A couple of years ago, I posted about a new and very welcome book, Women in the History of Linguistics
Words matter: a broader definition of linguistics allows women across the centuries to be included in this scholarly field. Given the cultural and practical limitations imposed on their access to education across all cultures, we need to look outside more institutionalized and traditional frameworks to discover the contributions made by women to the study of language structure and function.
Classic histories of linguistics, very rarely, if ever, include women scholars. We set about uncovering the contribution of women linguists—from European and non-European traditions— and their ideas and writings to give them the recognition they deserve. […] We decided to challenge categories and concepts devised for male-dominated accounts and expands our field of enquiry: we turned our attention not only to pioneers and exceptional women, but also to those non-exceptional women who nevertheless quietly moved forward our knowledge of languages, their description, analysis, codification and acquisition. Painstaking research in archives and libraries, looking at manuscripts and printed sources, gradually unearthed rich, fascinating, and often unexpected evidence of women’s contribution.
For the earlier periods, it was difficult to find women who published grammars or dictionaries, but they did exist. Marguerite Buffet in seventeenth-century France wrote a volume of observations on the good usage of French specifically aimed at women (Nouvelles observations sur la langue françoise, 1668). Similarly, in 1740, Johanna Corleva published a Dutch translation of Port-Royal’s celebrated general and rational grammar. In Portugal, in 1786, Francisca de Chantal Álvares produced a compendium of Portuguese grammar for female pupils in convent schools, the Breve Compendio da Gramatica Portugueza para uso das Meninas que se educaõ no Mosteiro da Vizitaçaõ de Lisboa, at a time when the majority of women did not have access to formal education. Further afield, women missionaries were also active in the field. Gertrud von Massenbach joined the Sudan Pioneer Mission in 1909, as a teacher of mathematics in Aswan, in Nubian territory. Her linguistic interests led her to publish a dictionary with a grammatical introduction of Kunûzi Nubian (Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes mit einer grammatischen Einleitung, 1933) and a collection of Nubian texts (Nubische Texte im Dialekt der Kunuzi und der Dongolawi, 1962). […]
Women also assisted male members of their families, or male colleagues, in their work as linguists. Lucy Catherine Lloyd (1834-1914), the sister-in-law of the German linguist Wilhelm Bleek, was his most important collaborator. Together they created the nineteenth-century archive of ǀXam and !Kung texts (today called the Digital Bleek and Lloyd), an invaluable resource for linguists working on Khoisan languages. Cinie Louw followed her husband Andrew Louw to South Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe) to work on the Morgenster Mission, learning the local language, Karanga, a Shona dialect, and becoming a fluent speaker. Their 1919 translation of the Bible into Karanga was a joint effort, preceded in 1915, by an important manual of the Chikaranga Language.
Other women’s linguistic work has been neglected or overshadowed, the men with whom they collaborated reaping the benefit of their efforts. The young Chiri Yukie (1903–1922) helped codify the oral tradition of the Ainu people of Hokkaido in northern Japan. Thanks to her bilingual and bicultural knowledge she was able to collect a wide range of oral performances, preserving them for posterity and making them accessible by translating them into Japanese. Her invaluable work ultimately ended up promoting, instead, the career of a prominent male academic who was awarded the Imperial prize for his work on the Indigenous language.
What came to light, piece by piece, through reading their personal stories, was the challenges women had to face in male-dominated academia. Women’s personal and professional life cannot be separated in a way that has been possible for male scholars across the centuries. Theirs are often tales of perseverance and determination. Take the example of Mary Haas, a stalwart of twentieth-century American Indian Linguistics and a central figure in the Boas-Sapir tradition, which laid the foundation for current language documentation practices. Haas found her marriage in 1931 to Morris Swadesh limited her opportunities both within linguistics and with respect to employment generally. Given the scarcity of academic appointments, she considered getting a teaching certificate to teach in public schools in Oklahoma to support herself and her fieldwork on Native American languages. However, as a married woman she was unlikely to get hired in a public school. Undeterred, she wrote to Swadesh asking for a divorce so that she might be able to support herself. Swadesh agreed. Their divorce was meant to allow Haas to pursue more avenues of employment, although her plans were ultimately interrupted by World War II.
It’s infuriating to read about the challenges women have faced, but it’s good that the field is slowly coming to terms with the issue.
I had managed never to know that Mary Haas was married to Morris Swadesh. I suppose I could finesse my ignorance by saying (truly) that the question of who that excellent scholar happened to be married to had never struck me as of any interest compared with her actual work.
(It’s still a pretty distressing story.)
“Given the cultural and practical limitations imposed on their access to education across all cultures”
Er. It can be true, depending on what we include in “education”, historically, but “all cultures” is really many cultures.
