Masculine Bias Research Articles

Suffragists, Egoists, and the Politics of Early Modernism

SUFFRAGISTS, EGOISTS, AND THE POLITICS OF EARLY MODERNISM C H A R LE S F E R R A L L Humber College An December 1913, at the height of the Suffragist agitation, the directors of a small monthly London magazine called The New Freewoman decided to change its name to The Egoist. Under its new title, the magazine became famous for publishing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Tarr, and the poetry and prose of writers such as T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, H.D., D.H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, Ford Madox Hueffer, and Ezra Pound. Because recent criticism has alerted us to the masculinist biases of much of the modernist canon,1it might seem plausible to assume that the change of name was the result of some literary takeover of a Suffragist or feminist magazine. K.K. Ruthven, for example, argues that Ezra Pound, who was responsible for introducing a literary section to The New Freewoman on 15 August 1913, “appropriated” the “feminist” journal to further the literary careers of himself and others. Thus, according to Ruthven, “the publishing history of The New Freewoman and The Egoist might provide a paradigmatic instance of the subordination of women by a male-dominated modernism” ( “Appropriations” 1301).2 There is certainly some truth to Ruthven’s assertion that Pound was a “phallocrat” whose dealings with the paper provide evidence of a “desire to dominate, a will-to-power” (1300), but to describe the editor of the maga­ zine, Dora Marsden, as a “feminist” (1300) requires more clarification than Ruthven provides. Marsden had been a member of two Suffragist organi­ zations, the Women’s Social and Political Union and the Women’s Militant Suffrage Society, and had even been arrested at one Suffragist demonstra­ tion. However, she resigned from the W.M.S.S. late in 1911, finding its leadership too autocratic (Lidderdale and Nicholson 53). Unperturbed by her alienation from mainstream feminism, Marsden even went so far as to reprint a resolution passed by the W.S.P.U. condemning her paper. The res­ olution states that the “meeting totally disapproves of The New Freewoman, because of its attitude on the Suffrage question, and the spirit of the edi­ torial attack on Miss Pankhurst; it resolves to boycott the paper” (qtd. in MacKendrick 24). And by June 1913, Marsden was claiming that the “term ‘Woman Movement’ is one which deserves to go the way of all such — free­ dom, liberty and the rest — to destruction” (15 June 1913: 5). Whatever it English Stu d ies in Ca n a d a , x v iii, 4, December 1992 was that Pound took over, it was hardly an orthodox “feminist” magazine.3 How are we to describe the politics of Marsden, and what connection, if any, do they have with early modernism? Critics from Glen Hughes in 1932 to Ruthven have assumed that there is little or no connection between the political pages of the magazine that Marsden edited and its literary section.4 Only Ronald Bush and Michael Levenson have dissented from this otherwise almost universal assumption. Bush argues that Marsden and Pound share a similar kind of vitalist phi­ losophy, and Levenson contends that the philosophical “egoism” of Marsden was compatible with a modernism that was “individualist before it was anti­ individualist” (79). Whatever the new light shed on early modernism by these recent studies, both largely ignore the contemporary political context to which Marsden was reacting. It is important that we analyse in more detail the political ideology of Marsden, since, if there is more than an arbi­ trary connection between the two halves of the magazine, such an analysis should reveal much about the politics of early modernism. The title of the final version of the magazine provides the most significant clue to the nature of Marsden’s politics. Although Pound and a number of other male contributors complained that the magazine’s name did not reflect its contents (Marsden 15 Dec. 1913: 244), the new title appears to have been suggested by Marsden (Lidderdale and Nicholson 75). In the 15 December 1913 issue, Marsden expresses no reluctance about the change and even...

