Pamela Fishman

Pamela Fishman conducted an experiment that involved listening to fifty-two hours of pre-recorded conversations between a series of young American couples.

Five out of the six subjects were attending graduate school; all subjects were either feminists or sympathetic to the women’s movement. They were white, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five.

Fishman listened to recordings and concentrated on two characteristics common in women’s dialect, including tag questions for example ”you know?”. Fishman begins by examining the use of tag questions being asked and states that women frequently use tag questions following a thought or suggestion. She believed that for women, questions are an effective method of beginning and maintaining conversations with men.

Fishman argues that women use questions to gain conversational power rather than from lack of conversational awareness. She claims that questioning is required for females when speaking with males; men often do not respond to a declarative statement or will only respond minimally.

Fishman also analyses the frequent use of the noun phrase ”you know” used by women. ”You know” is an attention-getting device to discover if their partner is listening. When  ”you know” is combined with a pause, she realised that the woman is inviting the listener to respond.

When little or no response is heard from the male, the pause is internalised by the speaker and she will continue into the conversation. With her study, she found that women in her study used four times as many yes/no and tag questions as the men.

But she was adamant that this was not because women were more uncertain and tentative as Lakoff suggested but because women are the ones generally trying to keep the conversation going.

 Pamela Fishman concludes that women are represented as having more power in a conversation as they tend to have more use of tag questions and conversational shitwork, which allows women to maintain control. Additionally, she argues that women’s style of communicating is not from lack of social training, but to the inferior social position of women.

 

https://prezi.com/u-sq6bqepdiy/pamela-fishman/

Feminism

First Wave feminism

• ·       First wave feminism arose due to an increase of women in the industrial society, connected to the liberation of the women’s rights movement. The goal of this was to open up opportunities for women, focusing on the early socialist feminists and the suffrages.
• ·       Not only did first wave feminists want the right to vote (suffrages), but they also wanted the right to an education, the right to work, the right to work safely and be catered for like the men, the right to earn money when working, the right to have children, the right to a divorce and the right over their own bodies
• ·       The first wave of feminism focused on legal issues. It was not until the late 19^th century that the efforts for women’s equal rights emerged into an identifiable movement, charged by feminists who wanted women to no longer be inferior.  
• ·       First wave feminists had to battle against a society in which a unmarried woman was considered property of her father. Correspondingly, a married woman was considered property of her husband. First wave feminists used this to strive for independence and stand for themselves, instead of being the property of others.

The first wave of feminism allowed women to start taking control over what happened to them and how the world would start seeing women from now on. The likes of the birth control pill were now available, working conditions started to become more appropriate and the crusade against lynching and race based violence. Women now started to gain some freedom, and equality was now starting to become apparent in more countries.

Second wave feminism

• ·       The second wave of feminism began in the 1960’s through to the 1990’s. 
• ·       This second wave introduced feminist now arguing for not only equal rights, but broadening the debate to issues such as sexuality, workplace, family and reproductive rights.
• ·       Second wave feminism drew attention to acts hidden by men to the outside world, such as rape and domestic violence.  The voices of women now seemed to have more empowerment
• ·       The growing revolt of women against their oppression started in the late 1960’s. The likes of many different backgrounds came together and opposed the old oppression that seemed to be dying out.
• ·       Despite many women going to college in the early 20^th century, the stereotypical suburban housewife status downgraded most women, downplaying the importance of an education. Wanting to erase this outlook some women had, feminists of the second wave understood that girls and women must be encouraged to seek out an education if they were to ever be seen as, “equal’.

The second wave of feminism allowed women to change the perception men would have had of them. No longer would women tolerate injustice against them. Not only were women gaining control of themselves, but they also had control over what happened to them. Feminists now had more power over men in the sense that women are no longer their possession, but their own unique person with equal rights.