In the French language, steps forward and back for women
The fight to help make the French language kinder to women took steps forward, and back, this week.Warning that the well-being of France and its own future are at stake, the government banned the utilization in schools of a way increasingly utilized by some French speakers to help make the language more inclusive by feminizing some words.
Specifically, the education minister's decree targets what's arguably the most contested and politicized letter in the French language - "e." To put it simply, "e" is the language's feminine letter, found in feminine nouns and their adjectives and, sometimes, when conjugating verbs.
But proponents of women's rights are also increasingly adding "e" to words that normally wouldn't have included that letter, in a conscious - and divisive - effort to make women more visible. Take the generic French word for leaders - "dirigeants" - for instance. For a few, that masculine spelling suggests that they are usually men and makes women leaders invisible, since it lacks a feminine "e" toward the finish.
For proponents of inclusive writing, a far more gender-equal spelling is "dirigeant·es," inserting the extra "e," preceded by a middle dot, to create clear that leaders could be of both sexes. Likewise, they could write "les élu·es" - instead of the generic masculine "élus" - for the holders of elected office, again to highlight that women are elected, too. Or they might use "les idiot·es," rather than the most common generic masculine "les idiots," to acknowledge that stupidity isn't the exclusive preserve of men.
Proponents and opponents sometimes split down political lines. France's conservative Republicans party ses " élus"; the left-wing France Unbowed tends toward " élu · es.""It's a fight to make women noticeable in the language," said Laurence Rossignol, a Socialist senator who uses the feminizing extra "·e."
