Woman Studies Midterm

People use the English language everyday to communicate with each other. But what the average person doesn’t realize is that the English language might be doing a lot more than what they think. Some people believe that the English language subliminally transmits ideas of patriarchy and sexism into individual’s heads. I personally am one of those believers. After reading a few articles that are more in depth about this topic, it wasn’t much work to make me view our language in a whole new perspective.

In one article, an excerpt by Katsi Cook, called The Coming of Anontaks, Katsi speaks of the word “squaw”. This word was used in colonial times to degrade and insult Indian women. The word originates from the Mohawk word otsiskwah, which translates to “it’s slippery”, or in its more generally used meaning, a vagina is slippery. It’s odd that otsiskwah was a term used “to describe the clear, abundant, thready mucus the cervix produces when a woman is fer...