Them students

When I teach, I try to decentre my students’ gender. I, like many other teachers, try to make it not matter whether my students are female, male, neither or both – to make it not matter for me, or for other students in the classroom. Because every time we mention that someone is a man, or a woman, we recreate this difference and act as if it matters when considering each others’ ideas. And usually we do so even without asking whether the student cares for these labels that we give them. I want to find ways in the classroom of expressing fewer assumptions about gender, and ways of de-emphasising it altogether.

Of course, our gender does matter in society in many ways, for instance because women’s contributions are often valued less. And the life experiences that this leads to should definitely be brought into classroom conversations. Also, whether I succeed in my aims is a different story. Making gender irrelevant, even if only for a moment, is a difficult thing to do. We have each piled up a lifetime of gender socialisation to the contrary. But precisely for these reasons, I try to level the playing field at least somewhat and direct our attention to what a student says, rather than to their gender.

Photo of Banqiao Senior High School’s day of action against gendered uniform rules. New Taipei City (Taiwan), May 2019. Posted on school Facebook site PCSH.BQSA, maker unknown, accessed via the Straits Times.

In order to help myself and the other students a little, I am trying to teach myself to refer to each student using their name, or else the word ‘they’.

However, always using their name can lead to awkward situations.

I remember a conversation with a colleague about a student, that went something like this:

colleague: ‘How was her essay?’

– ‘Esmeralda’s essay was pretty good. Esmeralda managed to combine theory and case-study in a wonderful manner. Esmeralda introduces the theory very clearly, and then tells us about an experience Esmeralda had Esmeralda-self, that shows how we may have to modify the theory a little if it is to take into account the lives of Esmeralda and students like Esmeralda.’

By the second sentence, my colleague was no longer listening (I doubt that I was, myself) and gestured with a slightly concerned look on their face: ‘What are you doing?’

Thankfully, there is that English pronoun ‘they’.

But I also teach in Dutch. Dutch has the awkward property that there is no separate word for ‘they’. There is no distinct pronoun to refer to the third person in a ungendered manner. All there is, are the plural words ‘ze’ and ‘zij ‘, but these happen to be the same as the singular female pronouns! The only way of making clear you are using the ungendered words is by using them in combination with a plural verb.

And so I stumble on:

colleague: ‘And how did she do in classroom discussions?’

– ‘Oh, they were doing very well.’

In English, that sounds just fine, but in Dutch, it led my colleague to doubt my sanity once again:

‘No, I did not mean the rest of the students. Just Esmeralda herself!’

– ‘As I said: Esmeralda were making an excellent contributions [I totally lost it now]. They did not only say a very interesting things, but they also listened carefully to the others students, as well as to us, the teacher.’

If plurals confuse me now, of course speakers of Dutch will get used to them eventually, like people do in English. The real problem is that the distinction between female ‘zij’ and ungendered ‘zij’ is still not very clear in practice.

Other solutions have been tried by Dutch speakers. Use of the plural object word ‘them’, for instance:

– ‘Them has a few questions to their teacher.’

This word – ‘hen’ in Dutch – was voted pronoun of choice for non-binary people in a poll organised by the Dutch Transgender Network (TNN).

On a side note, this shows how similar innovations are coming from multiple directions at the same time. Trans activism and feminist activism (and the two overlap) diagnose closely related social issues and can fruitfully look for solutions together.

The Network’s news item on the poll suggests that for them, the pronoun ‘hen’ is expressly not meant to be used for (cis or trans) men or women: ‘Just like cisgender men and women, trans men and women prefer binary pronouns (he or she).’ But I do not know whether that reflects the opinion of all who participated in the poll, or all members in the Network. I think that even a ‘binary’ feminist – whether man or woman, cis or trans – might very well opt for a non-binary pronoun. I am therefore very grateful that the Network is coordinating this effort at language change. I believe that the results can be used for a more general feminist cause as well. Our language only starts to change once a critical mass has gathered, and through their communication with the media, the Network may well be creating quite some of this mass.

Back to my daily practice and ‘hen’.

The somewhat conservative language lover in me does lament that ‘hen’ would then be used for both object and subject in a sentence, which I find ugly:

‘Them sees them.’

… and laments that it is also the Dutch word for chicken: ‘hen’.

But I have decided to give it a try.

