Introduction
In September 2015, as we were finishing this book, two menâJeremy Corbyn and Tom Watsonâwere elected to serve as leader and deputy leader of Britainâs Labour Party. Both positions had been contested by women, and the fact that a man was preferred in each case divided opinion among Labour supporters. One view was that the gender of a leader matters less than his or her politics: in this case, the socialist policies advocated by the winning candidate would do more to advance the interests of most women than the less radical policies favoured by his two female rivals. An opposing view, however, was that gender is important in its own right: the presence of women in leadership roles makes a difference both to the content and to the conduct of politics. In support of this argument, Yvonne Roberts (2015) cited the example of the recent General Election campaign, in which three female party leaders had featured prominently:
Nicola Sturgeon for the SNP [Scottish National Party] and Leanne Wood for Plaid Cymru [the Party of Wales] changed the debate not just because of what they said, but how they said it and the way in which they related to each other and the electorate â a visibly different kind of politics.
The sentence just quoted contains two related propositions which are central to our concerns in this book: first, that women, by virtue of their gender, offer a âdifferent kind of politicsâ; and second, that this difference is inextricably linked to the way women use language in political contextsânot just what they say, the political content, but how they say it, the style of interaction. This is not a novel observation: in fact, over the past two decades, it has become a clichĂ© of British political journalism. After the 1997 General Election, when the landslide victory of Tony Blairâs âNewâ Labour party brought what was then a record number of womenâ119âinto Parliament, commentators suggested approvingly that their presence would make the House of Commons debating chamber âless of a bear-gardenâ. Similar sentiments were expressed by some of the new women MPs (Members of Parliament) themselves. Julia Drown explained that âwomen are more co-operative in the way they work. Theyâre not so into scoring points, and more interested in hearing different points of viewâ, while her colleague Gisela Stuart noted that âwhat [women] will do is make politics more relevant to peopleâs lives: democracy is about consensus rather than imposing willâ (Cameron 1997). These comments are expressions of what we will refer to as the âdifferent voiceâ ideology of gender, language, and politics. They suggest that womenâs distinctive political contribution is a way of doing thingsâand saying thingsâthat eschews aggression and point-scoring in favour of cooperation and consensus, making politics more civilized, more modern, and more human.
As language and gender researchers, we are interested in the political speech of womenâboth what it is, and what it is believed to be. But those two things are not always easy to disentangle. For many commentators on womenâs âdifferent voiceâ, including not only journalists and politicians but also academic researchers outside the field of language and gender studies, âvoiceâ is a metaphor for a whole cluster of distinctive qualities and concerns women are said to bring into the political arena. In many studies, the main focus of attention is not linguistic style so much as political substance: the question is how womenâs presence as âcritical actorsâ in institutions (Childs and Krook 2009) helps to shape political agendas or increase the visibility of issues in which women have a particular stake (Chaney 2012; Mackay 2004). It is often claimed that women also have a âdifferent voiceâ in the more narrowly linguistic sense, but most commonly, the basis for this assertion is the accounts women give of their linguistic behaviour when they are talking more generally about their difference from men. For example, when the British researcher Sarah Childs (2004) conducted in-depth interviews with twenty-three Labour women MPs who had entered the House of Commons in 1997, almost two thirds of them expressed the belief that women have a different approach to politics, and language was mentioned repeatedly as one of the key markers of the difference. Women were said to prefer a âless combative and aggressive styleâ, with âless standing up and shouting on the floor of the Houseâ, and more collaborating with others behind the scenes. They were also described as communicating in a more personal and less abstruse way, without using political âbabble [and] jargonâ, and without adopting such undesirable male practices as making cutting remarks while others were speaking, unnecessarily repeating othersâ points, or talking just for the sake of talking (Childs 2004: 5, 6). The women accorded positive value to the style of speech they described, but they also complained that it was viewed as less legitimate and less effective than the traditional âmaleâ style. One interviewee had been told by a Whip (an enforcer of party discipline) that she should be more combative, while another believed that the female preference for less jargon and more everyday English was regarded by others as ânaĂŻveâ.
These observations point to a paradox. Many or most public comments on womenâs different way of speaking either say or imply that it is preferable to menâs. No journalist or politician, of either sex or any party allegiance, ever says: âwhat we really need in politics is less constructive dialogue and more shouting, jeering and hurling accusationsâ. Yet in practice, womenâthe group which supposedly embodies all the virtues people say they want to see more of in politics (and none of the vices they say they want to see less of)âremain marginalized, a minority at all levels, and a vanishingly small minority in positions of political leadership. Is all this talk about the virtues of womenâs style just lip service? Does it function as a form of sexism in its own right, a way of keeping women in their subordinate place? What does it mean, concretely, to say that women as a group speak a different political language, and how far do descriptions of that language, such as the ones quoted above, correspond to womenâs actual behaviour in political settings?