Engendering Russia's History: Women in Post-Emancipation Russia and the Soviet Union

The revival of the women's movement in the late 1960s sparked a resurgence of interest in women in Russia and the Soviet Union. Historians then already had foundations on which to build such as S. S. Shashkov's survey of the history of women in Russia' and Elena Likhacheva's monumental pre-revolutionary study of women's education in Russia which extended beyond the limit of its title to explore the birth and growth of the Russian women's movement.2 Historians and social scientists in the 1970s attempted to find women omitted from previous accounts of Russian and Soviet history. In 1978, Richard Stites published his monumental and pioneering study that maps vast portions of the terrain that other scholars would later explore in greater detail and from different perspectives.3 Some members of this new generation of scholars, myself among them, were personally and politically as well as intellectually motivated. Feminism encouraged women historians of Russia, as it encouraged historians of the US and western Europe, to seek past, to tell herstory. To correct the masculine bias of earlier accounts, we hunted through archives and published sources, looking for traces of women's experiences, trying to hear women's hitherto silent voices. If we studied literate women, as most of us did, we pored over diaries, memoirs and letters. To the usual questions of historians and social scientists, this feminist cohort added new ones, questions concerning the power that men exercised over women and its impact on women's ideas and experiences. We questioned the nature and sources of patriarchal power and asked how being female shaped a woman's choices and activities. And even as we carefully gathered and sifted evidence, as professional historians do, explicitly or not and in varying degrees, we often brought our own experience as women and as subjected beings to the materials we examined.4

Masculine Bias in the Attribution of Personhood: People = Male, Male = People

Silveira (1980) noted that not just masculine generics, but also neutral terms, have masculine connotations; she called this the “people = male” bias. Her hypothesis takes two forms: people = male, a male is more likely seen as a person than is a female; and male = people, a person is more likely believed to be male than female. A total of 108 female and 91 male college students participated in three studies. Study 1 tested male = people. Participants referring back to a female or male protagonist as a woman/man or as a person were significantly more likely to refer to the male with a nongender-specific term. Studies 2 and 3 tested people = male. In Study 2, reanalysis of data from Hamilton and Henley (1982) showed that hearing unbiased generics promoted male-biased mental imagery in men. In Study 3, participants' imagined “typical person” was significantly more likely to be male than female.

Making it Really New: Hilda Doolittle, Gwendolyn Brooks, and the Feminist Potential of Modern Poetry

NEWNESS WAS THE CENTRAL CONCEPT OF MODERNISM. IN THEIR LEGendary attempts to make it new, modem Anglo-American poets, like modem novelists and visual artists in general, wanted to challenge every aesthetic complacency and cultural institution they could identify. They broke spatial wholeness into Cubist fragments, they disrupted temporal sequence, and they tried to integrate the status of subject with that of object.' For all its innovations, literary modernism was deeply conservative in one important respect: It failed to question male entitlement and white supremacy. Rather than challenge Eurocentric and androcentric values, the high modernism of Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Williams left these values securely in place. The masculinist bias of modernism becomes evident when gender is used as a category of analysis. Until recently, accounts of modernism ignored questions of gender, though the Woman Question and women's suffrage were known contemporary issues and though feminists like Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf helped to create modernism in Anglo-American literature. Now that women have become visible, it is clearer that modernism is not neutral but gendered. On the one hand, according to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, the determinedly anticommercial cast of the highbrow innovations for which modernism

The Premenstrual Syndrome “Dis-easing” the Female Cycle

This paper reflects on masculinist biases affecting scientific research on the Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS). Masculinist bias is examined on the level of observation language and in the choice of explanatory frameworks. Such bias is found to be further reinforced by the social construction of “the clinical body” as an object of medical interrogation. Some of the political implications of the medicalization of women's premenstrual changes are also discussed.

The three bears are all boys: Mothers' gender labeling of neutral picture book characters

