A brief disclaimer upfront: most of my experience with languages outside of English are Romance languages. Latin, Spanish, a little Italian. I know enough about German to know about the neuter form, enough French to order a crepe.
We’re lucky that English is fairly non-sexist in its linguistic nature. We don’t have masculine or feminine nouns. We don’t need to change our adjectives to suit the person we’re referring to. People are just people.
I studied abroad in Rome last semester, which was wonderful and amazing, but the biggest challenge I faced wasn’t the language barrier. It was the men.
Men in Italy stare. At you. All the time. I didn’t stand out in Italy like some of my blond abroad-mates; my dark hair and dark eyes allow me to mostly pass unnoticed in the crowds whereas the blonds has it far worse.
That is, I was unnoticed by most women. The men still would stare, openly, all the time.
At first I was completely put off. Get a hold of yourselves, boys. Have you never seem a girl with her hair up before? Or leave the house alone? Aren’t you all obsessed with your mothers?
After a stressful first month where I felt uncomfortable walking around alone in the daytime, I took a deep breath and tried to think about why this was happening. I’m a pretty non-confrontational person and I really pushed myself to think about why they were staring.
Then it hit me. They stare because they can’t escape the language they grew up speaking. It’s not an excuse, but it helped me understand at least a little. Italian, as a language, is sexist. Very sexist. The word for work is “lavoro,” a masculine noun. Home, “casa,” is feminine. Working is for men, homemaking is for women. At least, how the language developed set down those roles.
There are exceptions, of course: dress is masculine, shirt is feminine, but overall nouns relate to the sexes with which they are associated.
Again, that’s not an excuse, but it helped me put some things in context. In French, daughter and girl are the same word: “fille,” but boy is “garçon” and son is “fils.”
Which is why it’s interesting that there are currently two movements in France right now trying to do away with “mademoiselle,” a word that refers to a usually young, unmarried women. Italian has “signorina,” Spanish has “señorita;” all are definitive forms of the word equivalent to “miss” in English. English has a flaw as well with “Miss,” but we also have an alternative: “Ms.” can refer to both marital states and came into being during the ’70s with second wave feminism.
Language frames our world views; it’s something we can’t escape. If you only know a way to think about the world in a way that makes a distinction between the sexes, you’re going to run into issues convincing the population to have equality. It’s not impossible, as universal suffrage does exists in some countries where gender differences are built into their language. But it can create problems. Changing a voting law is one thing, getting an entire culture to change their language usage is another.
Of course, scrapping “mademoiselle” from the French vocabulary could be a shame. It is a rather pretty word, but maybe it represents a bygone era, one that no longer is a part of how francophones think about women. It might be a small movement, but what it represents is bigger than using “madame” with every women one encounters; it’s about creating equality when every other word is pushing in the other direction.
Francesca Morizio is a double major in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Kogod School of Business. Please send comments and responses to:
edpage@theeagleonline.com