At first, it feels uncomfortable when I say it. Disrespectful even. As if I am mimicking someone else’s slang. But after a brief while, I already feel that discomfort wear away a little. That matches my general belief that even grown-ups can get used to new words very well, even to new pronouns. I only have to think of my own introduction to singular ‘they’ at the age of eighteen. This came after years of school- and BBC-trained insistence on ‘he’ or ‘she’. Yet within a few years’ time, I was accustomed to ‘they’.

Do read my colleague Marc van Oostendorp’s contrasting opinion in newspaper Trouw. Marc van Oostendorp reminds us that the human linguistic faculty is a conservative one: that it is hard for people to shift their use of function words like ‘she’ or ‘he’. And it is true, of course, that my own mental shift to ‘they’ took place within the English language, a language in which the new word was already considered normal by many other people.

Still, could we not create our own social pockets of normality? In our classrooms, our student essays, our blogs? Like I said, it only works once we gather enough critical mass for a specific solution. But once that’s there, that solution will no longer feel artificial, it will start to feel normal.

Marc themself has offered an alternative, one that is both democratic and linguistically informed: ‘vij/her/zaar’. (You can figure out how Marc got there if you know a little Dutch.) Though they did so jokingly, it sounds pretty good, and I would happily consider it.

As I would happily consider getting used to ‘hen’.

There is another obvious alternative in Dutch: using ‘that’ or ‘that one’ instead of ‘her’ or ‘she’.

‘Esmeralda might leave class early today. That has a vaccination appointment. or: That one has a vaccination appointment.’

As gender linguist Ingrid van Alphen has said before: ‘that’ does sound very demonstrative. And it may lead to confusion, because currently it is often used to refer to the object of a previous sentence, rather than its subject:

‘Esmeralda has a turtle. That one likes to go on walks’

Whereas previously it was clearly the turtle who liked walking, when using the suggested strategy this could just as well refer to Esmeralda. Still, it may be worth a try.

And how about simply leaving out the consonants of ‘hij’ and ‘zij’ and say ‘ij’?

Our own Radboud graduate Féline Visscher explored all the options in their thesis in 2017.

Debates about gender-neutral, ungendered and gender-inclusive pronouns have been going on for many decades, perhaps many centuries already. My aim in this column was not to add any new suggestions or arguments. Instead, I am hoping that we can transform some of all that thinking into practice. The Dutch language authority the Taalunie has created a gender-inclusivity committee that will, in years to come, advise us via their website. But why not start right here, right now, in our classrooms, our offices, our workplaces?

Are you a student on a Dutch-spoken course? Try out some innovative pronouns yourself, whether any of the above or others. And tell your teachers – tell me – which you would suggest for our everyday practice here in the classroom. Or for when us teachers praise your essays.

This column was originally written for the Women on the Timeline project, organised by students of the Radboud University Nijmegen, which can be found in Raffia Magazine, on Instagram: @w_o_t_t, and on Facebook: @WomenOnTheTimeline.

Sexism by anti-sexist activists

Change doesn’t come easily.

7 March is International Women’s Day, activism against gender inequity is experiencing a ‘third wave’, supported by writers, scholars and civic organisations alike – and yet, old habits are hard to shake off, even by these feminists themselves. Old habits, such as belittling women by the way they are named.

Carpenter around 1875 (from Wikimedia Commons).

As I was reading a biography of the activist Edward Carpenter, written by eminent women’s historian Sheila Rowbotham, it struck me that she referred to the women in Carpenter’s life by their first names, while the men were called by their family names. (This is especially clear in the chapter ‘Love and Loss’.) For an online example, see Rowbotham’s earlier publication Hidden from History. 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It.

In European culture, the use of first names traditionally implies intimacy, but also low status and a form of infantility or immaturity. First names are used for children, servants, nurses: Katie; Maud; Mary. Second names, on the other hand, have for a long time been reserved for people of power and authority, such as (male) politicians, authors, and teachers in secondary or higher education: Gladstone; Byron; Snyder.

(For a bitter laugh: google-image search ‘professor’ and then ‘teacher’.)

A romanticising painting of the Shelleys: William Powell Frith (1819-1909), ‘The Lover’s Seat: Shelley and Mary Godwin in Old St Pancras Churchyard’.

The distinction becomes abundantly clear in English literary history with the Shelleys, who were both famous writers. In most narratives about the Shelleys, Percy is ‘Shelley’ while Mary is ‘Mary’. It leads to such statements as ‘In mid-1816, Shelley and Mary made a second trip to Switzerland.’ (This one from Wikipedia, but exemplary of much academic writing as well.)

