lakoff n women

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Review: [untitled]Author(s): Barrie ThorneSource: Signs, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring, 1976), pp. 744-746Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173156 .

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744 BookReviews44 BookReviewsbeing unduly provocative, and often apparently based on intuitionrather than any solid evidence. A stimulus to rethink sex roles andrelations it is; a classic of sexual science it is not.

Language and Woman'sPlace. By Robin Lakoff. New York: Harper &Row, 1975.Barrie Thorne,Michigan State UniversityRobin Lakoff is one of the first linguists to address directly the topic oflanguage and the sexes. This slim volume contains two essays. The first,originally published as a journal article, has both provoked debate andprovided new research topics for those working in this area. The secondessay, "Why Women Are Ladies," extends the earlier argument but alsoreflects a shift in Lakoff's assumptions about the relative value of femaleversus male speech.In the first essay Lakoff discusses language used "by and about"women. The latter topic concerns the way language defines women dif-ferently from men, tending to derogate females (as in nonparallel termslike "master" and "mistress") and to define them in terms of their rela-tionships with males (e.g., we say "Mary is John's widow," but not "Johnis Mary's widower"). Lakeoff's evidence, drawn from introspection andanecdotal observations rather than systematic empirical work, is leastproblematic in this sort of semantic analysis. Her data-andassumptions-are more controversial when she discusses the use of lan-guage by the sexes, or the ways in which women and men speak. Lakoffclaims that women, more often than men, use speech patterns markedby uncertainty, triviality, and lack of clarity and forceful self-expression.For example, she believes that women tend to use "empty adjectives" like"adorable" and "divine," tag questions which convey uncertainty,question-like intonation patterns, and compound request forms. In thesecond essay Lakoff posits overall sex differences in speaking styles:women's speech, she claims, is governed by "rules of politeness" andcentered on "interpersonal exploration," while men tend to use "factualcommunication" which is "logical, direct, and to the point."In weighing Lakoff's argument, I found myself puzzling over sev-eral issues. The first concerns the empirical status of her assertions aboutsex differences in speaking patterns. While Lakoff does not claim tohave systematic evidence (she quite accurately calls her observations a"taking-off point for further studies"), the tone often slips into assertionof fact. Since stereotypes abound in cultural assumptions about sex dif-ferences, one must proceed with caution. Lakoff does not discuss thepossibility that stereotypes may infuse even a researcher's notions ofsex-typed behavior.

being unduly provocative, and often apparently based on intuitionrather than any solid evidence. A stimulus to rethink sex roles andrelations it is; a classic of sexual science it is not.

Language and Woman'sPlace. By Robin Lakoff. New York: Harper &Row, 1975.Barrie Thorne,Michigan State UniversityRobin Lakoff is one of the first linguists to address directly the topic oflanguage and the sexes. This slim volume contains two essays. The first,originally published as a journal article, has both provoked debate andprovided new research topics for those working in this area. The secondessay, "Why Women Are Ladies," extends the earlier argument but alsoreflects a shift in Lakoff's assumptions about the relative value of femaleversus male speech.In the first essay Lakoff discusses language used "by and about"women. The latter topic concerns the way language defines women dif-ferently from men, tending to derogate females (as in nonparallel termslike "master" and "mistress") and to define them in terms of their rela-tionships with males (e.g., we say "Mary is John's widow," but not "Johnis Mary's widower"). Lakeoff's evidence, drawn from introspection andanecdotal observations rather than systematic empirical work, is leastproblematic in this sort of semantic analysis. Her data-andassumptions-are more controversial when she discusses the use of lan-guage by the sexes, or the ways in which women and men speak. Lakoffclaims that women, more often than men, use speech patterns markedby uncertainty, triviality, and lack of clarity and forceful self-expression.For example, she believes that women tend to use "empty adjectives" like"adorable" and "divine," tag questions which convey uncertainty,question-like intonation patterns, and compound request forms. In thesecond essay Lakoff posits overall sex differences in speaking styles:women's speech, she claims, is governed by "rules of politeness" andcentered on "interpersonal exploration," while men tend to use "factualcommunication" which is "logical, direct, and to the point."In weighing Lakoff's argument, I found myself puzzling over sev-eral issues. The first concerns the empirical status of her assertions aboutsex differences in speaking patterns. While Lakoff does not claim tohave systematic evidence (she quite accurately calls her observations a"taking-off point for further studies"), the tone often slips into assertionof fact. Since stereotypes abound in cultural assumptions about sex dif-ferences, one must proceed with caution. Lakoff does not discuss thepossibility that stereotypes may infuse even a researcher's notions ofsex-typed behavior.


