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Individual Differences in Language Learning: A Complex Systems Theory Perspective Carol Griffiths
Women, Men and Language has long been established as a seminal text in the field of language and gender, providing an account of the many ways in which language and gender intersect. In this pioneering book, bestselling author Jennifer Coates explores linguistic gender differences, introducing the reader to a wide range of sociolinguistic research in the field.
Written in a clear and accessible manner, this book introduces the idea of gender as a social construct, and covers key topics such as conversational practice, same sex talk, conversational dominance, and children’s acquisition of gender-differentiated language, discussing the social and linguistic consequences of these patterns of talk.
Here reissued as a Routledge Linguistics Classic, this book contains a brand new preface which situates this text in the modern day study of language and gender, covering the postmodern shift in the understanding of gender and language, and assessing the book’s impact on the field. Women, Men and Language continues to be essential reading for any student or researcher working in the area of language and gender.
Jennifer Coates is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Roehampton.
Routledge Linguistics Classics
Authority in Language
Investigating Standard English
James Milroy and Lesley Milroy
Local Literacies
Reading and Writing in One Community
David Barton and Mary Hamilton
Verbal Hygiene
Deborah Cameron
Vocabulary
Applied Linguistic Perspectives
Ronald Carter
Power and Politeness in the Workplace
A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Talk at Work
Janet Holmes and Maria Stubbe
Language and Creativity
The Art of Common Talk
Ronald Carter
Women, Men and Language
A Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language
Jennifer Coates
Women, Men and Language
A Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language
Third edition
Jennifer Coates
Third edition reissued in Routledge Linguistics Classics series 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge
The right of Jennifer Coates to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Longman 1986
Third edition published by Pearson Education Limited 2004
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coates, Jennifer, author.
Women, men and language:a sociolinguistic account of gender differences in language/Jennifer Coates.—Third Edition, Reissued. pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Language and languages—Sex differences.I.Title.
P120.S48C62 2016
306.44081—dc23
ISBN: 978-1-138-94877-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-94878-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-64561-2 (ebk)
Typeset in 9/12pt Stone Serif by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong
2015030046
Part One: Introductory 1
1Language and gender3
2The historical background (I) – Folklinguistics and the early grammarians9
3The historical background (II) – Anthropologists and dialectologists28
Part Two: The sociolinguistic evidence
4Quantitative studies47
5Social networks70
6Gender differences in conversational practice85
7Conversational dominance in mixed talk111
8Same-sex talk125
Part Three: Causes and consequences
9Children and gender-differentiated language147
10The role of gender differences in linguistic change171
11The social consequences of gender differences in language189
Part Four: Looking to the future
12New developments in language and gender research215
Preface
This book is a re-issue of the third edition of Women, Men and Language , which was first published in 2004. It appears now within the new series Routledge Linguistics Classics. It is nearly 40 years since I first thought about writing a book dealing with language and gender (or ‘language and sex’ as it was then quaintly called!). The idea for the book came to me in the late 1970s: I was asked to teach language and gender as a topic on a sociolinguistics course at Edge Hill College. The students loved it and it became clear that this topic should become a permanent part of the undergraduate course. Because I was frustrated by the paucity of material available, I decided to write a book myself; I approached Longman, who approved my proposal and gave me a contract. The title, however, proved controversial and Longman tried hard to persuade me to change it to Men, Women and Language which they said ‘sounded better’. I refused, and the book was published in 1986 as Women, Men and Language. This now sounds uncontroversial, but at the time it definitely offended mainstream ideas of correctness. I was proud when the title was imitated by other writers, notably by Joan Swann (Girls, Boys and Language 1992) and by Janet Holmes (Women, Men and Politeness 1995).
One of the first works on the topic of language and gender published in the 1970s was Robin Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place, which appeared first as a journal article in 1974, but was then reprinted as a slim book in 1975. While Lakoff’s book was not based on sociolinguistic research, it was written from a feminist perspective and put the subject firmly on the map: colleges all over the English-speaking world began to include language and gender in their undergraduate programmes. But there were no full-length books based on up-to-date sociolinguistic research devoted to the subject. By the time the first edition of Women, Men and Language was published in 1986, there was a need for a book that university teachers could name as a set text for courses or sub-courses on language and gender. It seemed that Women, Men and Language fitted this need: it sold multiple copies. In a parallel development, English Language began to be offered as an A level subject. By the end of the 1980s, some A level boards (for example, London and JMB) included language and gender in their A level English Language syllabus, and Women, Men and Language was again named as a key text. The popularity of the book
resulted in the publication of a second edition in 1993 and a third edition in 2004.
In the eleven years between the second and third editions of this book, there were huge changes in the language and gender field, which made revision difficult. I brought chapters up to date in terms of the latest research and introduced new concepts from the very beginning of the book, so that students can read about early language and gender work at the same time as developing an understanding of new approaches to gender. I added two chapters to Part Two: one on conversational dominance and the other on same-sex talk. These reflect the significant shift in sociolinguistics which has taken place from work focusing on variation in grammar and pronunciation to work focusing more on gender and conversational practice.
Since 2004, when this third edition was first published, change has been less dramatic; the last ten years have seen a consolidation of ideas after the turbulence of the 1990s. New ideas have been developed, but these have been assimilated relatively smoothly. I suspect one reason for this has been the formation of IGALA (the International Gender and Language Association); the organisation was founded in 1999 and is ‘committed to the promotion and support of research on language, gender, and sexuality’. IGALA runs regular (annual) conferences, and publishes the journal Gender and Language. This organisation has given the research area both gravitas and stability, andprovides an arena where disagreements can be dealt with through reasoned debate.
In Chapter 12 of the book, I discuss the changes which were occurring in language and gender research at the turn of the century. In particular, I discuss the changes in understanding of the terms ‘language’ and ‘gender’. There has been a ‘postmodern shift’ (Swann 2003: 625) in the way ‘language’ and ‘gender’ are perceived, a shift from relative clarity and fixity to relative complexity and fluidity. Gender is no longer seen as given but rather as something that we ‘do’; the emphasis is on diversity and on plural masculinities and femininities rather than on a simple binary divide between ‘men’ and ‘women’. This new understanding of the plurality of gender means that the spotlight has shifted to these multiple femininities and multiple masculinities. Recent research encompasses a wide range of these, including maternal femininities (Tyler 2013); young femininities in London schools (Pichler 2009); migrant women and femininities (Erel 2013); ‘laddish’ masculinity in British Higher Education (Preece 2009); ‘tough’ masculinity in Glasgow (Lawson 2013); hegemonic masculinity among gay Serbian teenagers (Bogetic 2013); and marginalised masculinities around the world (Jackson and Moshin 2013).
