Feminism and Gender-Neutral Speech

The article I read was on Gender-Neutral speech and you can find it here. Gender-Neutral Speech's Effects.

This Article discusses the affects of using neutral speech in America. It talks about a study done back in 1984 that was done with children. The Children in this study were told to write a story and most of them were about a man when the first sentence had the word "he" in it. It was interesting to see how the simple use of one word makes people write about a man or woman. Also this article goes on to describe the affect of using the word "chairman" and "chairperson" when describing someone of high authority. The participants commonly felt that the "chairperson" was a nicer human being.

The ideology of using words that refer to a man has been poured into people's brains. However if one is able to recognize this and make their speech gender-neutral less people would have this ideology. Ideally America would be able to move on from this type of thinking and become more gender-neutral. Simply put, though we can try to move on from this I believe it is not possible. The use of specific words affects how a person thinks and how they look at society. If we continue using non gender-neutral speech America will keep grinding the image of a man being superior in someones mind and we will not move any closer to gender neutrality.

Comments

[dani k]

i think this post brings up a good point, but to some extent gender neutral speech is a bit unrealistic. i think its crazy though how our mind works when posed with one words and all it implies.