What’s so bad about being a manageress?

ABSTRACT

A feminitive is a noun which restricts its extension to women/girls. They have a long history of use within English (e.g. princess, temptress), as well as more recent additions to English (e.g. manageress, hostess). The desirability of introducing feminitives as a device of feminist language reforms is controversial. While some are a helpful tool for raising the visibility of women in traditionally male roles and environments, some seem counterproductive because they reinforce the assumption that the default referents of the original term are men. We argue that this dual aspect of feminitives follows from observations about their semantic content. Our proposal is that feminitives are a useful opposition to expressions which semantically exclude women, but a harmful reinforcement of pragmatic presuppositions about the denotations of semantically gender neutral expressions. We suggest an interesting parallel with feminist language reforms which directly modify the grammatical gender of certain nouns in Russian.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• feminitives
• gendered language
• gendered pronouns

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Deborah Cameron covers an impressive range of topics, ranging over all of these questions, in her classic study of feminism (1985) and linguistic theory. Cameron (1990) and Vetterlin-Braggin (1981) offer collections of important and wide ranging contributions to feminist philosophy of language and linguistics. Another illustration of the broad range of topics that are relevant to a feminist study of language is evident from reading McConnell-Ginet’s collection of essays (2011) which span over the full range mentioned here. See also her book (2020) for a recent summary of some central issues in feminist philosophy of language and intersecting areas of linguistic inquiry. For an accessible and illuminating philosophical overview of feminism more generally, including feminist philosophy of language, see Saul's introductory book (2003).

2 The term feminitive is widely used in the way we are defining it, particularly in discussions of the constructions in Russian that we will be looking at. See for example, Salata (2020).

3 In the case of expressions denoting humans, feminitives typically restrict by gender rather than sex. However, for feminitives denoting nonhuman creatures it seems that they restrict with regard to sex. A lioness, for example, is a female lion. It seems evident that gender is the relevant axis of restriction for humans. Using a feminitive like policewoman to deliberately refer to a trans man would be derogatory and offensive because it would be a case of misgendering equivalent to deliberately using the wrong pronoun to refer to that person. We will therefore assume throughout this essay that feminitives have extensions which are restricted with regard to gender, not sex. We are grateful to an anonymous referee for drawing our attention to places where we were unclear on this in an earlier draft.

4 An early expression of the sorts of concerns feminists have with feminitives is found in Lakoff (1973) who objects to the demeaning connotations of expressions like lady doctor. For more recent discussion see Saul (2003) and Saul, Diaz-Leon, and Hesni (2017), both of which discuss the apparent tension between, on the one hand, seeking to reform language to increase the visibility of women and, on the other hand, objecting to terms like manageress which draw attention to women in certain roles.

5 See Saul (2003, 181–182) for further discussion.

6 Although there is substantial disagreement about the merits and success of using feminitives in this way, both sides in the dispute agree that this is what feminist activists are attempting to achieve with this reform. See the following website for a good illustration of the sorts of disagreements that arise in online discussions of the reform: Pavlocki, Esenia. ‘Что не так с феминитивами? Отвечает лингвист.’ aif.ru, 23.06.2020, aif.ru/society/education/chto_ne_tak_s_feminitivami_otvechaet_lingvist, accessed on 08.12.2022.

7 This claim about the relationship between grammatical gender and actual gender of the denotation in Russian is not new. See Comrie, Stone, and Polinsky (1996, 231) for similar proposals.

8 There is some controversy as to whether singular they is grammatical in English. We assume that it is on the grounds that the usage is common. As Huddleston and Pullum (2005, 105) note: ‘Semantically singular they is well established in fine literature and completely natural in conversation and writing’. Furthermore, it is the ‘only natural non-sexist alternative’ to some constructions using he (Ibid: 104).

9 Of course it is not true that no men have mammary glands as many trans men have mammary glands. But a generic sentence of the form Fs are G does not have the same truth-conditions as some Fs are G. Hence it is not even clear that the sentence men have mammary glands is true (unlike the sentence some men have mammary glands). For discussion of the truth-conditions of generic sentences, see Leslie (2008).

