'Gender and Sexism'
 
 

          Jill Kitson: Welcome to Lingua Franca. This week: gender and sexism in
          French. Professor Sandy Newman on the French Government's decision to
          feminise gender.
 

          In Australian English, a female chairman long ago became a chairwoman, a
          chairperson, a chair, or maybe a moderator or convenor. These days, only the
          deliberately provocative would address a woman holding such a position as
          Madame Chairman. Which just goes to show how influential feminist
          language vigilantes have been over the last 25 years, and not just here but
          throughout the English-speaking world. Not so in France, where feminists
          have a different agenda, not to substitute gender-neutral words for those
          that are gender-specific, but to feminise words that are masculine, that is,
          taking the masculine article 'le' and carrying a masculine noun ending, when
          they refer to women. So 'le depute', a deputy, a member of parliament,
          becomes 'la deputee', for a woman member of parliament.

          Well now France has a Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, and a Socialist
          Government committed to the feminisation of language, and not just for
          women's jobs. As Genevieve Frece, the Interministerial Delegate for the
          Rights of Women, explained to RN Breakfast listeners in July.

          Genevieve Trace: The human rights are still the droits de l'homme, rights of
          the man, you know that man is two things in French. And we are discussing if
          human rights can be droits de la personne humane, human person or human
          rights and not only droits de l'homme. It's still controversial in France, it's
          true.

          Jill Kitson: But of course as anyone who has ever learned any French knows,
          gender seems to have very little to do with sexism or indeed with sex. And
          here to attempt to explain this anomaly is Sandy Newman, Professor of
          French at the University of New South Wales.

          Sandy Newman: Many of us had a giggle recently at the expense of those
          foppish French when it was announced that the Minister for Education, Claude
          Allegre, and his sidekick, Segolene Royal, Minister delegated to Teaching, had
          issued instructions imposing the use of clearly feminine forms for referring to
          women by their profession, by titles of rank, grade, and so on. Our chortling
          was not, I suspect, aimed at the doubtless admirable, undoubtedly politically
          correct intentions, but at the outrage of reactionary indignation from bodies
          such as the Academie Francaise. An august body made up of the 40
          'immortals', as they are known, great men of letters (and recently one or two
          women), it was established in 1635 by Richelieu with a brief to safeguard the
          purity of the French language.

          But what was the fuss about? Gender, in a word. 'Sex', by any other name?
          Not really. But sometimes. The question is, what is the relationship between
          grammatical gender and sex, or rather the biological sexes? And how does
          this linguistic matter relate to the social roles and status of men and women?

          In approaching these issues, I will reserve my comments essentially to
          French, with reference to English, some translations and some comparisons. I
          will not talk about origins of grammatical gender, which are hidden in the
          mists of time.

          Except to say that the grammatical gender is undoubtedly related to the
          expression of sex differences. But what then of all the inanimate un-sexuated
          world? And what of the all those abstract concepts and experiences: hate,
          (which is feminine in French); cold, (masculine); intelligence, (feminine). 'Ha!'
          I hear you cry triumphantly, to which I reply, 'This is just in French'; and love
          (masculine). Now there's a teaser! More than you think, since in French
          l'amour is masculine in the singular, but becomes feminine in the plural!

          Some languages have a neuter category, which is helpful for dealing with the
          inanimate world. But it is not all plain sailing: the Germans, to take one
          instance, apply that gender to young women. French has followed Latin in its
          distribution of feminine and masculine; the Latin neuter words have mostly
          become masculine. Otherwise, usage has attributed the feminine or the
          masculine category to words for a variety of reasons pertaining to form, to
          analogy, or to etymology. For instance, a new word ending in 'ion' like
          'permission' or 'position', will be felt as feminine because of its form. The
          American CIA is known in French as 'la CIA' with the feminine article 'la'
          because they know that the key word is 'Agency' which is assimilated to the
          French feminine word 'Agence'. Whereas 'KGB' was masculine.

          Words have, moreover, not infrequently changed category over the centuries
          for diverse reasons (phonetic, ideological, etc.) 'Gens' (roughly equivalent to
          'people' in French) has had several shifts of form and gender which have left
          it as a mixed-up kind of a word, part feminine, part masculine. 'Ces vieilles
          gens son ennuyeux'- 'Those old people are boring'- treats 'gens' as feminine
          in the adjective 'vieilles' (old) and as masculine in 'ennuyeux' (boring). In
          relatively recent times, 'automobile' hesitated for a long time between
          genders before settling down as feminine, 'une auto', around 1920.

          I am inclined to think that gender as marked in the article 'le' or 'la' and
          agreements in French is, for the most part, handled by the French speaker as
          a grammatical manipulation without sex-related overtones, unless there is
          something in the utterance, (a play on words), or the circumstances, (a
          discrepancy between the words and what they refer to), which draws
          attention to it. I'm talking of a grammatical manipulation more or less as
          automatic as the 's' we add to the third person singular' 'I run, but she runs'.
          This said, a fascinating little book called 'Le sex des mots' (The Sex of
          Words) does somewhat give me the lie. In it, the author (authoress?) Marina
          Yaguello, presents an alphabetical glossary of terms which raise numerous
          aspects of the sex-gender debate, with a quiet but convincing demonstration
          that in most cases women are hard done by, belittled, sidelined, etc. Her
          ironic epigraph is the proverb: Effects are male and promises are female,
          which plays phallocratically on the fact that the word 'effet" is grammatically
          masculine and the word 'promesse' is grammatically feminine.