Those questions will be explored in the following chapters, where we examine the status and workings of the âdifferent voiceâ ideology in contemporary democratic politics, using the UK General Election of 2015 (hereafter âGE2015â) as a case study. At the heart of our case study is an empirical question, which we address in Chap. 2: how did male and female politicians actually use language in key public speech events during the election campaign? Does an analysis of their discourse support the belief that women political leaders have a âdifferent voiceâ, and if so, how is the difference best described? In addition, though, we are interested in the way the existence of the âdifferent voiceâ ideology (whether or not it is empirically well founded in linguistic terms) affects the public perception of female politicians and the terms on which they participate in public discourse. With that in mind, in Chap. 3, we analyse the way the women party leadersâand more specifically, their styles of speakingâwere represented in media coverage of GE2015. We compare the representation of their language use with the findings of our own analysis, and consider how far the reception of their speech was influenced by the âdifferent voiceâ ideology.
Before we turn to our case study, however, there are a number of preliminaries to be dealt with. Since not all readers will have followed GE2015, later on in this chapter we provide a brief narrative of the campaign, along with other background information that is needed to contextualize our case study. We also give a general account of our approach and the methods we have chosen to employ. First, though, we explore the wider intellectual context in which the questions we propose to investigate are located, relating our own study to previous work in a number of academic disciplines addressing questions about (in various combinations) gender, language, and politics.
Gender and Speech Style: Ideology and Practice
When we use the phrase ââdifferent voiceâ ideologyâ, we are placing the belief that women have a distinctive style of communication in the category of what anthropologists and linguists call language ideologiesââsets of beliefs about language articulated by the users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and useâ (Silverstein 1979: 193, 194). The implication of the term ideology is not necessarily that the belief in question distorts or misrepresents reality. There are types of language ideology, such as origin myths in which human language is created by a god or other supernatural being, to which positivist notions of truth are entirely irrelevant. Other language ideological beliefs may be close to, or at least not incompatible with, scientific accounts of the phenomenon they concern. However, language ideologies are representations which idealize their object, rendering the actual complexity of linguistic practice more intelligible through simplification, generalization, and stereotyping. They are typically also, as Silverstein says, rationalizations, attempts to explain what people perceive as significant facts about language use in a way that is consonant with their more general beliefs about the world. Language ideologies thus come with what Judith Irvine (1989: 255) describes as a âloading of moral and political interestsâ.
The relationship between language and gender is a common subject for these morally and politically loaded rationalizations. Exactly what language users believe about it can vary considerably across cultures and historical periods (Cameron 2007), but as Sherzer (1987) points out, a communityâs understanding of the speech of men and women is invariably related to its understanding of the qualities and proper social roles of men and women themselves. Gender differences in language use are not treated as arbitrary and superficial, but are taken to index deeper differences in ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to others.
As that last statement suggests, most ideologies of language and gender, past as well as present, centre on the belief that women use language in a different way from men. What we mean when we refer to the âdifferent voiceâ ideology, however, is something more specific than just âa belief that men and women are differentâ. In the form we consider it here, the âdifferent voiceâ ideology is a product of the late twentieth century. While it has clear continuities with earlier representations of gender differences in language use, it is also clearly indebted to the ideas and political aspirations of the late twentieth-century feminist movement, and it is not only a common-sense or âfolkâ ideology, but also one which has been elaborated in influential academic texts.
The phrase âdifferent voiceâ alludes to one of those texts, the US psychologist Carol Gilliganâs book In a Different Voice (Gilligan 1982). Like the political scientists mentioned earlier, Gilligan does not treat womenâs âdifferent voiceâ as an exclusively linguistic phenomenon: though she does touch on language, the real subject of her book is gender differences in moral decision-making, and its thesis is that men tend to think of morality in terms of respecting individual rights and freedoms, whereas women tend to be more concerned with fulfilling obligations and meeting othersâ needs. However, this notion of gender difference, and the oppositions which constitute it (e.g. autonomy/interdependence, rights/needs, justice/care), has influenced work that deals more specifically with language. It is echoed, for instance, in the work of the linguist Deborah Tannen (1990; 1994), a central figure in the development of what is sometimes called the âdifferenceâ or âtwo culturesâ model of male and female communication styles. Tannenâs argument is that boys and girls learn differing norms of interaction in the same-sex peer groups, which are at the centre of childrenâs social lives. Boys, whose peer groups are typically large and hierarchically organized, learn to interact in ways that foreground conflict and competition for status. Girls, whose peer groups are smaller and organized in looser, more egalitarian ways, learn to interact in ways that foreground cooperation, mutual support, and the avoidance or smoothing over of conflicts. These norms, acquired in childhood, are carried over into adult life, where they are liable to cause problems of miscommunication in relationships between men and women.
The book in which Tannen presented this account to a non-specialist audience, You Just Donât Understand (Tannen 1990), was an international bestseller; it was soon followed by an even more successful popular book, John Greyâs Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (1992), which argued that men talk to accomplish tasks, solve problems, and gain status, whereas women talk to make connections with others, share experiences, and express their feelings. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, these claims had been woven into a more general account of maleâfemale differences which related them to the structure and functioning of male and female brains (e.g. Baron-Cohen 2003). In these popularized forms, the âdifferent voiceâ ideology has become familiar to a mass audience: for many people, it has attained the status of self-evident common sense. It is this that enables writers like Yvon...