Gender Neutral Language

Famous quotes containing the words gender, neutral and/or language:

    Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.
    —Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)

    I feel the carousel starting slowly
    And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,
    Photographs of friends, the window and the trees
    Merging in one neutral band that surrounds
    Me on all sides, everywhere I look.
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)

    In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we do not know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.
    Marcel Proust (1871–1922)