Women's speech - curtailed through the ages.

[ArabellaScott]

https://wellcomecollection.org/stories/the-dangers-of-women-s-speech

Every woman on here who has been accused of screeching, screaming, or other noisy crimes, may be interested in this article from 2020.

'Whether women are represented as scolds, harridans, shrews or constant drops of rain, women’s speech has long been viewed as irritating, harmful or even criminal. But perhaps women’s advancing economic power is leading to a world where being prudent, quiet and meek will no longer be desirable.

Arabella, you must've read my mind, because I was just about to start a thread about the suppression of women's speech! Not specifically the piece you have linked to, but something OpheliaWitchoftheWoods
said on another thread about how some posters on Reddit might finally be starting to get the message that women have been saying for more than a decade now ( they were complaining about how some sexual predators are claiming to be trans, and giving all trans-identified men a bad reputation). Ophelia said (as an example of women speaking the truth):

Hate - nonsense. It's merely women and reasonable men with a grip saying this is not ok, ever, women are not resources for men or a lesser kind of human, and saying that the answer should be no to any men in any women's single sex spaces. End of.

It suddenly struck me that I think that No Debate was probably the worst thing, bar none, from this whole ideological movement, that could have happened to women. Because if we can't speak, we can't define, complain, defend, convince, or even compromise! And if we can't define, then words have zero meaning anymore, including all the words that incorporate "female."

It's probably been said too many times, but I just suddenly thought "that's how it started!"

I hope this makes sense!

While spring cleaning I found this old postcard from the 1980s. It's not just about women's speech, but it pisses me off that so little has changed.

Thanks for posting this. I'm sure I have seen before, but it must have been a very long time ago! How true it is still. Rage-inducing!

I recommend ‘Women & Power: A Manifesto’ by Mary Beard. A fascinating insight into how far back all this goes.

I had that postcard!

women’s speech has long been viewed as irritating, harmful or even criminal.

I was once told by a male line manager, that I talked too much, and that irritated people. I was an HoD in a tricky department I'd been appointed to push, and I needed to make our work visible, and defend our existence, actually.

So I needed to speak, firmly and assertively, actually.

Absolutely.

Stonewall's 'No Debate' campaign was a shining example of the issue.

'Let Women Speak' another.

Thinking on that issue, it's notable how many protests against women's rights have included amplified music, whistles, horns, etc.

And the number of visitors we get here that complain about us 'shrieking' or 'screeching' or 'shouting' etc, is astonishing, although by now, completely unsurprising. Women's speech is characterised by criticising its volume.

Maybe we're of a similar vintage. 😁

An article on Dale Spender, author of 'Man Made Language':

'Women are constantly told, by all kinds of self-appointed experts, that there are problems with the way they express themselves verbally. Their speech is said to be “weak” and “lacking in authority”; according to Naomi Wolf they don’t get firsts at Oxford because their written sentences aren’t bold enough. In the past male critics dismissed women’s literary writing on the grounds that its subject-matter was “trivial” and its prose style “flowery”, while linguists and lexicographers had their own version of the “man made language” story, in which men were, as Otto Jespersen put it in 1922, “the chief renovators of language”,: their use of language was creative and innovative whereas women’s was conservative and conventional. There was, Jespersen commented, “a danger of the language becoming languid and insipid if we are always to content ourselves with women’s expressions”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000ydx0

From 2021:

'Women may be caricatured as babbling chatterboxes, but in public, women speak a lot less.
Be it in conferences or committee meetings, television or parliamentary debates, women do not get a proportionate amount of air space as men.
Mary Ann takes us on a global journey to find out why women aren't speaking up and if they are being disproportionally side-lined, excluded from the world's debates.
She explores the role history and social conditioning plays: the ancient Babylonians thought if a woman spoke in public, she should have her teeth smashed with a burnt brick; in classrooms today boys get far more attention, teachers accepting their calling out of answers, while punishing girls for the same behaviour.
She hears that when women do speak, they are often spoken over regardless of their status. In the Australian High Court, women judges and even the female presiding judge were regularly interrupted by male advocates. And women aren't heard in the same way as men; many struggle to see that a woman might be the expert in the room.
So how can women be heard? In a year in which the head of the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee said women talk too much and Jackie Weaver had to assert her authority in a fuming parish council meeting, we do need solutions.'

This is the text of the postcard:

Because woman’s work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious and we’re the first to get the sack and what we look like is more important than what we do and if we get raped it’s our fault and if we get bashed we must have provoked it and if we raise our voices we’re nagging bitches and if we enjoy sex we’ re nymphos and if we don’t we’re frigid and if we love women it's because we can’t get a “real” man and if we ask our doctor too many questions we’re neurotic and/ or pushy and if we expect community care for children we’re selfish and if we stand up for our rights we're aggressive and “unfeminine” and if we don't we’re typical weak females and if we want to get married we’ re out to trap a man and if we don’t we’re unnatural and because we still can’t get an adequate safe contraceptive but men can walk on the moon and if we can't cope or don’t want a pregnancy we're made to feel guilty about abortion and . . . . . . for lots and lots of other reasons we are part of the women’s liberation movement.

Joyce Stevens
International Women's Day 1975

And yet empirical research by more recent (and one would hope more rigorous) linguists shows language innovation is driven by teenage girls.

Me too! I'd forgotten all about it.

Slightly tangential, but I’ve just been listening to a new song by Tori Amos called “Shush”, which was apparently inspired by Harvey Weinstein quietening his victims by putting a finger on their lips 🤮 She sings about women and girls being silenced and treated as “Cassandras” when they speak out about abuse, but no one takes them seriously. She name-checks Courtney Love too, who was blacklisted by Creative Arts Agency back in 2005 when she tried to warn young actresses about Weinstein, thus ending her acting career.

#nodebate was always about controlling the discourse and what women were allowed to say, wasn't it?

See also #TWAW - it's a statement, it's a fact, you're not allowed to argue with it.

#bekind also wanted to control women, but in a different way.

We shouted them down, stridently, in our obstinate way, and now those hashtags are gone. We wouldn't wheesht!

As a student at Oxford I tried to make my sentences bolder and my tutor told me it sounded ‘hysterical’.

Fucksake, Countess. Naturally, the solution is always for women to shush.

I had an ongoing campaign at work (all-female or largely female team) to get everyone writing directly, without the pleases, would you minds, do you thinks, and could you possiblys. One please and thank you per email is sufficient, and they have no place at all in instruction manuals.

I cut one 'how to' manual from 180 pages to just over 60 simply by removing fluff and making instructions direct.

I kept getting feedback in annual reviews about making my comments on other people's work 'more diplomatic'. I ignored that and stuck with efficient. I was given a lot of work above my grade, because I got things done, but of course not promoted to be paid for doing it.

The #No Debate tactic was something I found so dystopian and unlike anything I'd experienced before. I was a child of the 70s, a teen in the 80s and my generation of girls were told go out and have whatever career you wanted. I had more choices and freedom than my Mother had had. Marriage and babies no longer the only path to follow. We could campaign and demonstrate for equality, we could express ourselves freely. Experienced plenty of inequality but it wasn't this state enforced authoritarian dogma. I look back now over these recent years and how utterly horrible it felt to have our speech and thoughts policed and silenced.