          More clearly challenging than hesitation or change of gender over time, is the
          existence in French of many terms whose grammatical gender is in
          contradiction with the sexual category of their referents.

          In English, gender principally concerns sex difference, male and female. Thus
          woman-man, girl-boy, hence chairman and charlady. But there it ends, if one
          excepts a certain number of special cases like the maritime 'she' for ships,
          the Australian colloquial 'she' for luck, circumstances, or just plain fate, or
          whatever is referred to in 'She'll be right, mate.'

          Now it so happens that 'modele' and 'mannequin' (model and mannequin),
          both evocations of an extreme case of at least one view of the feminine, of
          the female, are in French, masculine words, though one does not at all
          associate them with a man. On the other hand the sentry nervously fingering
          the trigger of his machine gun as he cries in a gruff male voice 'Who goes
          there?' is in French, 'la sentinelle'. Or take this news item about a truck driver
          felled by a particularly violent punch by a fellow worker who 'lui decrocha un
          coup de point si violent que sa victime dut etre transportee chez elle. Le
          lendermain admise a l'hopital, elle y succombait d'une lesion cerbrale.' Word
          for word, the translation looks for all the world like: 'He hit so hard that his
          victim had to be transported to her home. Admitted the following day to
          hospital, she died there of a cerebral haemorrhage.' Her home? She died? No,
          not really. But it looks like it; it is the same words one would have used if
          you had said 'the woman had to be transported to her home. Simply because
          the word used, 'victime', is a feminine word, 'la victime', in French, so it is
          followed up by feminine pronouns, just as it would have been if it was our
          chair (la chaise) or our table (la table) taken home.

          Now in my teaching of French, I not infrequently use some rather dubious
          strategies to get across some of these anomalies of gender, as when I
          request one of the male students to tell one of the females that she is an
          angel. To this, the correct reaction is, 'Tu es un ange', using the masculine
          because that is the grammatical gender of the word for 'angel', despite the
          very patent femininity of the student. To rub salt into the wound, I add that
          all geniuses, like angels, are masculine. I do not say 'male', but 'masculine'.
          Just as I take glee in pointing out, further blackening my reputation, that
          brute (la brute) and beast (la bete) are both feminine words.

          More genuinely hurtful to the French woman's sensitivities, to her pride and
          her self-respect, is the pervasive devaluation, degradation even, of terms
          referring to her as female. In the lexicon, numerous words designating the
          female of the species have become devalued over the years, usually in the
          direction of 'slut', 'prostitute'. (It is no consolation that it is the male users of
          the language who cause this decline.) All those who have studied a bit of
          French are familiar with the classic example, 'fille'. One was taught to
          translate 'girl' by 'jeune fille', since 'fille' on its own meant 'prostitute'. (It
          must be added that 'fille' has regained a large measure of its respectability in
          the last 50 years). On another front, 'secretaire' (secretary) is exemplary, in
          the worst sense of exemplifying phallocratic favouritism. 'Secretaire' is firmly
          feminine, 'la secretaire', as long as we are talking about its application to a
          subaltern shorthand-typing-and-filing, clerical work description, and nobly
          masculine in its use in the high spheres of governmental and diplomatic
          bureaucracy. Madeline Albright, if French, would be Madame le secretaire
          d'Etat.

          Which brings us back to the action of Claude Allegre, aimed at the education
          system in which 63% of employees are female, along with the group of the
          most prominent high flying women politicians in the Jospin government, like
          Mesdames Aubry, Voinet and Guigou, all with ministerial appointments, who
          have ganged together to call themselves Madame la Ministre, on all their
          official stationery.

          The argument, largely spurious, of the Academie Francaise against such
          changes is that feminising, for instance, the word 'minister' has the effect of
          making a distinction between man and woman, a segregation which runs
          counter to the equality of the sexes. What does strike me as a curious
          contrast in the feminist program of French women, as compared with English
          speaking women, is that they adopt opposed strategies, one based on a
          feminism with egalitarian aspirations, a feminism of sameness, and the other
          on a feminism with particularist aspirations, a feminism of difference.

          I can best conclude by quoting a comment by one of the more enlightened of
          the Academicians on the Minister for Education's plan. While opposing the
          imposition of feminine versions of professional titles, he conceded that usage
          was the sole final arbiter in matters of linguistic acceptability, finishing with
          this neat verbal pirouette: 'L'usage a toujour raison, meme quand il a tort.'
          Usage is always right, even when it is in the wrong.

          Jill Kitson: Sandy Newman, Professor of French at the University of New South
          Wales.

          And that's all for this week's Lingua Franca.
 
 

 © 1998 Australian Broadcasting Corporation