The Prisoners of Texts: Male Chauvinism in College Handbooks and Rhetorics

Abstract

CAPITALIZING on the Women's Liberation Movement to peddle more cigarettes, the Virginia Slims advertisements proclaim ad nauseam that we babies have really made progress, but the condescending, infanticizing term baby illustrates that full equality for the second sex still lies a long way ahead. Advertisements, of course, are merely symptoms of widespread cultural diseases. No wonder, then, that college English teachers still find composition students claiming that women are inferior to men because they cannot lift as many pounds, or smugly asserting that if God had meant women to be equal to men He would have made them so. Too few realize that women are not equal because they are not allowed to be. Students of both sexes still defend male-chauvinistic attitudes as natural, cogent testimony that sexism is still in the saddle, deriding us all. The classrooms of colleges and universities are good places to refute the feminine mystique, however, both because such institutions are committed to the search for truth anc' to humanistic principles, and because the voung are more open to change than their elders. As a teacher my chief concern is not the blatant sexism of advertisements, of publications such as Playboy, or of the likes of Norman Mailer, the soidisant prisoner of sex self-consciously rattling his self-imposed chains, but the more sober, steadfast, and scholastic stuff, particularly college English rhetorics and handbooks, whose educative function is their only excuse for being. Although the sex discrimination in children's texts has been thoroughly exposed of late, to my knowledge no one has paid much attention to college texts. The subliminal nature of the prejudice that often films their pages like a semi-transparent skin, usually undetected but restricting and distorting the images of women, doubles its danger. Just as the particularity of blacks has been masked by racial prejudice, so have women been rendered invisible as individuals, their distinctions blurred by the sexist myopia in the eyes of all beholders-including textbook writers. Through examining only a few rhetorics and handbooks, I have discovered that much of their material is informed by at least for sexual stereotypes: the Sex Object, the Passive Nourisher, the Perpetual Child, and the Invisible Presencenot just individually indistinguishable as in the other stereotypes, but literally ignored.