Femininity (15 page)

“Meekness is ye choicest ornament in a woman” was a popular saying in colonial times.
Women were not permitted to speak or hold office in the church, and there was even
some question as to whether they should be allowed to sing the psalms, under a literal
reading of Saint Paul. Yet as the country grew, organized religion was unable to silence
a number of impudent females who founded their own sects or who preached their own
brand of evangelistic worship. The list includes Anne Hutchinson, who wished to remove
the stigma of original sin from Eve,
and was banished from Massachusetts, Sojourner Truth, forty years a slave and forty
years free, who earned her living as an itinerant preacher and raised her voice for
women’s rights, Mother Ann Lee, who founded the Shakers, Ellen G. White, who formulated
Seventh-Day Adventist doctrine through her revelations, Aimee Semple McPherson and
a continuing procession of charismatics, faith healers and visionaries, and Mary Baker
Eddy, who founded Christian Science. More typically, devout women were content to
be moved by the Spirit within the church choir; yet even there Mahalia Jackson and
others won international recognition as gospel singers.

The verbal capabilities of women have been hindered in every age: by legal restrictions
on higher learning, which go back as far as ancient Greece, by prohibitions on devotional
public speech in church, which effectively banned female contributions to thought
and doctrine in the world’s major religions, by the infliction of humiliating physical
punishment for the use of strong, rebellious language, by wicked ridicule in poems
and plays for alleged verbosity, and by imposing in the name of femininity a self-conscious
emphasis not on content but on modulation, elocution and pleasing facial expression.
Further, the historic division of work into male and female roles has had its own
effect on choice of words and imagery. Add to these realities the continuing imbalance
in the power relationship between men and women, and the fear of women that their
femininity may be found wanting, and it is no wonder that men and women may speak
the same language, but they speak it with a difference.
*

In
The Woman Warrior,
Maxine Hong Kingston wrote of her childhood struggle to sound like an American girl:
“Normal
Chinese women’s voices are strong and bossy. We American-Chinese girls had to whisper
to make ourselves American-feminine. Apparently we whispered even more softly than
the Americans. Once a year the teachers referred my sister and me to speech therapy,
but our voices would straighten out, unpredictably normal, for the therapists. Some
of us gave up, shook our heads, and said nothing, not a word. Some of us could not
even shake our heads. At times shaking my head no is more self-assertion than I can
manage. Most of us eventually found some voice, however faltering. We invented an
American-feminine speaking personality.”

For Kingston an American-feminine speaking personality had its own coordinates. These
coordinates are now the subject of intense research by a handful of feminist linguists,
psychologists and sociologists: Barrie Thorne, Nancy Henley, Cheris Kramerae, Robin
Lakoff, Mary Ritchie Key and Sally McConnell-Ginet, among others. In the next several
pages I have drawn on their research and combined it with my own observations.

Speaking “in feminine”—or speaking “in masculine,” for that matter—is an imitative
process that begins early in life. Like the clothes we put on each morning, the rhythms
of our speech, in a sense, have been chosen for us. Some styles seem appropriate and
some do not. Speech is an assertive act, sometimes an aggressive one, and male and
female are schooled in, different ways.

Right from the cradle, girls and boys are spoken
to
somewhat differently, as they are handled differently, by their gender-conscious
parents. Mothers and fathers tend to use a higher singsong register with baby girls,
a sweet coo of “Isn’t she pretty?” as opposed to a brisk, jovial “Hey, how’s the little
feller?” and “Look at the little guy!” Children are great imitators—how else are they
going to learn?—and the process of mimicry in the child helps to set the speech pattern
for the adult.