Today, multilingual settings constitute the normative social space in which the performance of gendered identity takes place. Many of the papers listed above involve multilingualism, and much of the research in multilingual, multicultural settings draws on the concept of hybridity. The term very roughly means ‘mixture’ and derives metaphorically from the biological term ‘hybrid’, meaning the offspring of two plants or animals of different
species. In sociocultural linguistics, the term ‘hybridity’ is used when talking about speakers who draw on two or more different cultural traditions at the same time. Skapoulli (2004) focuses on an Arabic-speaking immigrant girl in Cyprus; she shows how the girl’s linguistic choices and discursive strategies lead to the emergence of a hybrid cultural identity. Pichler (2009) recorded the informal talk of British Bangladeshi girls in an East London school. Sheexplores ‘the linguistic and discursive resources the girls use to switch between, manage and even merge culturally different discourses and subject positions’ (2009:15). In this way they construct ‘hybrid British Bangladeshi femininities’ (2009: 15).
A significant influence on the development of language and gender research has been feminism and feminist theory. After the publication of Language and Woman’s Place, feminist scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, inspired by it but frustrated by the lack of evidence for Lakoff’s claims, began to do sociolinguistic research exploring gender from a feminist point of view. Second wave feminism, with its confident use of the terms ‘women’ and ‘men’ and its energising sense of the need to challenge women’s oppression, was the background to early language and gender work. Second wave feminism was superseded during the 1990s by third wave feminism, which turned away from ideas of patriarchy and oppression and condemned talk of ‘women’ and ‘men’ as ‘essentialist’. Now, in the twenty-first century, some younger women have returned to many of the concerns raised by second wave feminism and are challenging sexism and misogyny in all its forms. Laura Bates’ Everyday Sexism (2014) is a typical example, and some younger feminists argue that we have reached the age of fourth wave feminism (see Cochrane 2013). This new energy is reflected in recent sociolinguistic work investigating sexism and misogyny in a variety of cultures, ranging from obscenities and verbal aggression in contemporary America (Hobbs 2013), and the ways domestic violence is represented in digital comments to a British online newspaper (Bou-Franch 2013), to issues of sexism and gender stereotyping in the Dagbanli language of northern Ghana (Alhassan 2014). This renewed alignment with feminist ideas is refreshing, but optimism needs to be tempered by an awareness of the development of biologistic ideologies of sex and gender, which ignore feminist theory and treat all gender difference as the direct consequence of ‘brain-sex’. I will discuss the role of ideology further below (p. x).
A significant shift in feminist thinking has been stimulated by black women in the USA who have challenged the dominance of white women in the feminist movement and have argued convincingly that women may be oppressed because of their race, class and sexuality as well as because of their gender (see Collins 2009). The theory arising from this challenge is known as intersectional theory. Feminist theorists now see how, for many women, the intersection of race, class, sexuality and gender results in multiple forms of oppression. The question ‘Is it possible to do language and gender research that does not privilege one group of women?’ (Morgan 2007: 121) is a significant challenge to language and gender research and requires us to take questions of intersectionality into account in our work.
viii
Intersectionality is also a concept associated with research using a Communities of Practice (CofP) framework. This framework emphasises that gender is constructed locally and that it is intersected by other social variables, such as race, class, sexuality and age (see Section 12.4 for more on Communities of Practice). The intersection of gender and sexuality is discussed in Section 12.5, which focuses on Queer Linguistics. Sociolinguists’ understanding of gender has been enriched by the realisation that gender and sexuality are closely intertwined and that dominant norms of masculinity and femininity are heterosexual. Probably the most important insight of queer theory is that ‘sexuality is organised and regulated in accordance with certain societal beliefs about what is normal, natural and desirable’ (Cameron and Kulick 2006: 165). This is known as heteronormativity. So work in queer linguistics looks at both the impact of heteronormativity on the linguistic behaviour of male and female speakers, and also at the linguistic practices of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender speakers. Recent work ranges in scope from an analysis of the talk of a lesbian hiking group (Jones 2014), the interactional discourse of bisexual students (Thorne 2013), to the use of expert discourse by trans male vloggers on YouTube (Dame 2013) . The rise in interest in queer linguistics has led to the founding in 2012 of a new journal, the Journal of Language and Sexuality. This journal aims to present research on the discursive formations of sexuality, including sexual desire, sexual identities, sexual politics and sexuality in diaspora. Current understandings of both gender and sexuality have increased with research that acknowledges their inter-connection.
With the formation of IGALA and the founding of the two new journals (Gender and Language and Journal of Language and Sexuality), research into gender and sexuality is being carried out in a much wider range of cultures than earlier, moving away from an English language-centric first world focus. Cultures where language and gender research is now being carried out and published include Austria, Botswana, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, China,Denmark, Finland, Ghana, Greece, Japan, Nigeria, Serbia, South Africa, Zimbabwe.
This expansion of geographical context has been accompanied by an increase in the range of social contexts investigated. In particular, research on workplace talk (see Section 11.3) now covers a wide range of workplaces such as hospitals, law courts, police stations, broadcasting studios, call centres, parliament, scientific contexts, and various professional and white-collar workplaces. Work investigating issues of power and dominance fell out of favour during the 1990s, under the influence of third wave feminism, but workplace talk is now the locus for such sociolinguistic explorations. The old idea of women staying at home (which was always a fiction, since working class women have always gone out to work, as servants, or in factories, for example) has given way to an acceptance of women in the public sphere, working alongside men. These new studies suggest that there has been some progress in gender equality in the workplace, with some workplaces facilitating a wide range of linguistic strategies, some historically seen as more masculine, some as more feminine (see, for example, Holmes and Schnurr 2006; Mullany 2007). But it is still
largely the case in the twenty-first century that women are expected to adapt to androcentric norms. And it is still the case that women who successfully adapt to characteristically male linguistic norms run the risk of being perceived as aggressive and confrontational, as un-feminine, while those who choose to use a more affiliative, cooperative style risk being marginalised (Coates 2013). Moreover, in the public sphere, feminist discourses are often ignored or simply not heard. Judith Baxter (2006: xiv) summarises the current position as follows: ‘Women still struggle for acceptance within institutional settings such as government, politics, law, education, the church, the media and the business world’.
The struggles of women to have their voices heard should not surprise us, given our new awareness of the role played by ideology in structuring society (see Section 12.6). Most people in most cultures align themselves with the social ideology of gender as dichotomous: gender is seen as a simple mapping onto sex, and sex is construed as binary (male/female). Ideologies of gender and language maintain gender distinctions and help to naturalise the idea that there are two ‘opposite’ sexes. Dominant ideologies now emphasise biology rather than culture, and claim that sex differences are an evolutionary development, and that male-ness and female-ness are hard-wired into the brain (see Cameron 2014). These ideas have prestige because they have the backing of science. ‘Biologism offers a narrative about gender which addresses postfeminist anxieties about recent social change’ (Cameron 2014: 293). But these ideas are inimical to good sociocultural linguistic research. In particular, it is difficult to make a feminist argument if everything is reduced to biology. It is very important that the field of language and gender does not lose its connection with feminism, and that language and gender researchers continue to challenge biologistic ideas of maleness and femaleness.
