By: Lilyana Jewell
October 9, 2026
In a world without women, there is no world. Women are responsible for creating life, and in most cases, nurturing it, perhaps in ways that you might not realize. Without Hedy Lamarr, the Internet wouldn’t exist and you wouldn’t be able to use wireless technology; without Marie Van Brittan Brown, you wouldn’t know if an intruder had entered your home; without Stephanie Kwolek, our bravest soldiers wouldn’t know what a bulletproof vest is. Many of society’s cherished feats have been pioneered by women of all backgrounds. You would think that this is reason for respect and admiration, but it seems to be the opposite. Women have constantly been met with condemnation and double standards throughout history. Regardless of which part of the world you analyze, misogyny is rooted too deep to be eliminated, despite our best feminist efforts. The very language that we use – the biggest system of symbols humankind has ever touched – was built on the alleged inferior nature of femininity.
Consider the word “hysteria,” once used to psychologically diagnose someone in extreme distress. This diagnosis was considered an umbrella term for any unexplained medical phenomenon, particularly in women. According to the Edinburgh Infirmary’s records dating back to the 1700s, 98% of all “hysteria” diagnoses were applied to women. This is not a shocking fact when we break down the etymology of the world itself. Hysteria comes from the Ancient Greek word “hystera,” translating to “womb” or “uterus.” The American Psychiatric Association did not remove this diagnosis from its “Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” until 1980.
To be a master of your trade is to be an authority figure who knows almost everything about the given subject. Calling someone a master of something is a universal compliment. Conversely, the feminine version of the word, “mistress,” is an insult. To be a “mistress” is to engage in sexual deviance with a man who is usually married. These differences in meaning are solely attributed to gender, and the same analysis can be applied to parenthood. A single father is seen as a beloved patriarch who should be celebrated for his hard work, but a single mother is seen as used and expired, likely disheveled.
English has a way of creating words for certain groups of people, specifically minorities. A word to describe a woman may not exist to describe a man. If a woman is future-oriented, intelligent, and organized, she is labeled a “career woman.” If a man displays the same traits, he’s simply a man because the phrase “career man” is nonexistent.
Within the media industry, we see many examples of misogynistic language that are slightly harder to pick apart. Recent headlines have been full of crimes against women (among other groups), such as reports that “a woman was assaulted” or that “a woman was raped.” By using this phrasing, the focus is pinned on the victim, often pointing blame along with unwanted attention. Very few headlines read that “a man was found guilty of assault” or “a man has been convicted of rape.” Shifting the focus of a story to the perpetrator is rare when that party happens to be male, especially when he is Caucasian.
To examine how harmful the misogynistic nature of our language is through a sociological lens, I conducted an interview with Thiel’s Department Chair of Sociology, Dr. Cynthia Sutton. I began by explaining the origins of the words “groom,” “bride,” “husband” and “wife.” Groom and bride come from the Old English word brydguma, combining the words to translate to “bride-man.” The suffix of the word, guma, translates to hero, implying that he is saving his newlywed woman. Similarly, the word husband is derived from the Old Norse term, húsbóndi, which directly translates to “householder” or “master of the house.” Wife comes from an Old English word, wīf, that also ties to Proto-Germanic roots of wīban or wīfa-, both of which translate to “to twist or turn; to manipulate” according to linguists. With this, we can linguistically conclude that if your husband is your master, then you are to be manipulated to his liking.
I asked Dr. Sutton about her opinion regarding the history of these terms, and if she thinks that women would want to be labeled as these things if they knew about this history. Dr. Sutton commented that there is a noticeably negative connotation around women’s marital statuses, “If you have failed to become a bride, you have apparently failed to be controlled.” We then discussed the traditional wedding ceremonies of decades past in which the officiant would declare the parties “man and wife,” not “husband and wife.” By doing so, the man is “unchanged” and the wife is “bound” to him. She continued to say that the words we use in the realm of marriage, like all words, have evolved, and we cannot forget that some meanings and connotations might have been lost along the way.
For a direct opinion about the consequences of the way that we use language in modern times, I asked Dr. Sutton if she felt that our use of selectively sexist phrases is still harmful, and if there is a path toward undoing that harm. “As a sociologist, I think that language is tremendously important. We have a theorem that then became a hypothesis – the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – and basically what it says is that language is the lens through which you see the world. So yes, the words we use… do impact the way we see the world and how we see others in the world…. I mean, with enough effort you can change anything…. It would be very hard.” She went on to explain that the reason this change would be so difficult is that when a group of people stand up to their oppressors, the latter feel threatened and accused, even when it may not directly mean that they are in the total wrong.
Another aspect of word connotations that might seem a little less obviously targeted toward women comes from medical terminology. Dr. Sutton and I discussed how the labels we give to medical procedures and prescriptions might have an impact on legislation regarding women’s bodies, such as a miscarriage being medically labeled as a “spontaneous abortion” rather than something more fitting. Likewise, the label of birth control quite literally has the word “control” in it, and if women have some sort of “control” over their autonomy, men in power don’t seem to like that very much. Dr. Sutton believes that these careful connotations go hand-in-hand with the way that we generally describe women. “We often hear the argument that she’s somebody’s wife; she’s somebody’s mother; she’s somebody’s sister; she’s somebody’s girlfriend. What we don’t hear is the argument that says she’s somebody, period. Full stop.” By defining women as only role-holders in others’ lives, we completely eliminate their desire to come forward about how they’ve been wronged.
If society decides that this issue isn’t important, we may find ourselves living in a world where women are too angry to interact. Women hold the power to cause a decline in birth rates, deny postnatal care, and make heterosexual men involuntarily celibate. Furthermore, women could decide that their expertise in their fields is not appreciated enough, and we would lose some of the most crucial visionaries we’ve ever had. We often don’t assign enough power to the words we use, but it is proven that the way you speak to or of others is directly related to how you perceive them.
“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.” -Thumper, Bambi (1942)