When men’s and women’s voice tones are compared with the respective size of their
vocal tracts, the tonal differences are greater than the physical differences warrant.
In feminine speech the voice is pitched toward the upper end of the natural range,
the decibel level is reduced and the vowel resonances are thinned. Writes Jacqueline
Sachs, who is pursuing this line of research, “Men may try to talk as if they are
bigger than they actually are, and women may talk as if they are smaller.” The boarding-school
voice of the debutante, a breathy vocalization of poor-little-rich-girl helplessness,
is a case in point. Sometimes a minor impediment—sibilance, a mild lisp, a gentle
stammer—conveys an impression of feminine charm, much as the hesitant speech of a
child is heard by grownups as cute. Far from working against their success, the controlled
impediments of two top female broadcasters, Barbara Walters and Jessica Savitch, actually
may have given their delivery a softened feminine edge that men unconsciously find
appealing. Not necessarily in contradiction, precise articulation of word endings
(“loving” not “lovin’”) is also a feminine mode, cultivating the impression that a
woman is more refined than the men of her class: ladylike, or as some might say, affected.

Speaking in feminine also produces wavering tones within a syllable and a careening
range of pitch within a sentence to dramatize shades of meaning. Heard critically,
the speaker sounds overly emotional and insecure. Exaggerated to the stereotype, this
is the “speaking in italics” familiar to readers of
Cosmopolitan:
“I have this
wonderful
boyfriend and my
favorite
magazine says it’s
perfectly okay
that he’s
married.”
(The masculine stereotype is a cool, terse monotone, the “Yup” and “Nope” of Gary
Cooper.) Ruth Brend, who diagrammed feminine intonation patterns, reports that they
often end on the upswing. Swoops and glissandos, she believes, build into a sentence
structure elements of politeness, surprise, hesitation and good cheer, and seem to
beg for outside confirmation. Brend finds most men avoid speech patterns that do not
terminate at the lowest level of pitch.

Some men do incorporate musical swoops and rising inflections. Indulgence in campy
speech by portions of the gay male community is a puzzle to straights, who think they
are imitating women. Those who speak camp might disagree. Whatever the underlying
reasons, campy speech allows a male to be extravagantly emotional and sensuous about
everyday things in a
manner that is normally permitted only to women. “It is to
die!”
I heard a young man in my neighborhood exclaim in front of a pastry-shop window.
An emotional response to a piece of pastry is out of keeping with heterosexual manhood,
but when the dessert cart rolls around in a restaurant the ladies are expected to
ooh and aah, and they usually comply.

It is not that the speech of men must be flatly without emotion. Skilled orators like
Winston Churchill, Billy Graham, Martin Luther King, Fidel Castro and Hitler learned
how to wring emotion from their audience by embodying passion in their own extravagant
inflections—but politics and religion are certifiably masculine themes. The feminine,
and gay masculine, infusion of passion into the stuff of everyday life is considered
trivial, weak and sometimes unstable by heterosexual men.

On occasion they have a good point. Vocal expressions of passionate interest in clothes
are objectively no less significant or understandable than emotional outcries over
a football game, but how can a man relate to the woe, the utter tragedy, of “I just
ruined a nail!”? Unless a person has invested daily time, patience and work toward
the creation of a perfect set, a broken nail is peculiar cause for wailing. Feminine
speech is charged with sudden upsets and crises (“I’ve got a run in my stocking!”;
“I’m getting a pimple!”; “I gained two pounds!”) that are inexplicable to those not
engaged in the struggle for feminine perfection.

Fashion and shopping add fanciful touches to feminine speech. Subtle gradations in
color bear succulent, romantic names. A woman speaks in familiar terms of taupe and
oat, of plum, aubergine, mauve and mulberry, of tangerine, salmon, cerise, coral and
peach, while a man may take inverse masculine pride in the broad generalities of light
brown, purple and orange. A feminine color vocabulary is filled with hues and shades
that most men have little occasion to learn or would hesitate to say aloud for fear
of being called effeminate or superficial. Significantly, more than ten times as many
men as women are colorblind to some degree (this is a sex-linked characteristic).
Colorblindness in a sizable portion of the male population, particularly the white
male population, where 6 to 10 percent see a limited spectrum, offers a possible explanation
for professed
masculine disinterest in the refinements of color. But if a man earns his living as
an artist or in the fashion business, knowledge of color is not considered unmasculine
at all.

If one outstanding characteristic marks feminine speech, it is the reluctance to voice
a declarative sentence—“I say this”—with certainty and strength. Robin Lakoff, a pioneering
theorist of feminine inflections, devised a classic masculine-feminine exchange to
demonstrate how women routinely turn a declarative into a faltering question:

MAN
: When will dinner be ready?

