Women v Females — Part I
In a recent post, we considered a change well underway in English, a change prompted by the shift in relations between men and women. That change is this: they is becoming like you. Now, let’s consider another change, one that also springs from the shift in relations. That change is the very popular use of a noun as an adjective.
Here’s a fine example, recently provided by Nancy Pelosi:
“Now, as a woman, as a woman Speaker of the House, I don’t want any less opportunity than male speakers have had when they have served here.”
There it is. When it comes to talking about men, the tendency is to use an adjective (male) as an adjective. But when it comes to talking about women, the tendency is to use a noun (woman) as an adjective. Why?
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When referring to their female attorneys, better than nine out of ten major law firms call them women attorneys. Yet, when referring to their male attorneys, they all call them (very simply) attorneys. Why the difference? Why treat the women differently than the men? Is that not sexist?
I first raised this matter with the marketing guru for a large law firm. He advised me that “women is a stronger term than female and that’s why law firms keep calling female attorneys women attorneys.” That made some sense. It struck me as similar to our strong reluctance to use it to refer to a person of unknown gender.
But then a lady lawyer objected with this:
Women attorneys is one of my pet peeves! Not only is it ungrammatical, to me it carries a dismissive tone. Much along the lines someone might sniff at women drivers, it seems to create a differential category for female attorneys. By using the noun as an adjective, it suggests there is something beyond sex that is different about female attorneys. The marketing guru is unwittingly correct — women is a much stronger term, and that’s why it’s damaging. I never refer to myself as a woman attorney. I am simply an attorney, and my sex is female, not that the one has anything to do with the other.
That made sense.
I asked an englician* friend of mine, and she said the law firms are using women as an attributive noun, like the truck in truck driver or the school in school teacher.
That made sense, too. But then why doesn’t anyone ever use man as an attributive noun, as in man nurse? Why treat the gals differently than the guys? Is that not sexist?
Just recently, I ran across this post written by a lady lawyer, and I asked her why she called female lawyers women lawyers. She didn’t know, and she asked if I had any theories on this. I thought about it some and came up with this:
I’ve got not so much as a theory, but a hypothesis, and it goes like this: the origin of the use of woman as an adjective is that stereotypical creature known as Joe Sixpack.
Now . . . one day, Joe (who never had a strong command of English) is driving along, and he’s not paying close attention to the road ahead. (Likely, he’s adjusting his car’s radio so he can listen to a ball game.) All of a sudden, Joe looks up and sees a car in his way. He hits the brakes and swerves. When he realizes a woman is driving that car in his way, he yells out his window: “Woman Driver!” Other drivers hear it, and the terms comes to life.
In other words, I supposed a man came up with the term and that he meant it in a dismissive way.
My hypothesis was wrong. It seems likely the term women lawyers was introduced by a woman — a lawyer, no less. In this article titled Women Lawyers in the United States, Lelia Robinson, a female attorney, consistently referred to female attorneys as women attorneys. And that was well over 100 years ago!
Here’s how that article begins:
THIS is an era of experimental philosophy. New departures of every kind have been taken in all directions, physical, mental, and moral, many of which must lead their followers entirely away from the broad paths, smooth-trodden by the myriad feet of custom through the ages, into fields unknown, perhaps to gracious heights beyond, and possibly into pitfalls and quagmires ; and of all nineteenth-century novelties, there is probably no one that would have amazed our good ancestors of a century ago more than the woman lawyer as she exists to-day.
Fascinating! When I discovered this article, I imagined that — back then — woman functioned as both adjective and noun. Wrong! Even more so than today, woman was strictly a noun, and not an adjective. (It was also a transitive verb, which it no longer is, though man is still such a verb — as in “man your battle stations.”)
After that discovery, I imagined that the use of woman as adjective was probably started by 19th-century feminists — by women such as Frances Power Cobbe or Marilla Ricker. But, no . . . as best I can tell, it was a female attorney — Lelia Robinson — who started calling female attorneys women attorneys. I wonder why.
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* Rhymes with mathematician; synonymous with English Major.
TO BE CONTINUED . . . .
27 February 2007 at 15:11
Yes, it is sexist to distinguish one gender only when talking about a mixed gender group. It’s sad that we have moved so little since the 1970s in gender equality. When I graduated law school in 1996 even though half of my class was female, I felt as if I had joined a fraternity because the hiring attorneys were all men.
27 February 2007 at 16:50
Yippie! This blog has gotten its very first comment.
Come on, all you shy people. Eat some Powder Milk Biscuits, and then chime in. Be anonymous, if you like, but don’t keep all your thoughts to yourself.
4 May 2007 at 12:46
Thank you for the insight. I found this page by searching for “Adjectival noun female woman” in Google. It is definitely a pet peeve of mine.
