Blog #2 " Otto Jespersen and Women"

I am not so sure this was the best article for me read right after a recent class that had a very one-sided discussion on the physical capabilities of women. Nevertheless, I read it and well...I suppose I should have taken into consideration that this article was written in 1922 and that things have changed since then. I also realize that shouldn't let my being a woman get in the way of reading this article and that I should read it from the perspective of a linguist. At least, I tried that for about 5 minutes. Needless to say, if it were possible, I would have strangled this article. :)

Initially, the article started out great when it talked about the differences in speech between the men and women in the Caribs and other tribes. It just talked about how women would use certain forms of the words and men use others but make sure they don't use the female forms because that would affect how they were perceived by the other men. It vaguely reminded me of the article by John Bradley and that was that. I didn't really have any qualms with the article so far. Even when they mentioned specific situations where women weren't allowed to eat until their husbands had eaten, I just kept the idea of cultural relativism in mind. Yes, a part of me thought " who would want to wait for their husband to finish and remain mute?" but that is the culture of those people. I guess that is how it goes for them and who was I to question what they did.

I think the problem I had with this article is that it seemed like Jespersen started to get very involved with this article. By involved, I mean personally. I can see how he tried to be academic about his ideas but by the end of the whole thing, he had failed miserably. Then again, maybe those were the times? Once he mentioned the bit about Scandinavian and German men learning English faster than women because they were outdoors more, he lost me. The downward spiral continued with how women appeared to use "so" often in their utterances. Let's not forget how their vocabulary was smaller than men! Surely we have to mention how the women who used Prakrit were " so inferior that they ranked only and had no share in the higher culture which, with the refined language, was the privilege of a small class of selected men." Tsk, tsk! ( Yes, cultural relativism was thrown out the window by this point)

Yet, there was one good thing he mentioned about women. A study by Romanes showed that women were able to read a paragraph faster than men, highly distinguished men I might add, and they were also able to give a better account of the paragraph from memory. While it seemed that the article had redeemed itself I only had to read further and there was a very lovely paragraph recanting the victory for women. From what I gathered, the quick readers (women) only did so because they were filling up the vacant spaces in their mind while the slower readers (men) were apparently examining the significance of every word they read, which drove them into a sort of intellectual overdrive hence the reason for their slow reading.

Well I never!