The premise of this book is ambitious and compelling. Sophie Salvo aims, on one hand, to examine how language came to be theoretically masculinized; that is, to be seen as a masculine rather than as a human preserve, around the year 1800. On the other hand, she aims to demonstrate how this new conception of language contributed to the exclusion of women from those fields concerned with the study of language. In this way, Salvo’s work has the potential to do exactly what our field does at its best: to shed new light on the ways in which science and society are mutually constitutive of one another.
In five compact chapters Salvo investigates this masculinization of language through different case studies. In Chapter 1, by (re)reading well-known works by the likes of Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Wilhelm von Humboldt through the lens of gender studies, Salvo sets out to demonstrate how the masculinization of language occurred around 1800. Chapter 2 then discusses ‘women’s language’ and the transformation of this term from one that described a language spoken by indigenous women in the Lesser Antilles during the seventeenth century into one that denoted a universally applicable theory of women’s language by the nineteenth century.
Chapter 3 traces the rise and fall of research on grammatical gender, a topic of particular interest for men such as Humboldt, Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Bleek during the nineteenth century. Salvo is particularly successful here in demonstrating the extent to which ideas about differences between men and women influenced research on grammatical gender, thus producing ‘facts’, which were in turn used to reinforce ideas about differences between the sexes. From a history-of-science perspective, this is the work’s strongest chapter. Chapter 4 turns to the work of three women who had recognizable careers in what Salvo terms the language sciences – Carla Wenckebach (1853–1902), Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos (1851–1925) and Elise Richter (1864–1943) – to illuminate how they positioned themselves and their work in the face of ‘masculine academic discourse’ (p. 128).
Salvo’s final chapter examines how the authors Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929), Robert Musil (1880–1942) and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) mobilized conceptions of women’s language to imagine new possibilities for communication. In so doing, Salvo stresses the extent to which they understood the constructed nature of gendered ideas about language and how this distinguished their work from that of the authors examined in Chapters 1–4, for whom the ‘fact’ of women’s alterity justified the masculinization of language (and vice versa). A short coda then turns to the politics of gender and language today.
A chapter-by-chapter overview is necessary to explain both the strengths and the weaknesses of Salvo’s text. This is a book I would advise reading backwards. Salvo’s discussions of the masculinization of language in Chapter 1 and of the emergence of women’s language as a concept that reified the alterity of women in Chapter 2 become fully meaningful in light of Chapter 5. In other words, having come to the end of the book, the aims, and the stakes, of her analyses in these early chapters become clear.
Yet it is also because of this that I fear historians of science are not the right audience for this work. For although Salvo’s text is theoretically compelling, it is also chronologically and historically imprecise. In Chapter 1, for example, she writes, ‘concomitant with the reconceptualization of language around 1800, I argue, is its alignment with masculinity’ (p. 8). Yet two of the main texts used to document this development around 1800 are Herder’s Treatise on the Origins of Language (1771) and Wilhelm von Humboldt’s On the Diversity of Human Language Construction (1836) – and one cannot simply average the dates of one’s primary sources to establish when X or Y occurred. These texts are, moreover, discussed without any consideration of the specific historical moments in which they appeared or how these moments differed from one another historically. Since, however, by the author’s own admission the choice of 1800 was informed by the work of Michel Foucault (p. 7), perhaps this should be unsurprising.
In a similar vein, Salvo often takes as a premise what instead needs to be explained. In this same chapter, for example, she demonstrates that the heterosexual couple disappeared from theories about the origins of language. Yet how and why this couple disappeared is precisely what needs to be analysed if the reader is to be persuaded that this was what ushered in a new masculinized conception of language, rather than other historical, political and cultural factors. Similarly, demonstrating that women were habitually portrayed as active co-creators of language in these earlier accounts would have bolstered her arguments about their subsequent exclusion and the consequences thereof. And it should also be stressed that the absence of women from origin stories about language was not in and of itself new around 1800. Salvo consequently bases her analysis on premises that historians of science – especially historians of linguistics – are unlikely to accept on faith. But these are, admittedly, historical critiques, and the author is not a historian.
Open-minded historians of science will thus find Articulating Difference thought-provoking and engaging. And we should all appreciate the extent to which Salvo’s observations and insights as a scholar of German studies can offer new perspectives on both the languages of science and the impact of the sciences on language. She has started a conversation from which historians of science can profit theoretically and we will be fortunate if future scholars step into the breach with new historical research.