WOMAN
: Oh … around six o’clock … ?

“It is as though [the woman] were saying ‘Six o’clock, if that’s okay with you, if
you agree,’” writes Lakoff. “Here we find unwillingness to assert an opinion carried
to an extreme.”

But of course. It is not feminine to express a strong opinion, even about something
as uncontroversial as when the roast might come out of the oven. Women are not supposed
to be authoritative. By reputation we are not even supposed to be able to present
a set of facts in a rational, cogent manner. (Analytic thinking, however, is believed
to be a process of the left side of the brain.) A female opinion strongly expressed
is often considered emotional or bitchy. In the Fifties, when a woman criticized another
woman—easier in mixed company than criticizing a man—she might find herself greeted
by a chorus of meows. Meow, meow, her observation was dismissed as catty.

Even when a woman is a forthright, assertive, highly confident and successful performer
on the stage of life, she may temper her speech patterns to fit a less challenging
mode. Commands and directives that come from her lips will be modified with little
grace notes, qualified with an extraneous phrase to take the edge off the expression
of power. “Would you like to get that for me?” is a’ feminine turn of phrase. The
underling may have no choice: he will get that memo on her desk first thing in the
morning or be fired for incompetence, but the command has been softened, the power
relationship disguised, the male ego left intact.

Except when dealing with children, women are rarely comfortable issuing a command—not
only because we have had fewer opportunities to be in a managerial role, but because
commands and orders are blatantly unfeminine. A command uses a minimum amount of language;
it need not be couched in terms of politeness. Politeness is required from underlings
but not from rulers. A command may be barked, but a woman must coo. “Would you do
me a favor and … ?” It is not surprising that insincerity is a charge that is leveled
at feminine speech.

Few fault the Southern belle for her insincerity, however. Insincerity is part of
her flirtatious charm, as long as it is directed toward the gentlemen in the form
of compliments and feigned, wide-eyed interest. “Let’s go over and fluff up Uncle
Hubie,” Luci Baines Johnson, the eager student, told Barbara Howar at a Washington
party where Vice President Humphrey was holding forth. “Fluffing up,” the Southern
belle strategy, is a highly successful, vivaciously feminine conversational mode,
redolent of magnolia blossoms, tinkling laughter and soft breezes on a summer night:
the perfect style, short of silence, for women who are extraneous to a male-oriented,
power-driven society. Flirtation allows for some pert audacity but it never goes for
the jugular or engages in “Can you top this?”

Self-centered interest in personal experience and feelings is another charge that
is leveled at feminine speech. According to psychologist Nancy Henley, a number of
research studies find that women do disclose more personal information, “just as subordinates
in general are more revealing.” She continues, “Self-disclosure, including emotional
display, is not in itself a weakness or a negative behavior trait. Like other gestures
of intimacy, it has positive aspects, such as sharing of oneself and allowing others
to open up, when the self-disclosure is voluntary and reciprocal.” By contrast a masculine
verbal strategy avoids personal admissions, confessions of weakness and failure, and
displays of emotion that reveal vulnerability and dependence. This is considered a
wise, defensive maneuver in the competitive arenas of business and warfare.

“Loose Lips Sink Ships” was a popular motto during both World Wars. A commercial advertisement
of the Forties, “Don’t
Talk, Chum; Chew Topps Gum,” had a patriotic slant that confused me when I was eight
years old because by that age I knew that chewing gum was not a feminine habit. But
the point is that trading baseball statistics, discussing the physical attributes
of women or negotiating deals is considered appropriate conversation among men, and
being tightmouthed about information that others can use to their advantage is considered
a masculine virtue. Women devoted to the lifelong pursuit of romance and relationships
cannot help but rely on their emotional feelings and the private lives of others as
the backbone of their conversation. They accuse men, often unfairly, I think, of being
uncommunicative and closed off. Men, for their part, are quick to assume that an intense
conversation among members of their own sex is probably a theoretical discussion or
a serious conference, while women engaged in earnest conversation most likely are
exchanging love lives, recipes or gossip.