Language and Woman's Place

Rating:
Summary: Out of Print and Out of Date
Review: I got this book at the library because most of the linguistic writing on gender based language studies quote it. Lakoff's theories seem largely out of date-for example, a discussion on whether "Ms." will ever come into use. The material is based on her observations rather than any experiment and there is no data. Still, the book is thought provoking. It is also interesting to see how language perceptions, and the role of women in society has changed (or failed to change) in the past 25 years.

Rating:
Summary: open to criticism, but still a classic
Review: It has been almost 3 decades since the publication of Language and Woman's Place. Though it was a 'pioneering' work at the time of its publication, there has been a stream of research in the language and gender area since then, and now it has become a 'classic'. Being a classic doesn't mean that it is immune from criticism, though. One thing that stands out to today's readers is that it is almost 'sexist' in "measuring women's language against men's", that is taking male language as 'norm' and viewing woman's as a "deviation" from it. It was in this "male-as-norm" tradition of research, for instance, that she could speculate that women use more tag questions than men because they learn the lesson not to be as assertive as they are.

However, the book is a delightful read for anyone interested in the issue of language and its relationship to sexual oppression. It is very readable and anticipates such subsequent studies as Dale Spender's Man Made Language in many ways.