These clues are gender displays or indexes, whose surface manifestations
may alter culturally and historically. Such displays may also be intertwined
with and reinforced by other distinctions--for example, titles like Miss or
Mrs., which mark someone not only as female, but also as single or married,
or by different items of clothing worn by girls/boys, or married/unmarried
women. Among the Bedouins of the Egyptian western desert, for example,
married women wear black veils and red belts, whereas unmarried girls
wear kerchiefs on their heads and around their waists.

Gender is thus an inherently communicative process. Not only do we
communicate gender in these ways, but we also "do it" with our words.
Because we construct and enact gender largely through discourse, this book
is about the crucial role of language in particular and communication more
generally in doing gender and displaying ourselves as gendered beings. If we
hear someone talking about children named Tommy and Jimmy, we assume
they are boys. When we read about scientists in the newspapers, most of us
still have mental images of men, even though there are now many women
scientists. When we hear someone describe a color as "baby blue," "carnation
pink," "lavender," or "mauve," we imagine the speaker to be a woman rather
than a man. When most people read a newspaper headline Doctor seduced
patient, they assume the doctor is male and the patient, female (see chap. 4
for further analysis). When you read the opening epigraph to this chapter
about language being part of "man's nature," did you think of women being
included or excluded? Did "man" create language?

The use of the term man instead of a more gender-neutral term such as
human(s), humanity, people, and so on obscures women's contributions to
language and its evolution. Yet even seemingly gender-neutral terms such
as person, member of society, and so forth are often still interpreted as
masculine by default, as in this example from sociolinguist William Labov
( 1972a, p. xiii), where he urged linguists to turn their attention to studying
"language as it is used in everyday life by members of the social order,
that vehicle of communication in which they argue with their wives, joke
with their friends, and deceive their enemies." Nowadays, such usage would
be called "sexist" and many publishing houses have specific guidelines
telling authors how to avoid language that either excludes women or stereo-
types them in negative ways. These are conscious choices we as language
users can make, and thanks to several decades of feminist reform, decisions
not to make them increasingly stand out. During O. J. Simpson's trial in
Los Angeles the courtroom paused to consider whether a male defense
attorney was being sexist when he accused a female prosecuting attorney
of acting "hysterical" (see chap. 2). Conversely, to accuse a male of hysteria
(or being a wimp), as the press did George Bush in his unsuccessful campaign
for reelection to the presidency in 1992, was to suggest he was effeminate
and therefore unfit for the office. In many areas of public life so-called

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