Another example, about contemporary writers: I use an appointment diary published by an international human-rights organisation, which contains poetry by political dissidents. Two Soviet poets from the 1980s are quoted: Irina Ratushinskaya and Nizametdin Akhmetov. She is ‘Irina’. He is ‘Akhmetov’.

Ratushinskaya, photographed by Mikhail Evstafiev. CC BY-SA 2.5.

Some women seem to be especially prone to being named in a way that places them at the bottom of the pecking order: these are immigrant women and women who have received less formal education.

Not too long ago, I was at a university conference about some of the work scholars in Britain are doing with local communities. Part of the aim was to show that such projects are a two-way street involving true collaboration between academics and people with other kinds of knowledge: knowledge from experience, or from family stories, for instance.

Unfortunately, these good intentions did not translate itself into the naming practices adopted by the (academic) presenters. The non-academic participants, mostly female and immigrant, were referred to by their first names, while the mostly indigenous/white scholars (also women in majority, in this case) were referred to by their family names.

Even scholars who make it their task to challenge racism and sexism have been immersed in a racist and sexist culture from a young age, and clearly even they find it difficult to shake of its influences.

No doubt I have been guilty of the same unfair practice over the course of my life. But once we start to notice how often it occurs, we can begin to be more careful about what we call people.

Michelle? Or Obama? (official White House portrait by Joyce N. Boghosian, 2009, from commons.wikimedia.org)

N.B. When I tried to locate the original source of this photo, the following message appeared on my screen:

Thank you for your interest in this subject. Stay tuned as we continue to update whitehouse.gov.

Sheila Rowbotham’s otherwise excellent biography is called Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (Verso, 2009).

A bushy tail to a hairy story

Last week’s story about the hairy-women scale was triggered by something a friend said.

We were watching Life of Brian. Enter a naked Brian and Judith. At seeing Judith my friend commented: ‘I feel like we’re watching a 70ies porn movie’.

It was disturbing enough to find out that my friend, in his thirties, categorises women primarily according to the kind of porn they might feature in.

But the point here is of course that he was referring to Judith’s bushy triangle. In his voice: a mixture of ridicule and anger. Apparently, a woman’s body is impossible on a woman these days; a prepubescent girl’s body is what’s needed. Now I know that body aesthetics in the media have been shifting since Life of Brian was made, in 1979. But I was still surprised to see a university-educated, grown-up man uncritically repeating what he sees on the telly.

The scene itself shows just what it’s all about: fear and shame and being brave.

This is exactly what I argued last week: outside of science, too, most people chime in with old-fashioned doctors and ethnographers in shaming ‘women’ (as identified by them) for not being ‘women’. As nice a bit of circular reasoning as ever you saw.

Many people contend that what you do with your body hair is your own business. But this is not true. Unsolicited criticism like my friend’s turns it into a social business. A recent article on the experiences of women in the south-west of the US convincingly shows this.

The UK, 2016. Photo by 9×6. Clearly, the beauty industry has a stake in this debate.

 

When asking women why they remove hair – mostly that hair associated with ‘hirsutism’ of the previous post – the response by and large was: ‘because I choose to’. When asking them to respond to other women who did not engage in conventional shaving or waxing practices, however, they expressed a strong disgust: these women were ‘dirty’, ‘gross’. A quote from one of the interviewees that shows this contradiction:

I think it’s a personal preference. [When they] don’t shave their armpits […] it grosses people out. Typically, if you’ve got a lot of hair, it looks like a man and it’s not very attractive on women, but I don’t think I make total judgments on it. I might just stand ten feet away from them! (Fahs, 171)

That already sums up nicely that some women exert strong pressures on other women. In other words, shaving is not a free choice at all.

In the same study, women who let their hair be, reported similarly contradicting reactions by others. From boyfriends for example:

First I got, ‘‘Ew, no. I won’t let you do that.’’ Then I got a joking but upsetting ‘‘I will not engage in any sexual acts with you until you shave.’’  […] he went on to say how ‘‘it was pointless’’ and ‘‘women can do whatever they want now because it is 2011.’’ (Fahs, 174)

Women also invent excuses to justify their hair removal. One woman in the study argued that pubic hair would be dangerous for her partner: ‘You can actually hurt the other person’. That’s quite a different story from the warnings by one GP that shaving in fact introduces health hazards.

Luckily, counter-activity is in the air. With the Free Your Pits movement, for example, with hair dyed in outrageous colours.