The first edition of Women, Men and Language grew out of my own sense of gender inequalities and of the role of language in sustaining these inequalities. While the succeeding decades have ushered in change, gender inequalities remain entrenched in our social and political culture. The UK is now ranked as 26th in the world by the World Economic Forum in its Global Gender Gap Report for 2014. (It should be noted that the UK was one of the top ten in 2006 but has been falling steadily in the rankings ever since, and has been overtaken by other countries where major steps have been taken to promote equality, such as Rwanda, Nicaragua, Latvia.) I hope that the re-issue of Women, Men and Language will inform a new generation of readers and open their eyes to the complexity of the links between language and gender, and to the continuing link between gender and inequality. I also hope that the book will continue to provide students and other readers with an overview of the language and gender field and an understanding of the sociolinguistic underpinnings of the subject.
Acknowledgements
First edition
This book arose from a course I taught for many years at Edge Hill College. Iam grateful to Stanley Ellis and Mark Newbrook for providing me with information about their work, and to Chris Baldick, Rhiannon Evans, Sarah Kay and Edward Wilson for their suggestions of folklinguistic material. I have been enormously helped by those who read and commented on earlier drafts of parts of the book: Deborah Cameron, Jenny Cheshire, Margaret Deuchar, Dick Leith, Beryl Madoc-Jones, Lesley Milroy. I would also like to thank my editors, Geoff Leech and Mick Short, for their comments and advice on the manuscript. But my main thanks are reserved for Joy Bowes whose scrupulously careful and detailed comments and criticisms on every chapter of the book have been invaluable. The book is dedicated to the students who took my course – it was their interest in the topic and their frustration with the paucity of texts which stimulated me to write it.
Second edition
In revising Women, Men and Language, I’ve had the unstinting help of my colleagues, Vikki Bell, Linda Thomas and especially Shan Wareing, who have suggested material for inclusion, commented on draft chapters, and always been ready to discuss language and gender issues with me. I would like to thank them for their support and encouragement. I would also like to place on record my gratitude to all those who have participated in my ongoing research on talk in single-sex friendship groups. Although I have used only brief extracts from these data in the book, my understanding of gender differences in language has benefited enormously from working on the project, which would have been impossible without their cooperation. Finally, I’d like to thank my son, William, for his fortitude over the last year, when my obsession with revising the book has sometimes taken priority over his needs, and for his invaluable help as a computer expert!
Third edition
I was only able to complete this third edition with the generous support of my institution, Roehampton University of Surrey, which enabled me to devote myself to writing in the autumn semester 2003. My thanks go to Linda Thomas (as Head of School) and Judith Broadbent (as Linguistics Programme Convener) for facilitating this. Thanks also to Casey Mein and Melanie Carter at Pearsonfor steering me through the revision process. I am grateful to my ever-supportive colleagues – Judith, Eva, Evi, Frances, and Tope – for their encouragement, and to Amanda and Jane for their invaluable technical assistance. I am particularly grateful to those who read earlier drafts of the revisions, especially Margaretand Pia. I am also indebted to those who gave me access to their sociolinguistic data: Anthea Irwin, Pia Pichler, Louise Mullaney, Kate Harrington. Many other sociolinguist colleagues, as well as students on my Language and Gender course, have helped in the shaping of this third edition, through discussions of language andgender in general, and of this book in particular. I would like to single out here Jenny Cheshire, who made me realise a third edition was not an insurmountable task, and who gave me the idea of writing a new final chapter to deal with developments in the field. As ever, thanks go to Margaret for her unstinting support.
Re-issue of third edition
I would like to thank all those who have helped me in the writing of the new Preface, by answering my queries, reading earlier drafts and making comments, and overall by giving me support: Deborah Cameron, Roslin Hamer, Margaret Gottschalk, Annabelle Mooney, Pia Pichler, Satori Soden, Janet Wolff. Thanks too to Nadia Seemungal at Routledge for giving me the opportunity to represent the book as part of the Routledge Linguistics Classics series.
Publisher’s acknowledgements
We are grateful to the following to reproduce copyright material:
Longman Group UK Ltd for our Table 3.3, from Table 3.2 ‘Questionnaire for Atlas linguistique et ethnographique du Lyonnais’ trans. W. Nelson Francis in Dialectology: An Introduction (1983); Cambridge University Press and the author Professor Peter Trudgill for our Table 4.1 from The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich (1974); CUP and the author Susan Philips for our Tables 9.3 and 9.4 from ‘Preschool boys’ and girls’ language used in pretend play’ in Philips, Susan, Steele, Susan and Tanz, Christine Language , Gender and Sex inComparative Perspective (1987); Edward Arnold Ltd for our Table 4.2 and Figures 4.7 and 4.8 in contribution by R.K.S. Macaulay ‘Variation and Consistency in Glaswegian English’, all in Trudgill, Peter (ed.) Sociolinguistic Patterns in British English (1978), also for our Tables 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 in contribution by Jenny Cheshire ‘Linguistic variation and social function’ and our Figure 9.1 in contribution byJohn Local ‘Modelling intonational variability in children’s speech’, all in Romaine, Suzanne (ed.) Sociolinguistic Variation in Speech Communities (1982), also Figure 4.15 from Edwards, John R. Language and Disadvantage (1979) and Figure 10.4 from contribution by Jim and Lesley Milroy ‘Belfast: change and variation in an urban vernacular’ in Trudgill, Peter (ed.) Sociolingustic Patterns in British English (1978); Heinle & Heinle for Tables 7.1 and 7.2 and Figure 7.1 in contribution by Don Zimmerman and Candace West ‘Sex roles, interruptions and silences in conversation’ in Thorne, Barrie and Henley, Nancy (eds) Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance (1975), also our Figure 10.9 in contribution by Patricia Nichols ‘Linguistic options and choices for black women in the rural South’ in Thorne, Barrie, Kramarae, Cheris and Henley, Nancy (eds) Language, Gender and Society (1983); Sage Publications for our Table 7.5 from article by Victoria L. DeFrancisco ‘The sounds of silence: how men silence women in marital relations’ in Discourse & Society 2 (4) 1991; Australian Professional Publication for our Table 6.1 in article by Janet Holmes ‘Hedging, fencing and other conversational gambits: an analysis of gender differences in New Zealand speech’ and our Figure 4.11 in an article by Edna Eisikovits ‘Sex differences in inter-group and intra-group interaction among adolescents’, both in Pauwels, Anne (ed.) Women and Language in Australian and New Zealand Society (1987); The Linguistic Society of New Zealand (Inc.) and the author Janet Holmes for