10 It would be too strong to say that these are infelicitous: there are felicitous readings available, but they require some interpretative dexterity. The use of his makes the phrase ‘man or woman’ surprising. A woman may use ‘he/him’ pronouns but that reading would seem to require the speaker to already have a specific referent in mind for the pronoun. Similarly, a man may wear a ball-gown so there will be plenty of contexts where (4) is OK, but in most contexts it will sound awkward to say the least. So both examples demonstrate that the occurrence of his is marked in a way that it should not be if it were transparently gender neutral.

11 A potential theoretical cost of our view is that we will no longer be in a position to identify a semantic source for cases where gender neutral uses of he do seem to be achieved. However, given that we are coupling our denial of a gender neutral semantic content for he with an acknowledgement that pragmatic mechanisms explain why he is often recognised by hearers as being intended by speakers to communicate a gender neutral content (i.e. it is interpreted in a looser than literal way) we are willing to accept this cost.

12 An important issue must be acknowledged here. Our argument – like McConnell-Ginet's and indeed arguments of others that we are discussing in this paper – makes an essential appeal to our intuitions concerning the examples under discussion. The value of such intuitions as a source of linguistic data is notoriously contestable (see Devitt 2012 for detailed discussion of this issue). Our own intuitions concerning (5) align closely with McConnell-Ginet's, although we have encountered contrary intuitions from some, including a referee for this journal. We recognize that not everyone will share our intuitions, though in our defence we have tested these against the intuitions of several audiences when presenting this material and found strong support for our own intuitions regarding the examples. Empirical testing through a more rigorously constructed experiment is beyond the scope of this paper but we accept that some of the examples we employ merit such study in the future and that our own claims may be seen by some as contingent on the results of such a study.

13 We assume that McConnell-Ginet intended the example to involve the gender rather than the sex of the individual, hence we have used ‘nurse who was a man’ in place of her ‘male nurse’ to make this clear and to bring it in line with our usage in this paper.

14 The qualification that this only holds in cases where the use is literally intended is important as there are at least two widespread uses of she to knowingly refer to men: (a) cases where it is being used as an insult – for example when used by homophobic speakers to refer to gay men; (b) cases where it is used in a non-derogatory, sometimes affectionate, way to refer to gay men within some gay communities, including cases of self-reference. This latter use in fact has a long history – Kulick (2000, 249) notes records of this usage dating back to 1941 – and it is interesting to consider whether (a) and (b) are related, with (b) being some form a reclamation of the insult in a way that is seen with slurs. Discussion of these issues cannot be pursued here, but we do want to emphasise that we see these uses as deliberate non-literal uses. The expression is being used in a figurative way in both (a) and (b) to deliberately distort the conventional meaning of the pronoun. Hence, in our view, a semantic mistake is still being made, but deliberately so for figurative effect. We are grateful to a referee for drawing our attention to these uses.

15 Speaker B may not be assuming that the nurse was a woman based on a stereotype of course. They may simply be assuming they are likely to be a woman because they believe that women make up the majority of nurses in a given situation. Again, however, the example shows that such assumptions, even if warranted in a given scenario, are not semantically mandated. Thanks to a referee for pointing this out.

16 A referee voices a concern that our example here may be misleading because the definite description the competent electrician makes the definite reading more prominent, whereas the indefinite a competent electrician makes the generic reading more readily available. While we take this point on board, we are not convinced that it detracts from the force of the example. It seems to us that there is still a significant difference that results from choice of pronoun: pairing the definite article with he, to our ears, makes the generic reading more readily available than when paired with she.

17 Better because they is fully gender neutral, encompassing any gender, unlike he or she which only admits referents who are either men or women. We are grateful to our referees for pointing out that we overlooked this important qualification in a previous draft.

18 In these kinds of cases, it would be incorrect to say that the feminitive increases the visibility of women in the role in question, given that the roles are traditionally seen as occupied by women anyway. Nonetheless, it clearly references gender in a way that is not desirable if we want to challenge these gender roles. This also raises the question of whether we may in some instances want to challenge assumptions about gender by introducing terms restricted to men to challenge the default assumption that the roles in question are for women only. Arguably, househusband and stay-at-home-Dad fall into this category although it is unclear whether they have positive or negative connotations. Furthermore, they seem to run into the same sort of problem we see with manageress: by drawing attention to a man occupying these roles, they seem to enforce the assumption that such roles are occupied by women by default. See Hochschild (1983) for discussion of many issues concerning traditional roles for women.