Perhaps I should take my friend to the hairdresser’s.

 

The article quoted is Breanne Fahs’s ‘Perilous Patches and Pitstaches: Imagined Versus Lived Experiences of Women’s Body Hair Growth’, published in 2014.

Are we done with ironing?

Time for the follow-up post to ‘Ironing board will soon be obsolete‘!

Do you iron?

We were lying by the pool, so my friend’s question was an unexpected one. She herself is a non-ironer, and she seemed to be gauging whether this makes her a bad person. Luckily, I could set her at ease: I do not iron my laundry either.

And your mother?

Well yes, the works: from cardigans to underpants.

While the recently released UN report ‘Progress of the World’s Women’ draws attention to the burden of unpaid care and domestic work that falls on women globally, it also allows us to ponder how the more affluent parts of the world deal with these tasks.

Clearly, women in wealthy countries are no stranger to the difficulty of juggling different duties within the limited hours of the day. However, I found that the question my friend asked me by the poolside signals a remarkable change that we see with today’s young people. This generation of emancipating women are using their time in a new manner.

In the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, housewives set towering standards when it came to the proper maintenance of furniture, floors, windows, linen and clothes.

To give an early example from a British housekeepers’ manual (pp. 6-7): every day, the blankets but also the sheets had to be taken from all the beds, and mattresses had to be

turned over daily. Feather-beds must be turned over and shaken in all directions.

The bed should then be completely remade,

and drawing your hand along the lower edge of the pillows, so that their form may be seen, the bed is made.

Before making a bed, wash your hands, and take care that your apron is not dirty.

Although these efforts may have yielded some health benefits, they were primarily aimed at enhancing a family’s respectability. Next to this, they may have helped mothers who were caring for only a small number of children, but who had nevertheless been excluded from the work force (it was a matter of pride for couples when the wife did not ‘have to’ work), to give purpose to their life: to feel needed.

In the 1970s and 80s, second-wave feminists were already different wives from their mothers. No longer did they just take care of home and family: they turned to paid work in massive numbers.

Still, they had been raised with their mothers’ domestic ideals: a perfectly neat interior, especially when receiving guests, the children always scrubbed and combed… Beside their paid jobs, wives and mothers continued to spend twice as many hours on home and care as their husbands, both in the UK and in many other countries (see the Multinational Time Use Study database). This ‘second shift’ of work is what led to the feelings of stress and inadequacy many women know so well.

In other words, the baby boomers were stuck with a historically high bench-mark in all matters domestic. In spite of a substantial growth in paid labour participation, which now absorbed much of women’s time, the baby boomers have never really rid themselves of this standard.

This is a thing which we do see happening with their children. Many of the young women who are starting a household today, and their partners, too, are taking on a new mentality. Of course, women’s time scarcity can also be alleviated by men’s greater involvement in the home, and by hiring professional help. Partly, this is also what is happening. However, the other obvious option young people see, is to simply lower their expectations.

A photo taken by the USA Department of Agriculture, Extension Service, around the 1940s: ‘Washington, D.C. Dusting mits with which dusting can be done with both hands develops speed and efficiency. Dusting mit or dust cloth in the pocket, dusting as you clean, eliminates travel time.’ (Currently in the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park. Photo provided on Wikimedia Commons.) Did the federal government occupy itself with the efficient cleanliness of American homes? I’m no expert on this, but it would seem so.

Hoovering, mopping, replacing linen and making beds: everything happens less often in this generation. Except for a formal shirt now and then, none of my friends ever iron as far as I can tell. Even folding is occasionally abandoned. (A weekly dusting has already been history for a while: in my work as a professional housekeeper, the different priorities of different generations of clients have become abundantly clear.)

Yes, guests like to sleep on clean sheets, but that does not mean the entire house must shine. Kids don’t like to worry about their clothes in the first place. And who knows what will happen to the pressing iron? It might do nicely enough as home decoration next to the washboard and the spinning wheel.

If these first indications persist – if women are grasping this opportunity to turn their back on perfectionism, and men are growing just as modest in their expectations – then, perhaps, we can look forward to a little less pressure in our stressful lives. Which is why the best place imaginable to start a discussion about housekeeping, was indeed the poolside.

This column has also been published in the University of Sheffield’s History Matters and, in a different version and focusing on the Dutch instead of the British situation, in NRC Handelsblad on the occasion of International Women’s Day 2015.