GENDER BIASED ELEMENTS IN THE ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS FOR THE STUDENTS OF JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL IN INDONESIA

GENDER BIASED ELEMENTS IN THE ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS

FOR THE STUDENTS OF JUNIOR HIGH

SCHOOL IN INDONESIA

BY 

WIDAGDO SANUANTORO

Women are generally assumed to become inferior to many aspects of live; in short, women are located just where men’s shadow fall. In the old Javanese culture; for example, women were completely determined as servants of men as if their existence were created and devoted only for the advantages of ‘the manhood power’. They were made as the kitchen people, assigned as the house keeper and prohibited to taste school. John Knox, in this work entitled The First Blast of Trumpet of Against The Monstrous Regiment of Women published in 1558, states that women are weak by nature, “nature, I say, does paint them forth to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish.” Therefore, these two issues about women, at least, can be a representation of an idea that for centuries we have lived in a male-dominated society.

Women have a different way of speaking from men, a way of speaking that both reflect and produces a subordinate position in society. Women’s language, according to Lakoff (1972) as quoted in Eckert (2003:158) is rife with such devices as mitigators (Sort of, I think) and inessential qualifiers (really happy, so beautiful). This language, she went on to argue, renders women’s speech tentative, powerless, and trivial; and as such, it disqualifies them from positions of power and authority. In  this way, language itself is a tool of oppression – it is learned as part of learning to be a woman, imposed on women by societal norms, and in turn it keeps women in their place. 

English is one which women are explicitly and implicitly treated to be inferior to men. The English language has two sets of pronouns for the third-person singular: he/him/his and she/her/hers. It is practically impossible to talk about individuals without explicitly and implicitly mentioning their sex. When A mentions a person unknown to B, B must find out whether the third person is male or female in order to know how to phrase him/her. If A doesn’t give any adequate information about that third person, B will usually use the pronoun he/him/his as the ultimate choice in order to phrase an expression. In English, the language tells us that so many words for unpleasant talk have a semantic feature of [+female] on them (Chaika,1982:361). Further, Chaika states gender - biased language affects everyone, both males and females. However, this fact has also been biased towards the male dominated language. Chaika also states that a person who is gabby, talkative, and gossipy and who acts as a nag, a shrew, a chatterbox must be a woman. Moreover, Chaika also initiates several questions dealing with stereotypical issues toward women; the questions are as follows:

What is a man? There are none. A woman is a nag when she asks for something too often. What is a man? Persistent. A woman who complains or criticizes a shrew. What is a man called in the same way? There is no single word for it. Women gossip; but men? They ‘shoot the breeze’, a far more pleasant and potent activity

These are the proof of how English language is definitely a male-dominated language. Besides, in our culture, men are viewed as being the superior sex and this is reinforced by the use of biased terms such as ‘mankind’, which in facts refers to the whole human race. ‘Fireman’ and ‘postman’ are also the two examples of why English is assumed as a male-dominated and gender-biased language. Society as the language user has also created stereotypical male and female gender identities. ‘Dear sir’ becomes the most used opening greeting in letters which are sent and received by people generally. Another example, Annie Edson Taylor is described as “the first person to go over Niagara falls in a barrel”, while the Neil Amstrong is “the first man to walk on the moon”.

The compulsory English textbooks for students of Junior High School in Indonesia are likely three of many books that still employ such kinds of gender biased issues. A name of ‘Dr. John’ (Dr. Male name) could be easily found in this book; meanwhile, there a single name with a considered-prestige academic title which refers to female name. In such case, we usually make a gender-biased tendency by putting into the inferior occupation. Many times we subconsciously assume that men are having a privilege to occupy the superior occupation; e.g. ‘he’ for a professor, doctor, soldier, scientist and ‘she’ for a nurse, secretary, babysitter. Moreover, women are generally assumed to be more emotional than man; upset, sad, crying are examples of words that are usually referred to woman. In this book, the following expression can be found: ‘she will be upset. She is more emotional than we all are’. Why is our choice of pronoun referred to ‘she’? In this book, there is no single expression stating that ‘a man’ can be upset, sad, and crying too.

Based on the phenomena above, the writer is interested in conducting a research towards gender biased elements in the English textbooks which are compulsory for students of junior high school in Indonesia. The research paper is entitled: GENDER BIASED ELEMENTS IN THE ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS FOR THE STUDENTS OF JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL IN INDONESIA.    

 

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