19 For example, until this century the first born son of the monarch of the UK would precede any elder sisters in line of succession to the throne. This was changed by the introduction of new legislation in 2013.

20 See Comrie, Stone, and Polinsky (1996, 231–2).

21 The reverse is true of, but not limited to, such words, as няня (childminder/babysitter), балерина (ballet dancer), горничная (housemaid), прачка (laundress), швея (seamstress), and сиделка (sick-nurse), although the list is significantly shorter than that of man-only profession terms.

22 In our examples we will adopt a relatively informal way of marking gender on terms by subscripting as (m)asculine or (f)eminine.

23 A prescriptive grammar for Russian may dispute the acceptability of many of our examples. However, they are representative of ways in which ordinary Russian speakers speak.

24 A degree of discomfort of using feminine terms to denote a man can be observed as, for the lack of a masculine analogue, descriptive expressions are used. For instance, a ballet dancer who is a man (балерина) is routinely called ‘артист балета’ (a ballet artist); a sick nurse (сиделка) – ‘человек, ухаживающий за больными’ (a person looking after the ill), thereby changing a feminine noun to a masculine one.

25 Note that here again, the example is an instance of actual usage, incorrect by the normative standards according to which the word ‘favourite’ should also be feminine.

‘Авторка и нянь: 15 слов, у которых сложные отношения с мужским и женским родом.’ mel.fm, 27.01.2019, mel.fm/gramotnost/kak-govorit/4138960-gender_marking, accessed 08.12.2022.

26 According to Comrie, Stone, and Polinsky 1996, 232–233, such specifically feminine-suffixed forms were introduced after the Revolution, reflecting the increase in women taking up jobs previously confined to men, and have subsequently become common in some spoken, and ‘non-standard’ varieties of Russian.

27 In cases where there is more than one female in the group, the exact identity may not be revealed but we certainly gain some information about which subset of the group they belong to.

28 ‘Сколько россиян за использование феминитивов в русском языке.’ news.rambler.ru, 21.04.2021, news.rambler.ru/sociology/46271188-skolko-rossiyan-za-ispolzovanie-feminitivov-v-russkom-yazyke/, accessed on 08.12.2022. On a more positive note, 84% of respondents allow for the routine use of feminitives in day-to-day speech.

29 Rudyonok, Karina. ‘“Я вам не авторка”: кого и почему раздражают феминитивы.’ trends.rbc.ru, 19.10.2021, trends.rbc.ru/trends/social/616e90aa9a7947529df0b98b, accessed on 08.12.2021. We have deliberately focused on discussion boards and online forums for the source of our examples in this paper because it provides clear evidence for the actual and current usage of the terms. It is, however, only a first step towards gathering data which we hope will be consolidated by further more in depth empirical work based on the hypothesis we present in this paper.

30 Pavlocki, Esenia. ‘Что не так с феминитивами? Отвечает лингвист.’ aif.ru, 23.06.2020, aif.ru/society/education/chto_ne_tak_s_feminitivami_otvechaet_lingvist, accessed on 08.12.2022.

31 Rudyonok, Karina. ‘“Я вам не авторка”: кого и почему раздражают феминитивы.’ trends.rbc.ru, 19.10.2021, trends.rbc.ru/trends/social/616e90aa9a7947529df0b98b, accessed on 08.12.2021.

32 Rudyonok, Karina. ‘“Я вам не авторка”: кого и почему раздражают феминитивы.’ trends.rbc.ru, 19.10.2021, trends.rbc.ru/trends/social/616e90aa9a7947529df0b98b, accessed on 08.12.2021.

33 Rudyonok, Karina. ‘“Я вам не авторка”: кого и почему раздражают феминитивы.’ trends.rbc.ru, 19.10.2021, trends.rbc.ru/trends/social/616e90aa9a7947529df0b98b, accessed on 08.12.2021.

34 We are grateful to a referee for encouraging us to reflect further on this issue.

35 This is complicated of course by the fact that the term male prostitute literally includes a sex-term rather than gender-term. Whether it is used in accordance with that literal meaning, however, is unclear.

36 We are very grateful to two anonymous referees from this journal for detailed and constructive comments on earlier drafts.