How language excluded women for centuries

Earlier this year, the director general of assessments of Canada’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre testified before the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women. He explained that the anti-feminist movement is becoming increasingly relevant to national security.

He argued that in certain contexts, “anti-feminist ideology can function as an enabling factor along pathways to violent extremism.”

Similarly, the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women reports that misogynistic views are becoming embedded in key institutions, including governments and political bodies, and are now shaping debates over education policy. These ideas are “aimed at dismantling or blocking progressive change for women’s equality and human rights,” according to the organization.

As a historian working in Canada whose research covers sexuality and gender in medieval Europe, with a specific focus on masculinity and male sexuality, I can say that none of this is new in western society.

The power of sexist language, in fact, rests on a question medieval scholars debated centuries ago: did the terms “man” and “mankind” include women, or men alone?

Gendered creation story

Linguistic debates about the creation of humans emerged from the two very different versions of creation contained in the Book of Genesis.

In the King James Version of the Bible, Genesis 1:27 states “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Here, the gendered words and the use of the plural are clearly inclusive.

The word “man” includes “male and female.” Furthermore, the plural “them” indicates that men and women were created simultaneously and both are identical in God’s image.

Genesis 2:21-23, which may be more familiar, tells a different story. It focuses on creation as a series of discrete sequential processes: God created Adam from the dust of the Earth.

Afterwards, recognizing Adam needed a companion, God created a woman (Eve) from man’s rib. Thus, man and woman were created separately, not simultaneously, nor from the same substance. Woman could also be understood as secondary and perhaps not in God’s true image but rather, in Platonic terms, a copy of a copy.

These two creation stories formed the foundation of western culture’s understanding of sex and gender, defining the biological natures and social roles appropriate to men and women. Within a patriarchal church and society, it appeared “normal” that women, the copy once removed, should be subordinate.

Consequently, Genesis 2 was used to explain women’s inferior place in society, the family and the moral order.

This narrow definition of “man” endured for centuries, from medieval theologians through scientific empiricists to the secular rationalists of The Enlightenment. Stripped of its Biblical origins, “man” became an unexamined, automatic term that referred to men alone.

Exclusion written into law

This was also the meaning of “man” in the great documents that laid the foundations of western liberal democracy.

In France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, “man” meant men, not all human beings. The text, written in French, uses the word “homme” which in French pertains to male persons, as homo does in Latin. The United States Declaration of Independence of 1776 is similarly unambiguous, stating “all men are created equal.” There was no written or assumed equality for women either here, in the Constitution of 1787 or the subsequent 1791 Bill of Rights.

The absence of women from these documents espousing equality was called out immediately by women themselves. They included Mary Wollstonecraft, a feminist philosopher in England, who published in 1792 “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” as a direct and deliberate response to the French Revolution.

In the U.S., Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, one of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence, famously wrote to her husband: “Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.” This was to no avail. John replied: “We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.”

It took more than a century for women’s voices to be heard and women’s legal rights and equality to be explicitly recognized.

Unlike the French or American founding documents, the British North America Act of 1867 did not use the term “man.” Rather, it used the singular pronoun “he” for an individual but the gender-neutral plural term “persons” for more than one individual.

While “he” retained elements of the exclusionary “man,” a “person” was defined as someone over 30 years of age who owned $4,000 of property. Thus, “person” was ambiguous and did not necessarily refer to men alone.

In Canada, the 1927 Persons Case challenged the practice of excluding women from the Senate because they were not “persons under the law.” The final decision, made in Westminster, not Ottawa, was a rebuke of exclusionary misogynistic linguistics: “To those who would ask why the word ‘person’ should include females, the obvious answer is, why should it not?”

Rights not guaranteed

While Canadian women were legal persons, that did not ensure they were fully equal. For example, they did not enjoy the same rights to marital property and there were few safeguards against sex discrimination.

From 1980 to 1981, they had to lobby to ensure that their equality was incontrovertibly enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This led to the inclusion of Section 28, which sets out clearly that men and women have equal rights.

In this new world of the 2020s, what are women’s rights and how safe are they when the vestiges of structural and linguistic inequality — that can be traced back to ancient and erroneous interpretations of the Genesis creation stories — remain embedded in individuals, institutions and subcultures?

Exclusionary language doesn’t stay confined to old texts. Because language is more than semantics, it constructs reality.

The same logic that once asked whether “man” included women, and decided by default that it didn’t, resurfaces whenever a movement like anti-feminism frames women’s rights as a deviation from a “natural” order rather than a baseline of equality.

» Jacqueline Murray is a professor emerita in history at the University of Guelph.

» This column was originally published at The Conversation Canada: theconversation.com/ca