Erasure of Women in Language & Rewriting the Human Narrative
The human narrative is written in a language constructed atop a ghost architecture, the suppressed experiences of half the world. Language is not merely a conduit for communication; it is a cultural contract, encoding power, identity, and social hierarchy. For centuries, this contract has been skewed toward men, structuring thought, shaping reality, and erasing women’s presence from collective memory. While language has historically functioned as a patriarchal instrument, codifying erasure, silencing women, and presenting male experience as universal, the contemporary project of feminist linguistics moves beyond critique. It demands radical reconstruction: reclaiming lost words, destabilizing entrenched biases, and reauthoring the social contract itself.
Dale Spender’s Man Made Language (1980) illuminates the structural underpinnings of this bias, revealing how linguistic norms naturalize male dominance. Jennifer Saul’s Feminist Philosophy of Language (2004) further demonstrates that semantic expectations, usage patterns, and syntactic conventions are not neutral; they actively reproduce stereotypes and entrench social inequalities. Words are not passive vessels; they are instruments of power, shaping what can be conceived, expressed, and valued. Feminist critique, therefore, is not merely descriptive; it is a call to intervention, a mandate to reclaim the blueprint of society embedded in language.
Literature offers a vivid illustration of this reclamation. Pip Williams’ The Dictionary of Lost Words (2022) follows Esme, a young girl who clandestinely collects discarded words omitted from the first Oxford English Dictionary, many tied to women and marginalized communities. Esme’s dictionary becomes a symbolic act of resistance, a deliberate reclamation of what history sought to erase. Jane Mills’ Womanwords (1989) and other sources on similar themes similarly reveal how feminist lexicons have actively countered male-centered authority, reclaiming linguistic space and asserting women’s visibility. These acts of preservation and redefinition are not passive; they constitute the deliberate construction of alternative epistemologies, ensuring that women’s experiences are inscribed into the social and linguistic imagination, a battleground that has rapidly shifted from library shelves to digital servers.
The stakes of this reclamation have never been higher. Today, language is generated not only in print but also in the neural architectures of Generative AI and Large Language Models. Trained on billions of words from patriarchal corpora, these systems exponentially reproduce historical biases. Without deliberate intervention, AI risks entrenching male-centric narratives, presenting them as neutral or universal. The fight for linguistic equity is no longer confined to dictionaries or print culture; it is about shaping the algorithms that define knowledge, understanding, and human narrative in the digital age.
Yet reconstruction is possible. Contemporary initiatives, singular they, gender-neutral pronouns, and alternative honorifics such as Mx, demonstrate how language can actively produce new realities. Performative language, in which the choice of words reshapes social perception, forces inclusion, agency, and recognition into being. Feminist lexicons, neologisms, and digital platforms are not mere supplements to male-dominated dictionaries; they are instruments for constructing an equitable narrative in real time. Every act of naming, defining, or speaking differently is a radical reclamation, asserting the legitimacy of voices that history sought to silence.
I, Riaz Laghari, write this as a man, yet I owe my existence to women: my mother, my sisters, and countless others who shaped who I am. It is because of them that I commit to this work: to champion empowerment, resist oppression, and dismantle linguistic patriarchy wherever it persists. The reauthoring of language is not a niche academic pursuit; it is the civil rights project of the 21st century. Choosing words, defining realities, and amplifying marginalized voices is a radical act, one that demands both courage and conscience. To participate is to rewrite the human narrative itself, building a society in which the stories of women are no longer footnotes, omissions, or erased whispers, but central, celebrated, and enduring.
References
Saul, J., Diaz-Leon, E., & Hesni, S. (2004). Feminist philosophy of language.
Mills, J. (1989). Womanwords: A vocabulary of culture and patriarchal society.
Saul, J., Diaz-Leon, E., & Hesni, S. (2004). Feminist philosophy of language.
Spender, D. (1980). Man Made Language. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Boston, MA.
Williams, P. (2022). The Dictionary of Lost Words: Reese's Book Club: A Novel. Ballantine Books.
Suchana, A. A. (2024). Discourse of patriarchy through gendered language: A study of EFL textbooks in Bangladesh. Heliyon, 10(20).
