As promised, this chapter of the series will be featuring the second part of my pledge blog. Our assignment for this section was to interview an expert in the relevant field. Without further ado, here it is:

I had the opportunity to interview UC Berkeley French Department GSI Sarah Christofides, who has done extensive research into the feminization of French profession nouns and its consequences on society. We covered many topics in our discussion: the reform of 1676, a grammar book written in 1767, a declaration signed by 314 teachers in France, a female version of history, textual visibility, insecurity in one's masculinity, and linguistic imagination.

I was initially overly optimistic, looking for concrete evidence that there is causation between French gendered grammar and sexism in society. Ultimately, I found that French grammar does a curious thing: it is simultaneously reflecting the sexism present in society at any given point in time as well as furthering sexist views by not accepting reform. By the end of my meeting with Sarah Christofides, I was equipped with much evidence of gendered grammar and sexism walking hand in hand, though I still could not conclude that one is the sole reason that the other exists. Still, I believe that French grammar contributes to the sexism in society. Again, I do not claim that other societies are not sexist (in fact, I think that there are more severely sexist societies out there with non-gendered grammar, but I am interested in seeing what gendered grammar--a seemingly purely linguistic and grammatical feature--can do to human interaction); I am merely looking at one case of gendered grammar and its relation to societal views.

Sarah Christofides and I started our conversation by talking about the way that French gendered nouns work. Every noun has a gender, and according to what gender it is, the verbs, adjectives, and articles that relate to said noun in a sentence must agree in gender; this is what is called grammatical agreement. Of course, there are other forms of agreement, such as tense and number. This emphasizes the idea that gender, like other forms of noun classes, SHOULD only have effect on grammar. Such is the case in non-human nouns, like "maison," the French feminine noun for "house." The only effect of the femininity of "maison" is that the words describing it must also be feminine.

However, when French deals with human nouns, things get sticky--and ugly.

Sarah Christofides discussed the way before 1676 and contrasted it to the way after the reform of 1676. The reform happened because of a man named Dominique Bouhours (he was a French Jesuit priest and scribe), who, in 1676, said that "the masculine always takes precedence over the feminine." He meant that in a French sentence, the presence of one masculine noun will automatically trump the presence of any number of feminine nouns. His justification for this was that the noblest gender--the male gender--must prevail over all other genders. Of course, to him, there was only one other gender in question: the female. The most alarming part, though, was that he not only meant this in a grammatical sense, but in a human sense as well (Korbick, 2011).

Bouhours wanted to make this form, "Les hommes et les femmes soient beaux," the correct, official version of French grammar. This sentence says "The men and women are beautiful," but in English, beautiful is not a gendered adjective so the sentence does not raise any red flags. In French, though, "beautiful" has a masculine and feminine form. "Beaux" is masculine (plural) and "belles" is feminine (plural). There could be two men and one hundred women referred to in the above sentence and "beaux" would still take precedence, if Bouhours got his way. Oh wait! He did get his way.

Why does this matter? Why can't the masculine just be the default? It's because of the norm prior to the reform of 1676: the most widely accepted grammar rule for gender USED to be one of proximity. In a case where two nouns were of different gender, but an adjective was used to refer to both of them, the noun placed the closest to the adjective in the sentence would take precedence over the gender of the adjective. So, the sentence, "Les hommes et les femmes soient beaux," would have been grammatically incorrect before 1676 because "les femmes" is actually closer to the adjective than "les hommes" is, so it actually would have been written "Les hommes et les femmes soient belles."

Similarly, the phrase "three whole days and nights" would have been "ces trois jours et ces trois nuits entières." "Jours," or "days," is a masculine noun, and the corresponding masculine form of the adjective "whole" is "entiers." However, pre-1676 rule says that since the feminine noun "nuit," or "night," is closer to the adjective, it should be the feminine "entières." In 2011, Henriette Zoughebie petitioned for the grammar rules to go back to the pre-1676 way. She feels that "this grammar rule [reform of 1676] shapes a world of beliefs in which the male is seen as superior to the female," and that the reintroduction of the old rule would help relieve sexist notions in society today.

Moving on to the next topic of our conversation, Sarah Christofides explained that there exists a grammar book written in 1767 which essentially stated the same thing as Bouhours did nearly a century earlier. It read, "The masculine gender is deemed more noble than the feminine gender because of the superiority of man over woman." (Beauzée, 1767). Teachers in France today have vowed to overthrow this rule. In 2017, 314 teachers signed a declaration that they would, from now on, refuse to teach their students in accordance to the 1676 and 1767 rule. They said that the rule encourages children "to accept the domination of one sex over the other" (Althouse, 2017).

Sarah Christofides then brought up a book that she teaches in one of her French classes, Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig. The title translates to "The Warriors," except it uses the feminine version of the word "warrior." This version is actually a word that Wittig made up because the feminine form of "warriors" does not exist in French. In Bouhours had a say, he would have named it "Les Guerriers," which uses the masculine version of the noun. However, Monique Wittig would not have it that way; she was a French author and feminist who advocated to overcome "socially enforced gender roles" and used Les Guérillères to further the lesbian slice of the feminist movement in the late 1900s (Martin, 2003).

