Ann’s post yesterday of the Daily Show clip “Is the U.S. Ready for a Woman President?” reminded me of a pet peeve of mine – the use of “woman” as an adjective. It always seemed to me that when people said “woman president” or “woman athlete” or “woman professor,” the implication was that without the adjective, “man” was assumed.
If you have to use a sex-identifying adjective for comparison purposes, “female” doesn’t bother me the same way. Why not? Because there’s “male” as an analog. If you’re comparing numbers of athletes, you could say “female athlete” or “male athlete,” but you wouldn’t say “man athlete,” just as much as you wouldn’t say “man president” or “man professor.” Since “man” isn’t used that way, “woman” is being used in a special way indicating that “man” is the assumed norm and “woman” is a deviation. That may be descriptively accurate in some cases (obviously so with president (in this country)), but it also carries a derogatory normative element.
William Safire of the New York Times covered this issue in the Times Magazine earlier this year. His conclusion: “Both words can function as nouns, but female, unlike woman, can also be an adjective.” However, he quotes Deborah Tannen explaining why she uses “female” instead of “woman”:
Female connotes a biological category. I think many feminists avoid it for the same reason they prefer gender to sex. . . . I avoid female in my own writing because it feels disrespectful, as if I’m treating the people I’m referring to as mammals but not humans.
Given her career built around essentialism, I didn’t realize Tannen was a feminist, but regarldess, I don’t agree with her. Rather, I think the other linguist Safire interviewed, Robin Lakoff from Berkeley, has it right:
[It] suggests that a woman holding that position is marked : in some way unnatural, and that it is natural for men to hold it (so we never say ‘male doctor,’ still less ‘man doctor’). Since we feel so strongly (still) that a president is necessarily male, every time we say ‘woman president,’ we reinforce that view: that only a man can be commander in chief, symbolize the U.S. (which is metonymically Uncle Sam and not Aunt Samantha, after all) and make it harder to conceive of, and hence vote for, a woman in that role.
Smart words from a smart [no sex-identifying adjective needed] professor.
– David S. Cohen
The Department of Women’s and Gender Studies invites applications for a tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant Professor to begin Fall 2008, pending final budgetary approval. We seek an interdisciplinary scholar who specializes in U.S. Latina Feminism or Latin American Feminism and who will contribute to our research and teaching missions at the undergraduate and graduate level (M.A and Ph.D.). Candidates should possess expertise in Latina feminist theory and/or feminist activism in Latin America, the Hispanic Caribbean, and/or U.S. Latina/o communities. Research interests might include waged and unwaged labor issues, sexual and reproductive rights, the political economy of migration, social movements, indigenous studies, transnationalism public policy, femicide, post-occidental theory, or cultural production. The ideal candidate should have a commitment to excellence in teaching and research and a strong interest in community outreach. We are eager to consider graduates of interdisciplinary programs including gender or ethnic studies departments, who are competent in multiple methodologies. Ph.D. is required. The department encourages applications from members of underrepresented groups. Rutgers is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer and has a strong institutional commitment to diversity.
Concerned by the rates at which women opt out of the legal profession, the lack of representation of women in the highest courts and echelons of the legal community, and the role of gender in the progression of many women’s legal careers, a group of female law students from Boalt Hall (UC Berkeley), Cornell, Georgetown, Harvard, NYU, Stanford, UCLA, UT Austin, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, and Yale came together and created Ms. JD in March 2006. Serving women in law school and the legal profession, Ms. JD is an online community that provides a forum for dialogue and networking among women lawyers and aspiring lawyers.