When Did Women Lose the Right to Name Ourselves?

Female erasure is hardly a new concept.

For generations, societies have treated the birth of a daughter as less desirable than the birth of a son. Female infanticide, sex-selective abortion, neglect, and unequal treatment have contributed to the disappearance of millions of women and girls from populations around the world.

In 1990, economist Amartya Sen famously estimated that more than 100 million women were “missing” worldwide. Later researchers continued examining how son preference, discrimination, and preventable female deaths distort population numbers.

Think about that. Millions of female human beings missing, not because they were somehow less human, but because societies treated their lives as less valuable.

Now consider that history when you hear discussions about the male loneliness epidemic.

I am not suggesting that loneliness is unimportant. I am asking why we can devote so much public concern to men’s loneliness while the historical and continuing disregard for female human beings receives so little comparable urgency.

And now, after all of that history, we are supposed to entertain the idea that women should surrender even the language we use to describe ourselves?

When Did You Decide Women Could No Longer Name Ourselves?

So exactly when did you decide that female human beings were no longer worthy of having a word to describe ourselves? And why?

There has never been a shortage of degrading names for women. History is full of them.

But to arrive at a point where women are expected to accept whatever description someone else chooses for us, while facing criticism for using familiar words to describe ourselves, is an extraordinary development.

We are not mysterious creatures. We are not an abstract feeling, a passing thought, or an idea waiting for someone else’s interpretation.

We are human beings.

Consider a good man in your life. A father, brother, husband, friend, or mentor. Imagine looking him in the eye and announcing that he can no longer describe himself in the language he has always understood.

Tell him that someone else will determine the terms by which he may speak about his own existence. That his understanding of himself is no longer sufficient.

How do you imagine that conversation would go?

And why should women be expected to receive such demands with gratitude?

Prince Got to Choose His Own Name

We do not even get to be the cool kind of unnamed, like Prince.

When Prince famously replaced his stage name with a symbol in 1993, he made that decision himself. He created the symbol, embraced it, and determined how he wanted to be represented.

That was self-declaration.

Quite a different thing from having someone else insist that you abandon language you recognize as your own.

And there is something especially troubling about the expectation that women should consider this a mark of progress.

We Have Seen the Power of Forced Naming Before

Names have a history. So does the power to impose them.

During American slavery, enslavers routinely stripped African people of their names, imposed new ones, and claimed authority over their identities.

Remember Kunta Kinte in Roots?

In the famous television adaptation, LeVar Burton portrayed the young Kunta Kinte, who resisted being forced to answer to the name Toby.

That scene remains unforgettable because the struggle was never simply about a name. It was about a man’s right to recognize himself in the face of someone determined to exercise power over him.

The historical circumstances are not identical to today’s disputes over language. Slavery involved ownership, violence, and the systematic denial of personhood. But its history teaches us something important about why the power to name other human beings deserves scrutiny.

I am particularly unwilling to dismiss that lesson as a Black American woman.

We know that language can recognize human dignity. We also know that people have used language to deny it.

And I find it remarkable that women are still expected to explain why our own words, boundaries, and understanding of ourselves deserve respect.

Upon Reflection

Anyway, while you are thinking about all of this, I have two questions.

What one word do you use to describe adult female human beings?

What one word do you use to describe female children?

My answers are simple.

Women. Girls.

Two ordinary words. Two words with histories, meanings, and generations of human experience behind them.

Other people may describe themselves differently. They may hold different beliefs about identity, language, and gender. But respecting another person’s understanding of themselves should not require women to surrender our ability to speak about our own sex.

We can recognize the dignity of other human beings without pretending that female human beings are impossible to name.

And we should be able to discuss the lives, histories, health, safety, and rights of women and girls without treating the words themselves as an offense.

Women and girls have survived centuries of people deciding what we could be called, what we could say, where we could go, and how much of ourselves we were permitted to own.

We have no obligation to celebrate another demand that we make ourselves smaller.

We know who we are.

And we ARE allowed to say so.

A Right You Cannot Define Is a Right You Cannot Defend – WE Survive Abuse