Do you know of any culture which has not imposed limitations on women’s access to education? (Before the last few decades, obviously.)
“Before the last decades” is an important note here. No. But I know little about history of education even in the few cultures I’m more or less familiar with. I only mean that I wonder what exact mechanisms lead to this inequality. Saying that it is “always” so (without actually studying the question) does not help…
Also “limitations on access” is a very accurate formulation. But a reader unfamiliar with European society of 19th century (no such readers here) may conclude that in “educated” classes women were uneducated. Which is not true: some sort of book learning was expected from them and women actively sought education too. It was and is appealing. This is why we have those educated women without degrees.
The author does take an effort not to reduce the matter to stereotypes, so maybe she should not generalise over all cultures so easily, even if she has a good reason to sigh about them.
I’m surprised that someone so concerned with the position of women would respond in that way. Would you object to a generalization that Russia has been governed autocratically for centuries by saying “Well, actually there was not an autocratic government for eight months in 1917”? We can’t think productively without generalizations; when they’re unhelpful or wrong, it’s fine to point that out, but the idea that “the cultural and practical limitations imposed on their access to education across all cultures” is an unhelpful generalization is bizarre to my mind, especially coming from you. (I admit that I am pretty fed up by today’s near-universal tendency to nitpick absolutely everything; people seem to read things looking for something they can complain about rather than to find something new and interesting, and I apologize if I’m taking it out on you.)
@LH, first why I commented at all: “all cultures” is just a weird phrase, it sounds almost like an oxymoron. “Cultures” reminds that we can live differently. I am not sure there exist a context where I expect to hear “all cultures”, the phrase immediately makes my jaw drop.
The below is not a rant, I’m just trying to explain why I am perplexed.
I think “why does it happen?” is an important question. To understand it we need to compare different societies. Perhaps what we will find is that the author is right. But the author did not try and I never tried either: all known cultures is really a lot. When you offer a ready answer (a stereotype) you discourage others from looking for the answer, you speak of the state of affairs found in 19th century Europe as preordained.
And no, our modern society is not “a few months” with no impact. We live in it, and conditions for some reason changed profoundly. They were not preordained (and for many people who think that the world will collapse if women start wearing pants we are the proof of concept).
“why does it happen?” – paticularly I am speaking about various rather weird limitation imosed by our society in 19th century. You can’t explain them with “women are busy with children”. They are as arbitrary as Saudi driving restriction.
Actually, I agree with drasvi that to speak of “all” cultures is simply begging for counterexamples. And I think there are premodern counterexamples: I mean, traditional Kusaasi culture has/had pretty defined roles for the sexes, but girls are no more denied educational opportunities than boys: children just learn to do what they are expected to do as adults, and you could just as well characterise this as boys being denied the opportunity to learn how to brew millet beer (a woman thing, in that culture.)
I don’t think this is really nitpicking: apart from the hostage-to-fortune inclusion of “all”, characterising the – certainly usually very different – educational opportunities for girls and boys as limitations on women’s access to education assumes a modern Western notion of what “education” actually is. In the practical setting of my Kusaasi example, this would start to become a sensible way of describing the situation only once Western-style schooling arrived, and parents decided that their sons should be sent to school in preference to their daughters, and/or that there was no need for girls to learn to read.
None of this, of course, detracts from Hat’s entirely valid point that the great majority of women in the overwhelmingly dominant cultures of the world during the historical period have indeed been denied anything like equal educational opportunities, nor that woman have been and are oppressed by men all over the world.
“assumes a modern Western notion of what “education” actually is.”
Yes, I wanted to write about this too. But I did not want to make my comment even longer. It reads as a rant so the more I write the more it looks like hostility to the author, when in reality it was just my instinctive reaction to this phrase and subsequent explanations. I am not terribly diplomatic (still better than Putin).
“valid point that the great majority of women in the overwhelmingly dominant cultures of the world ”
As I said, the author has a good reason to sigh.
Actually, I agree with drasvi that to speak of “all” cultures is simply begging for counterexamples.
Yes, on reflection I agree with both of you. (I’m just so tired of scholarly writing that reflexively uses language like “It seems quite likely that in many, perhaps most, societies that we are aware of — bearing in mind of course that the field is in flux, and new discoveries may problematize any conclusions we reach…” Suck it up and say something, dammit!)
I am not terribly diplomatic
Me neither!
“I mean, traditional Kusaasi culture has/had pretty defined roles for the sexes, but girls are no more denied educational opportunities than boys: children just learn to do what they are expected to do as adults, and you could just as well characterise this as boys being denied the opportunity to learn how to brew millet beer (a woman thing, in that culture.)”