our Table 6.2 from ‘Hedging your bets and sitting on the fence: some evidence for hedges as support structure’ in Te Reo 27 (1984): 54; Longman Group UK Ltd for our Table 6.3 in contribution by Deborah Cameron, Fiona McAlinden and Kathy O’Leary ‘Lakoff in context: the social and linguistic functions of tag questions’ and our Table 11.1 in contribution by Joan Swann ‘Talk control: an illustration from the classroom of problems in analysing male dominance in education’, both tables in Coates, Jennifer and Cameron, Deborah (eds) Women in their Speech Communities (1989); Praeger Publishers, an imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT, for our Tables 6.6 and 6.7 in a contribution from Penny Brown ‘How and why are women more polite: some evidence from a Mayan community’ in McConnell-Ginet, S. et al. (eds) Women and Language in Literature and Society; Routledge Publishers for our Table 9.2 in Gordon Wells’ contribution ‘Variation in child language’ in Lee, V. (ed.) Language Development (1979); Editions Payot & Rivages for Figure 3.1 from Les Mots et les Femmes, page 27 (1978); Basil Blackwell Publishers and Lesley Milroy for our Figures 5.3, 5.4 and 10.5 in Language and Social Networks (1980); Basil Blackwell Publishers and Suzanne Romaine for our Figure 9.2 in The Language of Children and Adolescents (1984); Cambridge University Press and Jenny Cheshire for our Figures 5.5 and 5.6 from Variation in an English Dialect (1982); CUP Press and the authors Eckert, P. and McConnell-Ginet, S. for our Figures 4.12, 4.13,10.6 and 10.7, adapted from ‘New generalizations and explanations in language and gender research’ in Language in Society, 28 (2), (1999); Blackwell Publishers and the author Brown, P. for our Table 6.8, adapted from ‘How and why are women more polite: some evidence from a Mayan community’ in Language and Gender: A Reader edited by J. Coates (1998); Pearson Education Ltd for our Figure 7.2, adapted from Women, Men and Politeness (Holmes, J. 1995); BlackwellPublishers and the authors Herring, S., Johnson, D. and DiBenedetto, T. for our Table 7.3, adapted from ‘Participation in electronic discourse in a “feminist” field’ in Language and Gender: A Reader edited by J. Coates (1998); Pearson Education Ltd for our Table 7.4 adapted from ‘Talking shop: sex and status as determinants of floor apportionment in a work setting’ in Women in their Speech Communities edited by J. Coates and D. Cameron (Woods, N. 1989); Routledge/Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. and the authors Eckert, P. and McConnell-Ginet, S. for our Figure 10.8, adapted from ‘Constructing meaning, constructing selves: snapshots of language, gender and class from Belten High in Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self edited by K. Hall and M. Bucholtz (1995); Hodder Arnold for our Figure 10.10, adapted from ‘Linguistic change in intonation: the use of high-rising terminals in New Zealand English’ in The Sociolinguistics Reader Vol. 1: Multilingualism and Variation edited by P. Trudgill and J. Cheshire (Britain, D. 1998); and Blackwell Publishers and the authors Holmes, J. and Stubbe, M. for our Table 11.2, adapted from ‘“Feminine” workplaces: stereotypes and reality’ in The Handbook of Language and Gender edited by J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff (2003). We have been unable to trace the copyright holders for Figures 4.4 (10.1) and 6.1 and Tables 3.1 and 6.5 and would appreciate any help that would enable us to do so.
To Simon, Emily and William
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PART ONE Introductory
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Language and gender
1.1Introduction
Do women and men talk differently? Gender differences of all kinds fascinate people, and so it is not surprising that there is curiosity about the way women and men talk and whether there are linguistic gender differences. We all have our own views on gender differences – in language and in other aspects of human life. Tabloid newspapers and television chat shows, for example, provide answers to the question ‘Do women and men talk differently?’ which could be described as ‘folklinguistic’. They are likely to say that women gossip, or that men swear more than women. These answers are widely believed – but are they true? or are they myths?
And what about the question itself? By asking ‘do women and men talk differently’, we make a series of assumptions that are currently under challenge. First, the question assumes that we can divide speakers neatly into two groups called ‘women’ and ‘men’. Secondly, the question assumes that we are interested in differences between women and men rather than similarities between them. At this point, you may think these are ridiculous points to make – of course there are women and men; what’s wrong with being interested in differences rather than similarities. But I want to make clear that if I had asked a different question, there would have been different answers.
I shall attempt to answer the question ‘Do women and men talk differently?’ by drawing on evidence from anthropology, dialectology, discourse analysis, ethnography, sociolinguistics and social psychology. Over the last twenty years, there has been an explosion of research in the field of language and gender. Many books have been published, as well as many articles, both in learned journals and in edited collections. It is one of the aims of this book to provide a coherent account of such work; to bring together the many accounts of gender differences in language that have been written and to make themaccessible to the interested reader. The book is intended both for those with an interest in sociolinguistics who want to study one aspect of linguistic variation in depth, and also for those interested in gender differences in general. It will concentrate on sociolinguistic work carried out in Britain and other Englishspeaking countries.
This book, then, is primarily a sociolinguistic account of the co-variation of language and gender. It is not about the relationship between language and sexism, except in a very general sense; that is, it is not about language which denigrates, or is believed to denigrate, women. It will describe language use, in particular the differing usage of women and men as speakers.
As far as terminology is concerned, gender rather than sex will be the key category under discussion. ‘Sex’ refers to a biological distinction, while ‘gender’ is the term used to describe socially constructed categories based on sex. Most societies operate in terms of two genders, masculine and feminine, and it is tempting to treat the category of gender as a simple binary opposition. Until recently, much of the research carried out on language and gender did so. But more recent theorising challenges this binary thinking. Gender is instead conceptualised as plural, with a range of femininities and masculinities available to speakers at any point in time. (These new conceptualisations will be explored in Chapter 8.)
In this introductory chapter, I shall begin with an overview of the way language and gender studies have developed within sociolinguistics. I shall then give a brief account of the main approaches adopted by linguists to the question of gender differences in language. Finally, I shall provide a brief outline of the structure of the book.
1.2Sociolinguistics and gender
It is only relatively recently that sociolinguists have turned their attention to gender. Why is this? I should like to suggest three reasons: the first two stem from sociolinguistics’ antecedents in dialectology and linguistics; the third is linked to changes in the position of women in contemporary society.
First, in traditional dialectology, the informants selected were typically nonmobile, older, rural and male (see Chambers and Trudgill 1980: 33). This bias in informant selection was observed by sociolinguists and rejected, but rejection consisted initially of choosing urban rather than rural and younger as well as older informants. While many studies included informants of both sexes, studies confined to male speakers continued to be carried out (e.g. Labov’s (1972b) study of black adolescents in Harlem; Reid’s (1976) study of Edinburgh schoolboys). It was only in the late 1980s that studies appeared which concentrated on female speakers (e.g. Bate and Taylor 1988; Coates and Cameron 1989).
Second, as sociolinguistics began to establish itself as a discipline, reaction against mainstream linguistics led to a shift in emphasis from standard to non-standard varieties. All sorts of minority groups have come under scrutiny, in particular working-class groups, ethnic minority groups, adolescents. Women, however, were not perceived as a minority group. Linguistic variation coextensive with social class, ethnicity or age was what appeared salient to early sociolinguists.
