ABSTRACT
For a number of years now, issues of language have been at the forefront of feminist scholarship. This has been as true in psychology, anthropology, and history as in literary theory and linguistics. Yet, oddly, the studies that result often seem to have little in common. Psychologist Carol Gilligan writes about women’s “voices,” historian Carol Smith-Rosenberg wants to hear “women’s words,” anthropologists Shirley Ardener and Kay Warren discuss women’s “silence and cultural mutedness,” literary critics from Elaine Showalter to Toril Moi explore “women’s language and textual strategies.” But it is not at all clear that they mean the same thing when they say voice, words, silence, and language as do the linguists and anthropologists who study women’s and men’s everyday conversation, who count the occurrence of linguistic variables, analyze slang and euphemisms, or examine the linguistic expression of solidarity in same-sex groups.