I don’t know if I like your example of … like the truck in truck driver or the school in school teacher. A truck drive is a “driver of trucks”. A school teacher teaches at a school. But a I would a woman lawyer is a lawyer for a woman.
I personally think this comes down to the perception that “woman” is a stronger word than “female”. It’s unfortunate, but I don’t think this grammatical double-standard (male and woman) is going away.
4 May 2007 at 12:48
Is there a Part II ? (Sorry about the typo in my previous comment. It should have said But I would think a woman lawyer is a lawyer for a woman..
5 February 2008 at 7:47
I thought I was the only person left on the planet to realize that the word “woman” is a noun and not an adjective. When I hear someone use that word as an adjective, I see that person as grammatically and intellectually challenged. I can’t help it. I grew up during a time when spelling and grammar meant something. Now the English language is being insulted by this and other things such as “Ebonics”. “Ebonics” seems to be a label given to a group of people who either don’t completely understand the English language or don’t care to understand it. It is “accepted” and labelled in an effort to be politically correct and to prevent accusations of a certain people being uneducated or just plain stupid.
I won’t bend to the “new trends” in speech and I hope there are many more that feel the same way.
Penny
5 February 2008 at 8:29
Penny:
RE: “I won’t bend.”
Language changes over time. Words acquire new meanings, and lose old ones. Adjectives become nouns (e.g., Blacks and Gays), and nouns become verbs (e.g., Xerox and Google).
As they say, resistance is futile.
But I know what you mean. There’s something queer about an attorney (esp. one with an advanced degree from a school like Yale or Harvard) using a term like “women lawyer.”
6 March 2008 at 0:59
There’s an underlying assumption that lawyers are male, so one needs to distinguish female lawyers by attaching some tag. Although the relevance of specifying gender in most situations escapes me. This assumption is matched by that which assumes that nurses are female, hence male nurses need to be distinguished by a tag.
There’s no derogatory implication to using male as an adjective describing a man, we are comfortable with being male, so it passes and we don’t need to use ‘man’ as an adjective identifying male humans. We are not even too bugged about using male as a noun (a twenty-four year old male…). We know that a human male is being described.
But female as an adjective has acquired a pejorative sense. It sounds too detached, clinical, objective. As if one were talking about a specimen, not a human being. Similarly with the noun: ‘a twenty-four year female’ is only acceptable in some contexts, such as medicine.
That is why women initiated this usage. They didn’t want to be objectified as ‘females’. If we didn’t have a double standard about gender, we wouldn’t have this usage.
But why on earth do we need to distinguish gender when it comes to job descriptions anyway?
6 March 2008 at 6:05
David:
RE: There’s an underlying assumption that lawyers are male . . . .
If half of all lawyers are female, where comes an assumption that they must be male?
In any event, male and female are nouns and adjectives. But man and woman are nouns (though man can also be used as a verb), not adjectives. You can have male lawyers and female lawyers, but you can’t have men lawyers and women lawyers.
It strikes me as a mite sexist to have lawyers, and then women lawyers.
21 May 2008 at 8:35
I’m an Englician ;) and would like to weigh in with my pov. I would agree with David that female has (or at least had) a more detached, clinical connotation. Perhaps that is why at the turn of the century, Lelia Robinson opted not to use the term to describe herself. It makes sense that at that time, there would have been the widespread assumption that lawyers were male. She would have wanted to use a stronger word than female because “female lawyer” might have crippled her argument by seeming like a laughable oxymoron to an audience of mostly men. (At the time they had a hard time swallowing the fact that a woman could be college educated at all, much less join their professional world).
In the English field we see this same phenomenon with the term “women writers” or “women poets,” which anthologies and courses are very comfortable using as titles. I think that if there had not been a double standard in our history in the first place, we would not now have the vestiges in our language of women’s attempts to bring some balance to it.
At this point, the term seems to have the opposite effect. I would agree with Thorne that it is now unnecessary to distinguish between male and female professionals in this way because it highlights the difference (and to what purpose?), rather than bring dignity to the person, as Lelia Robinson probably intended it to.
22 May 2008 at 7:07
Well . . . I’d like to know why Robinson used woman rather than female. I assume it was intentional. Did she start a trend, or were people already using woman as an adjective back then?
Before I learned of Robinson, I speculated that the error started this way: Some guy’s driving along in his pickup truck. He takes his eyes off the road to change the radio station. When he looks up, there’s a car in his way, and he has to swerve to avoid it. He notices a woman at the wheel of that other car, and — being not fully literate and none too humble — he yells out the window, “Damned Woman Drivers.” He yells it so loud that others hear it, and so he starts a trend.
Anybody out there no of an earlier (earlier than Robinson) instance of woman being used as an adjective?