Abstract

Early in the resurgence of feminist philosophy that accompanied the “second wave” of the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s, language was recognized as a key issue. Because personal relations, politics, economics, religions, and academic disciplines are defined and carried on in language, practical reform or transformation in these areas is often blocked by insistence on logics, rules of grammar, systems of meaning, and uses of words that carry sexist implications. The question immediately presented itself as to whether these barriers are changeable uses of words and reformable conventions of grammar, or constitutive of rationality and so not removable without risking unintelligibility. Is language a variable and flexible tool that can be used to describe independently existing differences between men and women, or are those differences projected in language? Even more important for feminists is the question of the relation between language and thought. Is language constitutive of thought so that any intelligible communicable thought is framed within established perimeters of possibly sexist meaning? Or can feminist beliefs and aspirations achieve independence from established meanings and lay groundwork for radical changes in human relations? Even more important: is the self constituted in language, or can freely thinking feminist selves hope to create more adequate means of communication and more truthful ways of naming reality?