued use of these terms and more like of the kind, while harmless enough, only serves to obscure the cultural ideas about men and women, which runs deep. It is hard to argue for the autonomy of women, even any rights, while on the other hand upholding terms denoting the notion that women ‘belong’ to men (Mrs) in any capacity. If referring to married women as ‘Mrs’ (or using any of the other phrases above) were simply just a linguistic convenience, like we call any type of noodles Indomie, and it was not unconsciously co-signing social gender ideas, it may have been okay.

The feminist concern with language might seem nitpicky or trivial, but as is the nature of free will, women’s lives must be rid of any patriarchal castings for them to truly choose the kind of life they want. If the default and only option has always been a life of compliance to some social norms, then it is impossible to judge women’s true choices, and so as feminists, it behoves us to highlight these norms and apply changes where necessary.