So why wasn’t gender perceived as salient? The answer is that, until relatively recently, men were automatically seen as at the heart of society, with women being peripheral or even invisible. (This pattern of androcentricity will be explored further in the next chapter.) This is difficult to comprehend today, when gender differences are big business (see, for example, the success of books like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus or the more recent The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain),1 but if we look back at the period following the Second World War, all important positions in society were held by men. So Britain was headed by a king, George VI (the father of Queen Elizabeth II), the Prime Minister was male as were virtually all MPs, the most important people in the Law and the Church were male, business was run by men. However, the maleness of these important men was not remarked upon: in the 1940s and 1950s, men were persons first and male persons second. The major change that has occurred since that time, due in large part to the political activism of the Women’s Movement, is that women have achieved the legal right to be treated as the equals of men (both the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act came into effect in Britain in 1975). This has led to changes both in the workplace and in the home – changes in practice and also changes in attitudes.
The publication of Robin Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place in 1975 was a symbolic moment. While Lakoff’s book has been criticised for its sweeping claims and lack of empirical evidence, its significance cannot be underestimated, as it galvanised linguists all over the world into research into the uncharted territory of women’s talk.
Men, ironically, remained unexamined for much longer, precisely because man and person were often interchangeable concepts, but in the last decade the whole issue of men and masculinity has come into focus. There has been a shift in men’s view of themselves – a shift from seeing themselves as unmarked representatives of the human race to focusing on themselves as men. A good example of this shift can be seen in the titles of sociolinguistics books. Labov’s study of black male adolescents in Harlem (Labov 1972b, referred to earlier in this section) was one of the most important sociolinguistic works of the 1970s. Its title was Language in the Inner City. This title ignores the fact that the language analysed in the book is male language. By contrast, a collection of articles on the language use of male speakers published in the 1990s is entitled simply Language and Masculinity (Johnson and Meinhof 1997) This latter book was the first to focus explicitly on men and language.
1.3Differing approaches to language and gender
Since the publication of Lakoff’s classic work, Language and Woman’s Place, in 1975, linguists have approached language and gender from a variety of perspectives. These can be labelled the deficit approach, the dominance approach, the difference approach, and the dynamic or social constructionist approach.2
They developed in a historical sequence, but the emergence of a new approach did not mean that earlier approaches were superseded. In fact, at any one time these different approaches could be described as existing in a state of tension with each other. It is probably true to say, though, that most researchers now adopt a dynamic approach.
The deficit approach was characteristic of the earliest work in the field. Most well known is Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place, which claims to establish something called ‘women’s language’ (WL), which is characterised by linguistic forms such as hedges, ‘empty’ adjectives like charming, divine, nice , and ‘talking in italics’ (exaggerated intonation contours). WL is described as weak and unassertive, in other words, as deficient. Implicitly, WL is deficient by comparison with the norm of male language. This approach was challenged because of the implication that there was something intrinsically wrong with women’s language, and that women should learn to speak like men if they wanted to be taken seriously.
The second approach – the dominance approach – sees women as an oppressed group and interprets linguistic differences in women’s and men’s speech in terms of men’s dominance and women’s subordination. Researchers using this model are concerned to show how male dominance is enacted through linguistic practice. ‘Doing power’ is often a way of ‘doing gender’ too (see West and Zimmerman 1983). Moreover, all participants in discourse, women as well as men, collude in sustaining and perpetuating male dominance and female oppression.
The third approach – the difference approach – emphasises the idea that women and men belong to different subcultures. The ‘discovery’ of distinctmale and female subcultures in the 1980s seems to have been a direct result ofwomen’s growing resistance to being treated as a subordinate group. The invisibility of women in the past arose from the conflation of ‘culture’ with ‘male culture’. But women began to assert that they had ‘a different voice, a different psychology, and a different experience of love, work and the family from men’ (Humm 1989: 51). The advantage of the difference model is that it allows women’s talk to be examined outside a framework of oppression or powerlessness. Instead, researchers have been able to show the strengths of linguistic strategies characteristic of women, and to celebrate women’s ways of talking. However, the reader should be aware that the difference approach is controversial when applied to mixed talk, as was done in You Just Don’t Understand (1991), Deborah Tannen’s best-selling book about male–female ‘miscommunication’. Critics of Tannen’s book (see, for example, Troemel-Ploetz 2011; Cameron 1992; Freed 1992) argue that the analysis of mixed talk cannot ignore the issue of power.
The fourth and most recent approach is sometimes called the dynamic approach because there is an emphasis on dynamic aspects of interaction. Researchers who adopt this approach take a social constructionist perspective. Gender identity is seen as a social construct rather than as a ‘given’ social category. As West and Zimmerman (1987) eloquently put it, speakers should be seen as ‘doing gender’ rather than statically ‘being’ a particular gender. This
argument led Crawford (1995: 12) to claim that gender should be conceptualised as a verb, not a noun! The observant reader will notice that the phrase ‘doing gender’ was also used in the paragraph on the dominance approach. This is because the four approaches do not have rigid boundaries: researchers may be influenced by more than one theoretical perspective. What has changed is linguists’ sense that gender is not a static, add-on characteristic of speakers, but is something that is accomplished in talk every time we speak.
The deficit approach is now seen as out-dated by researchers (but not by the general public, whose acceptance of, for example, assertiveness training for women suggests a world view where women should learn to be more like men). The other three approaches have all yielded valuable insights into the nature of gender differences in language. While it is true to say that social constructionism is now the prevailing paradigm, discussion of sociolinguistic work in subsequent chapters will demonstrate the influence of the dominance and difference approaches during the 1980s and 1990s.
1.4Organisation of the book
This book will focus on linguistic variation related to the gender of the speaker. It will describe differences found in the speech of women and men, and will relate these linguistic differences to the social roles assigned to women and men in our culture. Chapter 2 will expose our society’s preconceptions about gender differences in language, while Chapter 3 will assess the contribution of anthropology and dialectology to the study of gender differences.
I shall then move on to look in detail at sociolinguistic analyses of gender differences in language. The five chapters that make up Part Two of the book follow the chronological order in which sociolinguistic research on gender developed. Chapter 4 will focus on quantitative sociolinguistic studies, Chapter 5 on studies involving the concept of social network. In Chapter 6 I shall look at those studies which examine women’s and men’s linguistic behaviour in the wider sense of communicative competence: this will include studies examining the use of hedges, questions, compliments, swearing and politeness, among other things. Chapter 7 will concentrate on the way certain conversational strategies can be used to achieve dominance in talk, looking in particular at interruptions, silence and patterns of floor-holding, while Chapter 8 will focus on single-sex talk and will present a more social constructionist picture of the way masculinity and femininity are accomplished in interaction.
These five central chapters will also try to deal with socio-functional explanations, since the data presented inevitably lead to the question ‘Why?’ Many explanations for gender differentiation in language have been suggested and these will be reviewed and discussed.
Part Three, entitled ‘Causes and consequences’, will examine three related areas in detail: the development of gender-differentiated language in children (Chapter 9), the nature of linguistic change and the role of gender differences
in promoting change (Chapter 10), and finally the social consequences of gender differences in language, looking especially at the use of language in the school setting and in the workplace (Chapter 11). This last chapter will ask whether women are disadvantaged in these two contexts, or whether it is male speakers who are now ‘in crisis’.
