Androcentrism — the patriarchal implications of the word “man”

I haven't finished writing this essay yet, but I know I won't ever publish it if I don't do it now. I'll keep polishing it until I feel satisfied. More references and content will come as I update it. 

OBS: I've been reaching this since before Christmas, I feel as though my brain will explode. I'm starting to believe I don't know English as much as I thought I did. 

Once upon a time, while scrolling through TikTok's "For You" page, I encountered a remarkable video which explored the meaning shift of the word "man" and the implications that came with it. Because I come from a cultural and linguistic background characterised by gender-specific language usage, namely Brasilian Portuguese, this subject matter is of particular interest to me, which is why I felt instigated to write this essay.

Imagine if a bunch of people today started using the word “human” to mean exclusively men, that in a 100 years, the word “humankind” just meant men. “Human” resources just meant men's resources. Can you see how this shift, the appropriation and reduction of the word “human” to just mean men, would show a dangerous and unhealthy shift in thought? That it would both reveal and perpetuate the belief that only adult men are human at all? That's what happened to the word “man”.

Etymology

The word man (singular) or men (plural) implied "human being, person or persons (of any gender)" for most of the English language’s history — though its meaning had already changed to refer mainly to adult male human beings, it implicitly included women (adult female human beings) until the 20th century. Often erroneously interpreted as an abrupt change, this occurred over the course of the language's evolution. For instance, in Old English (5th - 11th century), "man" (from Proto-Germanic, 500 BC - 200 AD "mann") primarily meant "person".

  Þæs dohter wæs gehaten Ercongota halifemne, & wundorlic man.

(this daughter was called Eorcengota holywoman, and wonderful man)

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Peterborough continuation) • Oxford, Laud Misc., year 636.

God gesceop ða æt fruman twegen men, wer and wif.

(then at the beginning, God created two human beings, man and woman)

Godden, M. (Ed.). (1979). Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The second series, text. Early English Text Society s. s. 5. London: Oxford University Press.

Thus, the words "wīf" and "wer" implied, respectively, an adult female and an adult male. Later, in Middle English and Early Modern English, the terms wer, wæpnedmann, wæpned and wæpmann became obsolete and man had to cover both specific and gender-neutral meanings.

Ȝho wass hanndfesst an god mann Þatt iosæp wass ȝehatenn.

(Who was a steadfast and good man that was called Joseph)

Orm • The Ormulum • (ed. Robert William Burchfield) · Burchfield transcript, year 1175.

The Lord had but one paire of men in paradise.

Bishop John King • Lectures vpon Ionas xxxvi • 1st edition, year 1597 (1 vol.)

Man therefore remained in both its various gender-neutral, gender-specific, generic and non-generic meanings in English until the modern period, leading Charles Darwin to entitle his famous nineteenth-century theory of human evolution The Descent of Man (Rauer, 2017).

The term "woman" evolved through various forms: Old English "wifmann" — "wyf" (female; wife) with "man" (human); "human female" — and "wifmonn", then early Middle English (11th-15th centuries) "vifmon", and later Middle English "wyfman".

Linguistic

The disappearance of the term wer from the English language did not restrict the meaning of man to males only. Rather, man developed a dual and asymmetrical meaning — referring both to all human beings and specifically to men, which reflects the assumption that male human beings are, or at least can be considered as, the standard representatives of our species as a whole, and that female human beings, or women — etymologically wife-man —, are a derivation, a subordinate, or a subcategory of man, who, during the development of the video English language, were defined by their relationship to men, specifically through marriage. In the Social Sciences and Linguistics, this phenomenon is referred to as androcentrism, referring to the favouring of men and male experiences as a universal, gender-neutral standard for the entire species, and the "otherising" of women and female experiences as a "sex-specific deviation" (Silveira, 1980).

Using language as a weapon and themselves as a reference, men categorize their surroundings according to what they judge similar or dissimilar to themselves — while everything else is taken as a deviation from the standard set by them —, or what functional significance it has for them.

For the author Jeanette Silveira (1980), society is biased to the extent that women are seen as less similar to the category person than men, i.e. while the instance man is typical of the category person, the instance woman is atypical. In short, a man is more likely to be seen or exemplified as a person than a woman, just as a person is more likely to be seen as a man than a woman.

Simplifying the language, women are less persons than men are. At least in language.

References and must-read's

BAILEY, A. H.; LAFRANCE, M.; DOVIDIO, J. F. Is man the measure of all things? A social cognitive account of androcentrism. Personality and social psychology review: an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc, v. 23, n. 4, p. 307–331, 2019.

BAILEY, A. H.; LAFRANCE, M.; DOVIDIO, J. F. Implicit androcentrism: Men are human, women are gendered. Journal of experimental social psychology, v. 89, n. 103980, p. 103980, 2020.

BEM, S. L. The lenses of gender: Transforming the debate on sexual inequality. New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press, 1993. p. 42.

HAMILTON, M. C. Masculine bias in the attribution of personhood: People = male, male = people. Psychology of women quarterly, v. 15, n. 3, p. 393–402, 1991.

KROONEN, Grus. Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic.

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “man (n.1), sense I.1.a,” December 25th 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5154791646.

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “woman (n.), sense I.1.a,” December 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/6827675328.

RAUER, C. Mann and gender in old English prose: A pilot study. Neophilologus, v. 101, n. 1, p. 139–158, 2017.

SILVEIRA, J. Generic masculine words and thinking. Women’s studies international quarterly, v. 3, n. 2–3, p. 165–178, 1980.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 3 e.d. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000. 

WIKIPEDIA CONTRIBUTORS. Man (word). December 25th, 2024, <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Man_(word)&oldid=1263336256>.