According to Christofides, Les Guérillères is an epic poem written to celebrate the female warriors of the world by rewriting history and ancient myth to be in feminine forms rather than the traditional masculine ones. Christofides states, "[Les Guérillères] formally wages war against the French masculine generic; there is much emphasis on women refusing to speak the French language, and an impetus for them to create their own language (which I think Wittig does via the text itself). Wittig's [use of] elles [in the book] is not to be translated as solely 'the women.' Instead, elles is meant to

function as a new kind of universal--an undermining of the conventional masculine plural ils."

Christofides wanted to address the issue of textual visibility for women. After the reform of 1676 and especially after the grammar book of 1767, it was difficult to have representation for women professionals in written media. In Claudie Baudino's 2001 book, Politique de la langue et différence sexuelle: La politisation du genre des noms de métier, she examines the historical feminization of professional titles, especially during times of political reform in France. She found that there were multiple instances where French authorities used masculine titles in media as a case against women to suppress the women from accessing resources they needed (Baudino, 2001).

This is an instance of the textual visibility that women do not have because the professional titles they occupy are traditionally masculine forms; one can make the sexist argument that the person behind a title written down on paper is a male, not a female--because of the non-existence of a feminine form of that professional title (Brick & Wilks, 2002).

It seems that the institution which is most insecure in its masculinity is L'Académie Française. It was founded in 1634, and there have since been 732 "Immortels," or members of the Academy. Here's the kicker: out of those 732, only 9 of them were women, and the first woman wasn't even elected until 1980! The official L'Académie Française website boasts this fact. Christofides hypothesizes that because women have scarcely ever been accepted into L'Académie, it is most likely difficult for the men of the Academy to empathize with the plight of the professional female in the French world--and thus, every L'Académie response (to petitions regarding the feminization of professional nouns) has been abrupt and adamant in saying no.

Finally, we move on to Anne-Marie Houdebine and her "imaginaire linguistique" proposition (Houdebine, 1999). "Imaginaire linguistique" translates to "linguistic imagination," and Christofides explains Houdebine's arguments as follows: "[Houdebine states] the need to make women in the workforce visible linguistically by eliminating discriminatory language via the feminization of professional titles. She [suggests] that research on the interaction between the sociological and the linguistic in the construction of sexual identity could be the next step in this continuously evolving field."

Houdebine conducted many surveys about the public view on feminization, and she found that most people favor feminization via derivation of the male form of professional nouns (such as conducteur becoming conductrice). She claims that the gap between the public view and L'Académie shows the morphological instability of the French language (Houdebine, 1999). Her "imaginaire linguistique" argument helps take into account the internal and external factors that would affect the feminization of profession nouns.

My discussion with GSI Sarah Christofides was extremely informational and helped me gain insight on many resources that I had not considered before. It also made me more comfortable in supporting my argument that the French gendered grammar and sexism go hand in hand, and that one of the only ways to eradicate this sexist view is to bring reform onto the language.

I would fully accept gendered grammar if it was purely about the grammar, like it should be. Reality, however, is not so nice. Because gendered grammar has shown relations to the sexist dynamic of human interactions, I have to dig my nose into it and fight for the equality--whether that be in terms of professional respect, textual visibility, historical credit, or anything else--that every and all genders deserve.

Sources:

Who I interviewed: Sarah Christofides, UC Berkeley French Dept. GSI

Althouse, Ann. 8/14/16 - 8/21/16, 2017, althouse.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-masculine-gender-is-deemed-more.html.

Baudino, Claudie. Politique de la langue et différence sexuelle, la politisation du genre des noms de métier. 2001. Paris, L'Harmattan, p. 364 Clio. Histoire‚ femmes et sociétés [En ligne], 21 | 2005, 21 | 2005, 334-336.

Beauzée, Nicolas. Grammaire Générale Ou Exposition Raisonnée Des Éléments Nécessaires Du Langage Pour Servir De Fondement à L'étude De Toutes Les Langues. Frommann, 1767.

Brick, Noëlle, and Clarissa Wilks. "Les partis politiques et la féminisation des noms de métier." Journal of French Language Studies 12.1 (2002): 43–53. Web.

Houdebine-Gravaud, Anne-Marie. "Femmes / langue / féminisation : Une expérience de politique linguistique en France." Nouvelles Questions Féministes 20.1 (1999): 23–52. JSTOR. Web.

Korbik, Julia. "Sexist Grammar: the French and German Cases." Cafébabel, 2011, cafebabel.com/en/article/sexist-grammar-the-french-and-german-cases-5ae007e2f723b35a145e2a50/.

Martin, Douglas. Monique Wittig, 67, Feminist Writer, Dies. January 12, 2003, New York Times.

Wittig, Monique. Les Guérillères. Beacon Press, 1969.

I hope that provided some more insight into the various factors and opinions regarding the feminization of French profession nouns. See you next week!