Part Four, entitled ‘Looking to the future’, contains just one chapter, which will provide an overview of recent developments in language and gender research. Language and gender is now such a dynamic area of sociolinguistics that new kinds of data and new ways of conceptualising gender are evolving all the time. Chapter 12 will sketch in the most important of these developments, and will hazard some guesses about the shape of language and gender research in the future.
1.5Author’s caveat
We are constrained by the English language to think in terms of binaries –man/woman, male/female, masculine/feminine. When we use the pronoun ‘I’, we bring to that use of ‘I’ a sense of being either a woman or a man. You, reading this book, will bring to your reading your experience of what it means to be a female speaker or a male speaker today. You will also have been socialised into a set of preconceptions about the nature of women and men in general and about female and male speakers in particular. You should be alert to these preconceptions and to your own necessarily partial viewpoint when sifting the evidence presented in this book. Also you should remember that it is not only you, the reader, who have preconceptions and prejudices – I, the writer, have them too, and so have the various scholars whose work on language I shall be referring to. Obviously, the pursuit of any discipline involves an attempt by scholars to rise above their preconceptions. However, it is important for scholars to acknowledge that they are not outside culture, but are part of it and therefore not impartial.
As a first step to coming to terms with our preconceptions, and in order to assess which gender differences in language are fiction and which fact, we will look at the cultural mythology associated with gender differences in language. The next chapter will address this subject directly.
Notes
1John Gray, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (HarperCollins, New York and London 1993); Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain (Penguin, Harmondsworth 2003).
2‘Social constructionist’ is probably the more accurate term, but ‘dynamic’ has the mnemonic advantage of continuing the pattern of words beginning with the letter ‘d’.
The historical background (I) – Folklinguistics and the early grammarians
2.1Introduction
Differences between women and men have always been a topic of interest to the human species and supposed linguistic differences are often enshrined in proverbs:
A woman’s tongue wags like a lamb’s tail. (England)
Foxes are all tail and women are all tongue. (England – Cheshire)
Où femme y a, silence n’y a (where there’s a woman, there’s no silence). (France)
The North Sea will sooner be found wanting in water than a woman at a loss for a word. (Jutland)1
The comments of contemporary observers, recorded in diaries, letters, poems, novels and so on, also provide us with evidence of folklinguistic beliefs about gender differences in language. Beside these more casual observations we can place the work of the early grammarians. It is not always easy to draw a line between the former and the latter, since much work entitled ‘grammar’ is no more scientific in its approach to gender differences in language than the observations of ‘ordinary’ people. In other words, academics and scholars are as much the product of the times they live in as are non-academics, and their work on language can be as subject to prejudice and preconception as are the comments of lay people.
As we shall see, scholarly comments on gender differences in language reflect the ideas of their time. In some cases this tendency has led to startling contradictions. Such contradictions can be accounted for by assuming a general rule, which I shall call The Androcentric Rule: ‘Men will be seen to behave linguistically in a way that fits the writer’s view of what is desirable or admirable; women on the other hand will be blamed for any linguistic state or development which is regarded by the writer as negative or reprehensible’.
In this chapter I shall survey writings from the Middle Ages up to the beginning of this century (that is, work written before the discipline of linguistics was established). Rather than survey the entire field, I shall focus on the following areas of interest: vocabulary, swearing and taboo words,grammar, literacy, pronunciation and verbosity.
2.2Vocabulary
Interest in the lexical and grammatical structure of the language, that is, in its vocabulary and grammar, was stimulated by the rise of Standard English. Once one variety of a language is selected as the standard, then the process of codification inevitably follows. Codification involves the writing of both dictionaries (dealing with the lexical items of a language) and grammars (dealing with the grammatical structure of a language). In England, the eighteenth century saw the publication of numerous dictionaries and grammars, all written in an attempt to reduce the language to rule and to legislate on ‘correct’ usage.
Commentary on gender differences in vocabulary is quite widespread in eighteenth-century writings, as the following extracts will demonstrate. The passage below, written by Richard Cambridge for The World of 12 December 1754, implies that the ephemeral nature of women’s vocabulary is associated with the unimportance of what they say:
I must beg leave...to doubt the propriety of joining to the fixed and permanent standard of language a vocabulary of words which perish and are forgot within the compass of a year. That we are obliged to the ladies for most of these ornaments to our language, I readily acknowledge.
(Cambridge 1754, as quoted in Tucker 1961: 93)
Here we see an eighteenth-century gentleman grappling with the problem of linguistic change. The ultimate aim of codification was to ‘fix’ the language once and for all. However, vocabulary was an area which appeared to elude control. On what grounds Richard Cambridge judged women to be responsible for ephemeral words, we are not told.
Turning to the early twentieth century, we find Otto Jespersen, a Danish professor of English language, writing on the question of changing vocabulary. He asserts that it is men rather than women who introduce ‘new and fresh expressions’ and thus men who are ‘the chief renovators of language’ (Jespersen
1922: 247). This apparent inconsistency can be accounted for by the Androcentric Rule (see section 2.1). As the rule would predict, in an age which deplored lexical change, women were held to be the culprits for introducing ephemeral words. On the other hand, Jespersen in 1922 accepted that change was inevitable and saw innovation as creative: he therefore credited men withintroducing new words to the lexicon.
An anonymous contributor to The World (6 May 1756) complains of women’s excessive use of certain adverbial forms:
Such is the pomp of utterance of our present women of fashion; which, though it may tend to spoil many a pretty mouth, can never recommend an indifferent one.
And hence it is that there is so great a scarcity of originals, and that the ear is such a daily sufferer from an identity of phrase, whether it be vastly, horridly, abominably, immensely, or excessively, which, with three or four more calculated for the same swisslike service, make up the whole scale or gamut of modern female conversation. (as quoted in Tucker 1961: 96)
This characteristic women’s language is gently mocked by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey (1813), in the speech of Isabella Thorpe:
‘My attachments are always excessively strong.’
‘I must confess there is something amazingly insipid about her.’
‘I am so vexed with all the men for not admiring her! – I scold them all amazingly about it.’
(Northanger Abbey, Ch. 6, my italics)
It is clearly significant that it is Isabella, who is flirtatious, selfish and shallow, who uses these adverbials, and not Catherine, the heroine (who is altogether less sophisticated).
The use of adverbial forms of this kind was a fashion at this time, and was evidently associated in the public mind with women’s speech. Lord Chesterfield, writing in The World of 5 December 1754, makes very similar observations to those of the anonymous contributor quoted above:
Not content with enriching our language with words absolutely new [again the accusation that women destabilise the lexicon] my fair countrywomen have gone still farther, and improved it by the application and extension of old ones to various and very different significations. They take a word and change it, like a guinea, into shillings for pocket money, to be employed in the several occasional purposes of the day. For instance, the adjective vast and it’s [sic] adverb vastly, mean anything and are the fashionable words of the most fashionable people. A fine woman ...is vastly obliged, or vastly offended, vastly glad or vastly sorry. Large objects are vastly great, small ones are vastly little; and I had lately the pleasure to hear a fine woman pronounce, by a happy metonymy, a very small gold snuff-box that was produced in company to be vastly pretty, because it was vastly little.