Two studies examined mother's labeling of gender-neutral characters in young children's picture books. In the first study, mothers and their 18- to 38-month-old children looked at three popular children's books together. The mothers' use of masculine or feminine names or pronouns to refer to gender-neutral characters was recorded. The data revealed an extreme masculine bias: 95% of all characters of indeterminate gender were referred to by the mothers as males. In a second study, specially prepared picture books were used to examine the effect of gender-relevant variables on the mothers' labeling. The results replicated Study 1 in showing a strong bias toward referring to neutral pictures with masculine labels: The incidence of masculine labels was again high and, in addition, was relatively impervious to most of the gender-relevant manipulations included in the books. The one variable that had a strong, consistent effect on the mothers' labeling was the presence of an adult in the pictures: Child Characters were nearly always referred to as males when they appeared alone; they were more likely to be given feminine or neutral lables when they were pictured in the presence of an adult. This result is related to Carpenter's [“Activity Structure and Play: Implications for Socialization,” in M. Liss (Ed.), Social and Cognitive Skills: Sex Roles and Childrens Play, New York: Academic Press, 1983] model of the development of sex-typed behavior. The data are also discussed with respect to the well-documented sexist bias in picture books for preschool children.

European workshop on language, sexism and education, West Berlin, 18–22 November 1985: A report

Dr Senta Trömel-Plötz: Language: The attribution of gender to all German nouns raises specific problems in combatting patriarchal language and it is important, where there is a female form, that this should be stressed and not absorbed in the male form. Conversation/discussion: This is shown to be male-controlled. Women and girls have less conversational rights than men and are frequently subject to interruptions. Male speakers are evaluated more highly then female. The analysis of video recordings demonstrates these findings. Linguistics: This is being criticised as a male science. Its models are faulty. Women have valuable conversational abilities, being cooperative and supportive. Professor Fern L. Johnson: Research in the U.S.A.: Interest in language and sex commenced about 10/12 years ago, following the publications of Robin Lakoff and motivated by the general concerns of the Women's Movement. Interest was directed to (i) the masculine bias in the language, e.g. Chair man, and (ii) the way in which women and men use the language. The Deficit Position holds that women's language is deficient, the Difference Position places a positive value on women's language and the Code Switching Position suggests that women should switch to whatever form of language a situation demands. It is helpful to consider that women have their own culture, for what is considered to be the general culture is a male culture. Sexism in the Classroom and Education: This occurs through (i) content and subject matter, (ii) the educational process, (iii) conversational discrimination in the classroom. Also, in the U.S.A., there is evidence of sexual harassment at College level. Patricia Niedzweicki: Research on the ‘Thespian’ Characteristics of Women's Language. From depreciating women's language (and image) to revaluating it.

Gender Bias in English: In Search of Fair Language

Women's historical lack of prominence in Western culture has been the subject of much research and debate in recent years. One area of partiuclar concern has been language: the grammatical prescription of masculine words as generic to describe both men and women. In the service of equality between the sexes, it is crucial to demonstrate that “generic” masculine words are indeed interpreted as generic (equally inclusive of women and men) by language users. The research reported here manipulated gender neutrality of language descriptors to determine whether generic masculine nouns, pronouns, and possessive pronominal adjectives function more similarly to gender specific terms or neuter terms. The relative masculinity of responses to these terms was assessed within three different tasks (draw a picture, read an essay, and provide example names). In addition, the relative masculinity/femininity of 10 terms with various intended gender references was empirically assessed. Participants rated each of them using 14 adjectives taken from the Bern Sex Role Inventory. Results support and extend previous research by showing (1) that “generic” masculine nouns, pronouns, and adjectives function similarly to gender specific masculine terms and (2) that certain grammatically “neutral” terms are in fact rated as relatively masculine. This evidence demonstrates that the use of “generic” masculine and even other grammatically neutral terms in effect serves to exclude women from the English language. The resulting masculine bias in our language reflects and reinforces the pattern of male dominance in society.

Critique [of Reclaiming the Subject: Italian Women Self-Defined by Chris Ruggiero

Ruggiero9s stated purpose is “… to expose … the mythology which surrounds the image of Italian American women …” through studies of Italian American women and the Italian American family in a “feminist framework.” These new studies would offer “feminist method and content” and new, unconventional methodologies would provide a “female corrective” to the “masculinist bias [found in] traditional ethnic studies scholarship.” Ruggiero9s motives are laudable, but she fails to clarify either the “masculinist,” “sex-typed” view point she criticizes or the new “feminist” methodology she advocates. A “selected review” of “traditional literature” she offers by way of explanation becomes a rostrum for condemnation of the “masculinist” motives, methods, and conclusions in the works considered (by R. Gambino, H. Gans, B. B. Caroli, C. Mindel and R. W. Habenstein, and others).