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Spring 1976 745A second issue has to do with the relative value of female versus

male speech. Lakoff tends to assume the intrinsic superiority of maleforms (which she often equates with "neutral" speech; the male is pos-ited as the norm). Lakoff depicts women's language as a handicap,picked up through socialization. For example, she writes that a femalewho uses women's language "finds that she is treated-purely because ofthe way she speaks and, therefore, supposedly thinks-as someone notto be taken seriously" (p. 61).This line of argument, often found in writing about women, caneasily lead an author to blame the victim, to argue that it is women's faultthat they are subordinate to men (to be sure, women are seen as victimsof socialization, but that is in their biographical past and seems some-what impersonal). Lakoff's argument tends in this direction because ofher focus on individual speakers and the presumed responses to theirstyle of talk. This approach is one-sided because it neglects the context ofongoing interactionbetween hesexes, interaction shaped by and expressingsexual inequality. For example, if women use hesitating and uncertainspeech patterns, it may be because in mixed conversations men tend tointerrupt women (a sociolinguistic finding that Lakoff does not men-tion). Male and female speech must be analyzed for interrelated patternsof dominance and subordination. Rather than being overvalued as the"norm," or the more desirable style of talk, men's language should beexamined for patterns of domination and control. And female speechshould be analyzed with an eye notjust for its submissive dimensions butalso for possible strengths (e.g., there is some evidence that women'sspeech is more supportive and self-disclosing, attributes that may betermed positive). It is also possible to argue that particular speech formsare inherently neither inferior nor superior but that, given the structuralroots of sexism, no matter how women speak, they and their speech willbe devalued.

In the second essay, Lakoff is not so quick to assert the superiorityof male forms. She continues to imply that the male is the norm (e.g., inmaintaining that male speaking styles represent "the rules of conversa-tion"), but she allows that "neither of these two styles is good or bad:each is valuable in its own context" (p. 74). While this position movescloser to opening up a reexamination of the presumed superiority ofmale speech, Lakoff still does not adequately confront the question ofmale dominance in conversational styles.A final issue concerns the relationship of linguistic and socialchange. Lakoff describes linguistic forms as symptomatic rather thanpartly constitutive of sexual inequality. She argues that language changealways follows social change and hence that efforts to alter sexist lan-guage directly (e.g., the adoption of "Ms." as a title) are misguided.Many, myself included, would disagree with this position. I would arguethat language is an intergral part of social life, not just a symptom; that

Signs


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746 Book Reviews46 Book Reviewssexist language helps maintain and transmit sexist institutions; and thatefforts to change language are a valuable part of feminist strategy.Lakoff has helped open an area of study rich in importance forsociolinguistics and for feminist analysis. Her essays, however, need crit-ical reading. She tends to take for granted some of the very assumptionsmost open to reassessment by those interested in language and the sexes.