(as quoted in Tucker 1961: 92)
Lord Chesterfield concludes with a mock-serious appeal to one of the great legislators of the time, Dr Johnson, whose Dictionary (1755) was a landmark in
the codification process. ‘Mr. Johnson’, Lord Chesterfield says, ‘will do well to consider seriously to what degree he will restrain the various and extensive significants of this great word’ [i.e. vast].
Johnson’s Dictionary is well known for its individualistic and biased definitions (Patron is defined as ‘Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery’). Johnson stigmatises the words flirtation and frightful as ‘female cant’. Such a comment is value-laden. It seems clear that theanonymous contributor to The World quoted above is a man: all these passages reveal that their (male) authors believe women to have restricted and vacuous vocabulary, and to exert a malign influence on the language. Note that ‘language’ is defined by these eighteenth-century writers in terms of male language; the way men talk is seen as the norm, while women’s language is deviant.
The androcentric bias is still present in twentieth-century observations on English vocabulary. Jespersen included a chapter entitled ‘The Woman’ in his book Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (1922). This chapter has the merit of summarising extant research on women’s language in many different parts of the world. It has been justifiably criticised, however, for its uncritical acceptance of sexist assumptions about male/female differences in language. Jespersen includes a section on vocabulary in this chapter. He generalises that ‘the vocabulary of a woman as a rule is much less extensive than that of a man’. He supports this claim with data from an experiment by an American, Jastrow, in which male college students used a greater variety of words than female college students when asked to write down one hundred (separate) words. This is the only evidence given.
In his section on adverbs, Jespersen says that women differ from men in their extensive use of certain adjectives, such as pretty and nice It should be noted that the American linguist, Robin Lakoff, in Language and Woman’s Place, the work that for many people marks the beginning of twentieth-century linguistic interest in gender differences, specifically singles out ‘“empty” adjectives like divine, charming, cute ...’ as typical of what she calls ‘women’s language’ (Lakoff 1975: 53).
Women differ from men, according to Jespersen, even more in their use of adverbs. Quoting Lord Chesterfield’s remarks on the adverb vastly (see pp. 11–12), Jespersen argues that this is ‘a distinctive trait: the fondness of women for hyperbole will very often lead the fashion with regard to adverbs of intensity, and these are very often used with disregard of their proper meaning’ (Jespersen 1922: 250). (This of course begs the question of ‘proper’ meaning.) He quotes examples from all the major European languages. This proves that adverbs are widely used in these speech communities, but we are given no evidence to show that it is only, or preponderantly, women who use them.
So is also claimed as having ‘something of the eternally feminine about it’. Jespersen quotes Punch of 4 January 1896: ‘This little adverb is a great favourite with ladies, in conjunction with an adjective’. The extract gives as examples of ‘ladies usage’: ‘It is so lovely!’; ‘He is so charming!’; ‘Thank you so much!’; ‘I’m so glad you’ve come!’ Jespersen’s ‘explanation’ for this gender-preferential
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GORDON, GEORGE ANGIER. Humanism in New England theology. *$1.25 (18c) Houghton 285
20–5985
This little book commemorates the tercentennial year of the landing of the Pilgrims. The author holds that every form of theism is founded upon a humanistic interpretation of the universe; that the New England divinity is at heart a variety of humanism which will endure as a type although as a system of opinion it has passed away. He moreover holds that there are two great types of theism, the Unitarian and the Trinitarian; the New England theology belonging to the latter. Coming in a direct line of descent from this faith the author confesses himself as an “out-and-out Trinitarian” whose conception of man is that of an essentially social being. The essay appeared in the Harvard Theological Review for April, 1907.
Booklist 16:296 Je ’20
Boston Transcript p11 Ap 3 ’20 580w
“We wish that he had avoided the treacherous word ‘humanism.’ We have dwelt on this linguistic point because it really corresponds to a loose way of thinking, now too general, and, in particular, points to a vice in Dr Gordon’s treatment of theology which goes far, in our
opinion, to negate the value of an otherwise interesting book. To us the best of the book, which withal has much to commend, is its more personal characterization of some of the earlier divines.”
Review 3:47 Jl 14 ’20 420w
Springf’d Republican p8 S 28 ’20 600w
GORDON, MARY DANIEL. Crystal ball. il *$2 (5½c) Little
20–17022
A fairy story. The dearest wish of the King of Moondom is to possess the crystal ball from the garden of the sun. His two children, Prince Jock and Princess Joan make up their minds to get it for him for a birthday gift, and equipped with a tin of biscuits, toy pistol, drinking cups and compass, they set forth. A tinker joins their expedition and a gypsy fortune teller helps them on their way and they are successful in the object of their quest.
“A story which the young people will read with eagerness. ”
Boston Transcript p4 O 20 ’20 210w
“Her tale is lively, if undistinguished.”
N Y Evening Post p10 S 25 ’20 110w
GORDON-SMITH, GORDON. From Serbia to Jugoslavia; Serbia’s victories, reverses and final triumph, 1914–1918. *$2.50 (3c) Putnam 949.7
20–6737
To this “story of Serbia’s crucifixion,” S. Y. Grouitch, minister of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, contributes a foreword and says of the author that he has followed the Serbian campaign personally and closely, as war correspondent attached to the Serbian headquarters. The introduction contains a brief history of the political and military constellation of the Balkan states at the beginning of the war and the book is not only a record of the heroic struggles and sufferings of “ one of the bravest peoples in the world” but of a series of Allied mistakes committed along the eastern front, which, the author claims, were responsible for much of the defeat and suffering and for a prolongation of the war. The book falls into two parts: 1, From the Danube to Durazzo the Germano-Austro-Bulgarian attack on Serbia; and 2, The campaign on the Salonica front. There is an insert general map of the Balkan war area.
Booklist 17:24 O ’20
“We are impressed first of all with the clarity which distinguishes Mr Gordon-Smith’s exposition of the Serbian war story.” D. L. M.
Boston Transcript p6 Je 16 ’20 630w
Ind 104:68 O 9 ’20 30w
“The book is of absorbing interest.”
Outlook 126:768 D 29 ’20 80w
“As a history of the heroic and tragic part played by Serbia in the great war Gordon-Smith’s book ‘From Serbia to Jugoslavia’ fills a useful place. There is perhaps too much special pleading.”
Review 3:111 Ag 4 ’20 260w
R of Rs 61:670 Je ’20 60w
GORELL, RONALD GORELL BARNES, 3d baron. Pilgrimage. *$2.40 Longmans 821
20–18248
“After the poem called Pilgrimage from which the volume is named, and in which the author gives the key of his spiritual aspiration, there is a group of Shorter poems, four tales of fairly good narrative measure, Youth in idleness, On the Ponte Vecchio, Florence, The coward, and Autumn in Flanders, a suspended commentary on the war, and group of dramatic episodes called Closing scenes, which chronicle the last moments of Hannibal, Mary Stuart, a district commissioner dying of fever in Africa, and the garrulous retrospection of an aged London clerk on a dull, sultry August day.”—Boston Transcript
Ath p472 O 8 ’20 150w
Reviewed by
R. M. Weaver
Bookm 52:64 S ’20 40w
Boston Transcript p6 Ag 7 ’20 1400w
“Lord Gorell has two distinct manners. The shorter pieces are sensitive and wistful, but he can also manipulate the grand style, and in the finely imagined recitative of ‘The district commissioner’ he has given us the best thing of the kind that has been written since Lyall’s ‘Theology in extremis.’”
