ABSTRACT
James Joyce’s character, Stephen Daedalus, was not of course speaking here about gender bias in the English language, but instead about the effects of having been colonized by the English language, which replaced Irish as the medium of everyday communication in Ireland after England’s conquest. Nevertheless, in line with the connection I noted in the previous chapter between colonized peoples and women, a woman might well express these general sentiments. Gender scholars such as Dale Spender argue that English is a language made by men for men in order to represent their point of view and perpetuate it. In this world view women are marked as deviant and deficient, or made invisible. Thanks to the women’s movement, sexism in language became a political issue. This so-called “sexism in language” can be demonstrated with many different kinds of evidence. In this chapter and the next I look at the main areas of linguistic bias against women and some of the reasons why people have claimed English and other languages are man-made.