Woman'sEvolution: From MatriarchalClan toPatriarchalFamily. By EvelynReed. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975.Harriet Whitehead,Stanford UniversityIn Evelyn Reed's Woman'sEvolution, one finds what is getting to be, afterElizabeth Gould Davis and the republication of Diner, a drearily familiarformat: the revival of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century an-thropological speculation on the origin of the family fleshed out forcontemporary feminist tastes with new misinformation and more of thesame old misinformation as that which fueled the speculations of Bacho-fen, Morgan, Frazer, Freud, or Engels in the first place. This is not to saythat Victorian speculative anthropology was without redeemingscientific value; far from it. The theoretical principles articulatedthrough the rococo images of "savage" society as it appears in such worksas Freud's Totemand Taboo, Durkheim's TheElementaryFormsof the Reli-gious Life, or Morgan's Ancient Societyform the foundations of modernsocial science, and one must, in the final analysis, forgive (most of) thesewriters their ethnographic weaknesses and peccadillos in the interests ofacknowledging their genius. Having done so, one then goes on either toput the formulations of our forebears to use according to contemporarystandards of debate (for an example, try Emmanuel Terray's Marxismand "Primitive"Societies)or, if ethnographic butchery must still be per-formed, perform it in the service of new theoretical breakthroughs (e.g.Levi-Strauss's "structural anthropology").Evelyn Reed is doing neither of these things. In Woman'sEvolution,she embraces the concepts of Engels's The Origin of the Family, PrivateProperty, and the State so unreflectively as to reduce his reasoning toDarwinian parody: "The driving necessity to achieve the one-father fam-ily and do away with the divided matri-family opened the road to privateproperty" (p. 406). Contemporary anthropology is dismissed as "hostileto history" for its refusal to recognize "survivals" (p. xvi); and the entireeffort of the book is then expended in cooking the ethnographic recordfor proof of the author's version of the matriarchy-to-patriarchytheory-a version that is at times ingenious, at times ingenuous, but forthe most part intricate, improbable, and exhausting. We are asked toaccept primitive societies, all the institutions of which are either surviv-

sexist language helps maintain and transmit sexist institutions; and thatefforts to change language are a valuable part of feminist strategy.Lakoff has helped open an area of study rich in importance forsociolinguistics and for feminist analysis. Her essays, however, need crit-ical reading. She tends to take for granted some of the very assumptionsmost open to reassessment by those interested in language and the sexes.

Woman'sEvolution: From MatriarchalClan toPatriarchalFamily. By EvelynReed. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975.Harriet Whitehead,Stanford UniversityIn Evelyn Reed's Woman'sEvolution, one finds what is getting to be, afterElizabeth Gould Davis and the republication of Diner, a drearily familiarformat: the revival of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century an-thropological speculation on the origin of the family fleshed out forcontemporary feminist tastes with new misinformation and more of thesame old misinformation as that which fueled the speculations of Bacho-fen, Morgan, Frazer, Freud, or Engels in the first place. This is not to saythat Victorian speculative anthropology was without redeemingscientific value; far from it. The theoretical principles articulatedthrough the rococo images of "savage" society as it appears in such worksas Freud's Totemand Taboo, Durkheim's TheElementaryFormsof the Reli-gious Life, or Morgan's Ancient Societyform the foundations of modernsocial science, and one must, in the final analysis, forgive (most of) thesewriters their ethnographic weaknesses and peccadillos in the interests ofacknowledging their genius. Having done so, one then goes on either toput the formulations of our forebears to use according to contemporarystandards of debate (for an example, try Emmanuel Terray's Marxismand "Primitive"Societies)or, if ethnographic butchery must still be per-formed, perform it in the service of new theoretical breakthroughs (e.g.Levi-Strauss's "structural anthropology").Evelyn Reed is doing neither of these things. In Woman'sEvolution,she embraces the concepts of Engels's The Origin of the Family, PrivateProperty, and the State so unreflectively as to reduce his reasoning toDarwinian parody: "The driving necessity to achieve the one-father fam-ily and do away with the divided matri-family opened the road to privateproperty" (p. 406). Contemporary anthropology is dismissed as "hostileto history" for its refusal to recognize "survivals" (p. xvi); and the entireeffort of the book is then expended in cooking the ethnographic recordfor proof of the author's version of the matriarchy-to-patriarchytheory-a version that is at times ingenious, at times ingenuous, but forthe most part intricate, improbable, and exhausting. We are asked toaccept primitive societies, all the institutions of which are either surviv-

lakoff n women

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