The purpose of this research is to examine what consequences, if any, the recent emphasis on equality between the sexes may have for linguistic change. The plan of the research will be to set forth the social context in which the impulse toward changes in the language as an attribute of sex identification has arisen in recent years, to discuss the role that mass media have played in influencing linguistic change, and then to explore the character and extent of linguistic innovations that appear to have failed to take root in the culture.
Introduction to Sociolinguistics cites various studies showing that "'equivalent' words referring to men and women do have quite different associations in English." These various citations are useful as far as they go; however, the full implication of the evidence in such studies is perhaps better conveyed in a statement intended not for the scholarly community but for the popular culture. In The Female Eunuch, wherein Greer describes the evolution of contemporary language as an attribute of historical tension between the sexes on one hand, and as evidence of sex inequality as a fundamental of social organization on the other. She describes sex bias of the language as symptomatic of a socially sanctioned and scarcely concealed hatred of women.
Unfortunately the enfeeblement of abuse by hysterical overstatement is not the commonest phenomenon in the language of woman-hatred. Many more terms which originaly applied to both men and women gained virulence by sexual discrimination. The word harlot did not become exclusively feminine until the seventeenth century. There is no male analogue for it in the era of the double standard. The word bawd applied to both sexes until after 1700, and the word hoyden is no longer applicable to men. Originally a scold was a Scots invective poet--now it means, predictably, a nagging woman. Witches may be of either sex, but as a term of abuse witch is solely directed a...