That word
In July I attended my first Network of Women Students Australia conference. Having been an active feminist (but not a student) for years, I was amazed to hear the words chick and girl — demeaning words for women — in common usage there.
When I raised my concerns, I was told that it is possible to "reclaim" language and that individual women can change the meanings of traditionally negative words for women by using them in a positive manner. So, words like chick, babe, girl, grrl, bitch and slut are being used in student newspapers, women's collective magazines and T-shirts, stickers and posters produced by feminists on campuses.
Yet an important demand of the second wave of feminism in the 1970s was that women no longer be referred to as animals (chicks, bitches) or children (girls, babes) or moral guardians (ladies). While Helen Reddy sang "I am woman, hear me roar", Marilyn French's The Women's Room became a best seller for its passionate rejection of the ideas encapsulated in "ladies room", and its affirmation of women's right to assert themselves.
The second wave demanded that the all-inclusive, non-value-laden word "woman" be used to describe female adults and that sexist language be removed from all government activities, educational institutions, the media and the law.
Thirty years later, it is clear that this goal has not been achieved. Most toilet doors are still labelled "Ladies". Most media commentators still refer to women's sports teams as "the girls". In my conversations with fellow students, I am the only one who uses the word "woman" consistently. Conversations in pubs, schools, workplaces and the streets are still riddled with references to chicks and babes.
Words like chick, babe, slut, bitch, even when used by feminists, degrade and belittle women as intelligent, capable and very variable human beings. Trying to reclaim such words legitimates their use. Worse, it risks alienating all those women who are fed up with the sexist discrimination and name-calling they put up with every day.
When the women's officer at Canberra University produced T-shirts labelled "Lagerbitch", those women who wore them shouldn't have been surprised that they didn't get much of a hearing about how they were making an empowering statement from the many other women who found the T-shirts offensive.
When the women's collective at Sydney University produced Honi Slut, the women's edition of the student newspaper Honi Soit, complete with photographs of bare-breasted women standing on tables in the cafeteria and a full page of the breasts of the women's collective, they shouldn't have been surprised that the biggest audience for their women's edition were the male college students wanting pin-ups for their rooms.
Neither images nor language can be redefined in progressive terms separated from their social context, their commonly understood meaning in broader society.
But even if they could, that wouldn't alter one iota the systematic discrimination women face in the workplace, the law, the home, the streets. Rather than capitulate to this discrimination by adopting sexist language, we should consciously challenge it.
It is time that feminists once again asserted that they, and all other women, are just that, women. Think about the advantages:
Woman is a simple biological category, free of value judgments.
It is also an inclusive word that does not categorise women on the basis of their age (as chick does), or sexual activity (slut), or attractiveness (babes), or class and "moral" conduct (ladies). This society does its damnedest to divide women from each other, and feminists should have no part in that.
We want no part in that because woman is also a social category — one that feminists want and need described. That is, all women have in common their oppression as a sex. They thereby also have a common interest in smashing sexism.
If feminists are to succeed in smashing sexism, they must build an inclusive, self-conscious mass movement of women prepared to struggle for that aim. The use of divisive, exclusive and demeaning language to describe women will undermine this.
I have a friend who often greets me with the words: "Hey woman!". I find this very empowering, because I am proud to be a woman — a woman who is a feminist and who refuses to be labelled anything else.
By Tash Izatt