Friedrich-Schiller-University, Jena

The portrayal of women in selected British newspapers

by

 Claudia Mettge

Table of Contents

I INTRODUCTION 2

1.1. TOPIC OF PAPER AND METHOD 2
1.2. REALITY, LANGUAGE, THE MIND AND THEIR RECIPROCALITY 3

II THE PRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN NEWSPAPERS 4

2.1. STATISTICS 4

2.1.1. Visible women in reality 4
2.1.2. Visible women in newspaper articles 6
2.1.3. Visible women as recipients and producers of news 9

2.1.3.1. Women as readers 9
2.1.3.2. Women as writers 10

2.2. LINGUISTIC PORTRAYAL OF WOMEN IN NEWSPAPERS 12

2.2.1. Lexical analysis 12

2.2.1.1. Naming 12
2.2.1.2. Stereotypes, categorisations and labels 14
2.2.1.3. Diminutives 15
2.2.1.4. Word choice 16
2.2.1.5. Generic language use 18
2.2.1.6. Women as the unusual 19

2.2.2. Grammatical analysis 20

2.2.2.1. Verb and noun phrases 20
2.2.2.2. Premodification 22
2.2.2.3. Direct and indirect speech 22

III CONCLUSION 23

IV BIBLIOGRAPHY 25

I Introduction

1.1. Topic of paper and method

The topic of this paper is the representation of women in selected British newspapers. The question which I will try to answer is, whether women are portrayed significantly different from men and if so, in how far this is brought about linguistically. 

After giving a short synopsis of why a non- discriminatory treatment of women in the media may be favourable, I will first give statistical evidence from the material collected and supplement this with statistical information on where women stand in society. 

I will then go on to analyse staff and correspondents to see in how far women are involved in the perceptible news production or news reception. 

After having finished these chapters leading up to the topic of the linguistic analysis, I will then focus on the language in the newspapers. Here, attention will be both on the grammatical and the lexical level. On the lexical level telling semantic devices will be categorisation, generic usage, marked expressions and naming, among others. On the grammatical level, clause structures, noun phrases, verb phrases, activity, passivity and others will be of interest. A final conclusion will summarise the findings.

The material used will be the internet editions of five major British newspapers. These were randomly selected and downloaded in the last week of July 1998. The five newspapers chosen are (in alphabetical order) the Guardian, the Independent, the Mirror, the Star and the Times. Recurrent news items of this week were Blair′s cabinet reshuffle, the Tour de France, the Clinton- Lewinsky- affair, a cancer scare at a British hospital, the release of a wrongfully sentenced veterinarian and the clearing of the name of a wrongfully sentenced teenager. 
Except for the articles on the Tour de France, they all had a high frequencies of references to women, either as agents or as patients.

1.2. Reality, language, the mind and their reciprocality

When discussing the portrayal of women in newspapers, this has to be done in light of possible interlinkages between language, reality and mind. It has often been contended that language plays an active role in the formation of the mind, of opinion and of knowledge beyond the superficially perceptible. This notion is especially connected with the names of Sapir, Whorf and Adam Schaff. By looking at languages others than those of Indo- European origin, they discover different strategies in naming and usage in these languages. This leads Sapir to conclude that

[h]uman beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ′real world′ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. ¹

Although this opinion has been rejected time and again, it still today appeals to many and is adapted, and used to explain many phenomena of mind and language, e.g.

[...] language serves as an ideological filter on the world: language shapes or constructs our notions of reality, rather than labelling that reality in any transparent and straightforward way. ²

Applied to language in newspapers this would mean that if there language gave a picture of women only in powerless situations, this would be accepted as their normal position. Accordingly this role distribution would go not reflected, unchallenged and unchanged.

[...]

1 Edward Sapir (1958): "The Status of Linguistics as a Science". In: Edward Sapir: Culture, Language and Personality. Selected Essays. Ed. by David G. Mandelbaum. University of California Press, Berkeley/ Los Angeles. 65-77. p. 69.

2 Susan Ehrlich/ Ruth King (1994): "Feminist meanings and the (de)politicization of the lexicon". In: Language in Society 23, 59-76. p. 60.