A Question of Masculine Bias

In recent years, feminists in particular have argued for reform in languages like English in order to reduce or eliminate built-in masculine biases. Do they have a case, can realistic changes be made and accepted by users at large, or is the language simply adapting anyway to this challenge as it has adapted to others in the past?

Do masculine pronouns used generically lead to thoughts of men?

Six experiments investigated the commonly expressed view that the pronoun he, when used generically, may lead individuals to think more often of male referents. The first experiment validated a semantic differential scale which was constructed to unobtrusively measure subjects' impressions of stimulus persons. In the five subsequent experiments, descriptions of various stimulus persons were presented alternating the use of the pronouns he, they, or he/she. No support was found for a pure pronoun effect. However, some evidence was found for a masculine bias when the word man was combined with he. The results provide little support for the often cited claim that the use of the generic pronoun, per se, leads to increased thoughts of men.

The factors affecting the gender connotations of language for the deaf child.

The generics (man, he) have been demonstrated to evoke predominately masculine imagery in female and male hearing students. Recommendations have been made to replace, whenever possible, these generics with more gender neutral terms like someone or people. These words, however, may also carry masculine connotations and limit sex-inclusive imagery. The present study examined the adequacy of this replacement strategy for hearing-impaired students. Results show that generally the neutral terms enabled students to limit masculine bias. However, a closer examination of the different patterns of associations to singular and plural words and to word presentation formats (name vs. picture options) suggests that there may be an important difference between the ability to be sex-inclusive and the ability to be self-relevant. The implications of this finding and suggestions for further research are discussed.

Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman.

Originally published in 1978, this book caused a storm of controversy as Micheke Wallace blasted the masculinist bias of the black politics that emerged from the sixties. She described how women remained marginalized by the patriarchal culture of Black Power and the ways in which a genuine female subjectivity was blocked by the traditional myths of black womanhood. In 1990 the author added a new introduction examining the debate the book had sparked between intellectuals and political leaders; an extensive bibliography of contemporary black feminist studies was also added. Black Macho raised issues and arguments that framed the terms of current feminist and black theory and continues to be relevant today.

Beyond the "He/Man" Approach: The Case for Nonsexist Language

Time calls it "Ms-guided,"' a syndicated columnist "linguistic lunacy."2 TV Guide wonders what the "women's lib redhots" with "the nutty pronouns" are doing.3 A clear understanding of the sexist language issue continues to elude the popular press. The medium is not alone in its misunderstanding. This discussion separates the strands of argument often tangled in current approaches to the issue, whether these approaches appear in the popular media, academic journals, or feminist publications. The arguments against sexist language have been mistranslated more often than not. Those mistranslations have then been

On the Way to Wholeness

“Theology does not have its source within our own experience. It has its source in the revelation given by God, but our interpretation of that revelation has everything to do with our own situation. Men have the tendency to forget the second part of this statement and assume the theology they create is ‘undefiled’ by such non-intellectual factors. At the present time, some women who have been alienated from the church because of its failure to recognize the masculine bias present in its theology may have the tendency to forget the first half.”

The Invisible Woman

An examination of masculine theological reflection on the creation account of Genesis 3 discloses an understanding of the human situation that is one-sided. It reveals a masculine bias in biblical interpretation that establishes the chauvinistic nature of much Church life. An adequate hermeneutic must begin to incorporate a contemporary feminine viewpoint. It may be expected, then, to open new theological possibilities.

Strategy in a Feminine Game

When triads play a simple competitive board game, there are significant differences between the two sexes in style of play. By combining a series of signs, it is possible to differentiate exploitative (masculine) and accommodative (feminine) strategies. Since many experimental situations may contain unrecognized masculine biases, feminine approaches to problems may often be obscured. A quiz game with content especially appealing to females was devised. Under these conditions, there was a significant increase in accommodative strategy in female groups, compared to the previously employed board game, but male groups did not differ significantly in the two situations on this index.