Times
Lit Sup p361 Je 10 ’20 580w
JOSEF, and STOWE, LYMAN BEECHER. Inside story of Austro-German intrigue; or, How the world war was brought about. *$3 (3½c) Doubleday 940.311
20–5203
Dr Gori[)c]ar, who supplied the facts for this volume is a Slovene who was for fourteen years in the Austro-Hungarian foreign service where he received first-hand knowledge of the rivalries and intrigues which preceded the war. Albert Bushnell Hart, in his introduction to the volume, points out its object as being an examination into three fundamental questions: (1) the criminal policy which it (the empire) pursued in foreign affairs, including the partnership with Germany in a far-reaching plan of conquest and spoliation; (2) the enmity alike of Germans and Magyars to the Slavs, whether within or
without their empire; and (3) the deliberate bringing on of the great war to serve the arrogance and ambition of the ruling classes. Successive chapters are devoted to the various attempts of the Austro-German war parties to precipitate a war against Serbia and Russia, between 1906–1914 till at last a casus belli was constructed out of the archduke’s murder. Among the closing chapters are: Russian mobilization as the cause of the war a glimpse behind the scenes in Berlin during the first three months of the war; Mobilizing half a million men in America—how the Austro-Hungarian consulates secretly raised an army behind America’s back. There is an appendix.
“His wide contacts with diplomatic affairs make this a contribution of new views based on materials hitherto inaccessible.”
Booklist 16:274 My ’20
“Although the greater part of the historical material introduced by Dr Goricar is not new, he manages to throw a number of fresh sidelights on the general program of the German-Austrian-Magyar war parties. Reliance on newspaper opinion is notoriously dangerous but Dr Goricar quotes so profusely and intelligently that his case is materially strengthened.” H. F. Armstrong
Nation 111:sup420 O 13 ’20 1500w
“As Mr Lyman Beecher Stowe is responsible for the English, it is unnecessary to say the style is lucid and simple. One can never miss the author’s meaning, and this makes a book which otherwise might be difficult very easy reading. The revelations made in this volume are by no means new to any diplomatist stationed in Europe during the years immediately preceding 1914; but for the public at large they are admirably stated here.” M. F. Egan
Night’s lodging; scenes from Russian life in four acts. (Contemporary dramatists ser.) *$1 Four seas co. 891.7
20–26568
This drama of the underworld is translated from the Russian by Edwin Hopkins and is here printed with an introduction by Henry T. Schnittkind. The latter contains a short summary of Gorki’s life with an equally short characterization of his dramas.
“Mr Hopkins’s translation is frequently uncouth and difficult to read. Undoubtedly that is true of the original but in a different way, since it represents the staccato utterance of Russian speech. One could hardly imagine it possible that in its present form it would be intelligible on the stage. But who would desire to see it on the stage?”
+ N Y Times 25:115 Mr 14 ’20 3000w
Boston Transcript p4 Je 2 ’20 240w Springf’d Republican p13a Ap 25 ’20 330w
GORKI, MAXIM, pseud. (ALEXEI
MAXIMOVICH PYESHKOFF).[2] Reminiscences of Leo Tolstoy. *$1.50 Huebsch
The reminiscences are pieced together from notes jotted down after various meetings between the author and Tolstoy. Gorki knew Tolstoy intimately and reveals him in many new lights and from many different angles. Sometimes he is very human, sometimes the impression is that of a pilgrim “terribly homeless and alien to all men and things”; always he is infinitely wise. Gorki did not love him but felt: “I am not an orphan on the earth so long as this man lives on it.” At his death he did indeed feel orphaned and cried inconsolably and in bitter despair. He leaves this predominant impression of Tolstoy: “This man is godlike.” The translators of the book from the Russian are S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf.
Reviewed by S. Koteliansky
Ath p587 Ap 30 ’20 2300w
“In his attempt to ‘understand’ Tolstoy. Gorky enjoyed the considerable advantage of being himself a Russian. We do not know the precise value of this qualification, but we may suppose it to be considerable. On the other hand, we think that Gorky was at a considerable disadvantage in being a romantic.” J. W. N. S.
Ath p77 Jl 16 ’20 1300w
“To convey so much in so short a book is a nice illustration of Gorky’s own courageous expressiveness. Because he respected his emotions regarding this old Titan of Russia, we have now one of the
most real of biographical contributions. And yet most editors and publishers would have felt that these were mere fragments and would have howled for the circumstantiality of ‘fact.’” F. H.
New Repub 25:172 Ja 5 ’21 1450w
“Withal, the greatness of Tolstoy’s remarkable personality is enhanced rather than diminished by this snapshot of the old ‘earthman, ’ to use Merejkovsky’s term, which here takes on a special significance.”
N
Y Evening Post p10 D 31 ’20 250w
“Gorky’s book is particularly valuable because it reveals not only Tolstoy as he saw him, but unconsciously Gorky reveals himself also.” Herman Bernstein
N Y Times p3 Ja 9 21 3100w
“It will be seen how penetrating a study Gorky has made and how the man who emerges from his powerful charcoal lines differs from the smug ‘child of nature’ of the official portraits.”
Spec 125:212 Ag 14 ’20 1350w
“Tolstoy was too great for official biography; Gorky saw him only in fragments, but he has drawn him as Tolstoy drew his own characters, or rather, perhaps, as Dostoevsky drew his. There is no
effort at an unreal synthesis, none even at judgment; what might seem to be judgment is only a record of feelings which are strong and excessive as their subject was strong and excessive.”
The Times [London] Lit Sup p453 Jl 15 ’20 1200w
GOSSE, EDMUND WILLIAM. Some diversions of a man of letters. *$2.50 Scribner 824
A20–530
“To his latest collection of literary essays Mr Gosse gives the cumbersome title ‘Some diversions of a man of letters.’ It combines in its pages seventeen excursions into the highways and byways of literature, its figures being of every grade of prominence from Shakespeare to Caroline Trotter, the precursor of the bluestockings. Here we shall find discussed not merely such obvious subjects as: The charm of Sterne; The challenge of the Brontes; The centenary of Edgar Allan Poe; and The lyric poetry of Thomas Hardy; but also the less conspicuous but equally interesting material offered by the lives and the literary work of Joseph and Thomas Warton, of Bulwer, of Disraeli, and of Lady Dorothy Nevill. In addition Mr Gosse also discourses on: Fluctuations of taste; The future of English poetry; and The agony of the Victorian age. ” Boston Transcript
“Mr Gosse’s diversions are also our diversions; for to anyone with a literary tincture of mind these miscellaneous studies in criticism and biography are the best and most entertaining of reading. Perhaps the best thing in the book is Mr Gosse’s account of two