There is a segment of knowlege transmitted either by or among women in modern “traditional” societies (where cities with universities and villages co-exist). If total knowlege in the original form of those societies (before schools and Muslim sheikhs/Christian missionaries arrived) could be obtained by substracting “modern knowlege”, a society where most of knowlege is transmitted by women would look utterly unsurprising. Of course it is a wrong assumption, but I still won’t be surprised if the main transmitters of more theoretical “knowlege” were often women.
But I guess Arina Rodionovna does not count for education:)
(I mean, the author actually meant something more narrow, but it is difficult to define what in a way that would make cross-cultural comparison possible. E.g. the author would recognise book education in medieval Japan as “education”. Then in our definition we should not refer to modernity and to Europe. )
“In the practical setting of my Kusaasi example, this would start to become a sensible way of describing the situation only once Western-style schooling arrived, and parents decided that their sons should be sent to school in preference to their daughters, and/or that there was no need for girls to learn to read.”
Did this happen? And if yes, then why?
A bit, but not so much. Kusaasi women (like Kusaasi men) don’t take kindly to being pushed around.
The Kusaasi have resisted incorporatiion into the hierarchical structure of the Mossi-Dagomba kingdoms right from the beginning. The founder of those empires, Gbewa, set up his capital in Pusiga, now deep in Kusaasi terrirory, but in his sons’ time an “untimely Kusaasi and Bisa revolt” forced its relocation south of the Gambaga escarpment – where it remains to this day.
The Kusaasi also have no puberty rites at all (and have consequently never had either male circumcision or FGM.)
Talk of knowledge passed on more or less exclusively by women in traditional societies reminds me of the Hausa spirit possession cult, Bori, which is very much female led. I don’t know how it is nowadays, but traditionally the (male, of course) Muslim clerics left them well alone.
Just came across a female Nazi linguist (who, apparently, was not Nazi for the same reason as why we would be, but actually was with them from the start and reached high positions): Anneliese Bretschneider.
Sorry, it just a frequent topic: when you discover than yet another German linguist was a Nazi, say Wehr.
Does something about the subject of linguistics promote expectations that linguists in general wouldn’t “be Nazis” ? Do similar expectations hold as to computational linguists ?
No, 1/10 of Germans were. But still this topic arises once in a while.
@Stu: Maybe the drasvi thesis is that pretty much all linguists would be Nazis (at least if in a time and place where that would have seemed like a good career move) but not all from the same motivations? I take it the point with Dr. Bretschneider is that in drasvi’s estimation she may have had motives that went beyond careerism/opportunism/going-along-to-get-along.
Lots of topics arise once in a while. The one about Nazi linguists is brought up here more often than it arises. Cheap thrills, I suppose.
The ecstasy of sanctimony [Philip Roth]
@JWB, well, all is an exggeration. As I said 1/10 of Germans. For linguists I expect a larger proportion, but I am not sure. Otherwise yes, that’s what I meant, more or less.
As an academic in that time in Germany, if you weren’t a Nazi you could kiss your career goodbye, so I would think that academic linguists (which is mainly what we’re talking about) would indeed be significantly more likely than the average German to be Party members. Most people, at most times, just go with the flow; much of the time, that’s probably not bad thing, either.
Yup. Compare Party membership in the Soviet Union.
It might be an exaggeration about career: I understand their circumstances very vaguely, but there were scientists who were not Nazi.
Compare Party membership in the Soviet Union.
No, most Soviet scientists were not members of the Party.
Perhaps you mean that the percentage was higher…
I wasn’t thinking of scientists in particular, just that in order to get to the higher levels of almost any field it was very useful to be a Party member.
The Soviet regime lasted much much longer, such that after a certain point in time all entry level scientists, and then eventually all non-retired scientists, had had their secondary-school and university education and similar early technical training under the Soviet regime, such that they would have already been weeded out if they’d been too obviously or overtly anti-regime. In that setting the additional loyalty/enthusiasm signal of actual Party membership is perhaps not as strong (or doesn’t mean quite the same thing) as when the NSDAP suddenly found itself in control of universities etc largely staffed under the prior regime and with even newly-minted Ph.D.’s largely educated under the prior regime. Plus I’m not sure when if ever (not an area I’ve found interesting enough to inquire into) the NSDAP may have shifted its attitude from “we want as many new Party members as possible as part of our takeover” to “we’re secure in power so now we want to be more selective about letting people be Party members to ensure quality control and keep out the riff-raff.”
” as when the NSDAP suddenly found itself in control of universities etc largely staffed under the prior regime and with even newly-minted Ph.D.’s largely educated under the prior regime. ”
A good point.