I read with some interest Alex Byrne's recent paper, forthcoming in Philosophical Studies, “Are Women Adult Human Females?” Of particular note to me was his discussion of the semantics of gendered terms for non-human animal species.
“Someone who wants to deny AHF [i.e., the view that women are adult human females],” Byrne writes, “needs to explain why [the] pattern of gendered animal words leaves us out.” But whether defending or denying AHF, one would also do well to explain why this pattern of gendered animal words extends only as far as it does: to sows, does, hens, and so on, but not to adult female lizards, anglerfish, or cnidarians. There is no special word for the adult females of these biological kinds, and the obvious explanation of the difference is that pigs, deer, and chickens enter into human social life in a sufficiently salient way to warrant specialised terminology.
“Cow”, one might dare say, is political at least to the extent “woman” is: it designates a special category of being, with a role that is circumscribed and dirempted by political and economic forces from what would naturally be required for its thriving, within the broader zoopolis, to speak with Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson, that contains all of human political reality. But there are many, many biological kinds that are not included within this zoopolis, or at least only wander through it without being as it were censused or noted in its official registers. Consider: within each of the three kinds mentioned above as examples of less socially salient animals, there is wide variation in the ways “male” and “female” manifest themselves. Some species of jellyfish do not separate into male and female at all, and in others the gonads that warrant classification within the one or the other sex can only be detected, with difficulty, under a microscope. In some species of anglerfish, at the other extreme, the female is thirty times larger than the male, who for his part is little more than a tiny floating sperm sac. And even so --even with such extreme sexual dimorphism-- no specialised term for an adult female anglerfish exists in English or in any other language.
By contrast, with domesticated animals (leaving out for now semi-domesticate cervids, elephants, and other species that enter into human society, but that have generally defied human efforts to control their breeding), there seems to be a process whereby the specialised breeding function of the female forces the corresponding specialised term for the female into center stage, and often causes it to stand metonymically for the species as a whole. ‘Cow’ is now the default generic term for domestic bovines in English, while ‘bull’ designates something much more specialised and rare. This might have something to do with the fact that most male bovines are removed from the breeding process when they are forced by human artifice to become steers, but we also find the males occupying the marked semantic category in the case of, e.g., ‘rooster’, ‘gander’, ‘tomcat’, and so on. For at least three of the four most common large domestic animals in Eurasia, the Indo-European root originally designating the kind in general passes into English to designate only the female: thus *owi-, (‘sheep’) gives us ovis in Latin but ‘ewe’ in English; *su- (‘pig’) gives us sus in Latin but ‘sow’ in English; and *gwo- (‘bovine animal’) gives us bos in Latin but ‘cow’ in English.
This suggests that where breeding is overwhelmingly salient, perhaps even to the exclusion of all other roles, in the political life of a female animal, the specialised term for the female of the kind can easily come to push out or replace the generic term. Where breeding is not the exclusive or central element of the existence in human society of an animal kind, but nonetheless sex difference within that kind remains socially salient, specialised terms will be used, but not in a way that threatens to push out and replace the original kind terms, and often in a way that seems derivative or an afterthought: thus for example male bears are (sometimes) called ‘boars’ and female bears ‘sows’; male elephants are ‘bulls’ and female elephants are ‘cows’, and the same for giraffes and many other species, in a way that clearly proceeds by analogy from sex-specific terms used for species over whose breeding we often have more direct control.
Where then does ‘woman’ stand in comparison with these other terms? Curiously, it is most like ‘doe’, or any other specialised term for the female of a socially salient animal species whose breeding human beings do not generally control. Unlike ‘cow’ or ‘goose’, ‘woman’ is the marked term in the ‘man’/‘woman’ pair, and it shows no signs of threatening to push out ‘man’ in order to designate the human species as a whole. This does not mean that women are never reduced to their breeding role within human society --alas, they often are--, but it at least suggests that we do not take the function of the human species as a whole to be exhausted by husbandry, as we evidently do with domesticated animals.
All of this is relevant to assessing the strength of Byrne's defense of the view that a woman is an adult human female. He maintains that the semantics of specialised sex-specific terms for members of animal kinds “are not remotely controversial,” and that the consideration of such terms is “perhaps the most compelling” of all the reasons available to accept AHF. He acknowledges that specialised terms such as “peahen” generally designate “socially significant” categories, but he insists that it is a mistake to suppose that simply because a category is socially significant it is therefore a “social category,” which is to say “merely social” as opposed to biological.
But one wonders how much this distinction matters in the end. There are countlessly many biological distinctions we could make, but do not, because there is no social need to do so. For example, something we now take to be a basic biological fact about the order of nature --that whales are not fish-- arose out of the particular circumstances of the whale's social and economic role in the 19th century. These circumstances prompted taxonomic debates about what a cetacean really is, in itself, yet they were quite obviously motivated by the new social salience that commercial whaling had imposed on this order of mammals. (If whaling is not political, I don't know what is.) As John Dupré has compellingly shown, nothing about the world prior to the 19th century gives us any reason to think that its inhabitants were in error in supposing that whales are a variety of fish: the taxonomic adjustment of 150 years or so ago simply specified that no fish can give live birth (though of course many selachian fish are viviparous), produce milk (though what counts as “milk” is a biological question that is getting more and more complicated as more and more comparable cases are being found in taxa very distant from mammals), etc. But there is nothing in nature itself that necessitates this adjustment; we could have preserved a broader category, “fish”, that contains both mammalian fusiform aquatic vertebrates and gill-bearing aquatic vertebrates. There are real biological differences between whales and tuna, but I am prepared to say that the fact that we note these differences in language is a social fact, and I see no way to allow biology to “speak for itself” such that we might know when the way the world is requires us to take note of a given distinction, and when we are free to come up with a new distinction, or at least not in error to do so.
While “sow” does not strike us as controversial, to the extent that there are no opposed camps of humans arguing for and against the view that a sow is an adult female suidian, “sow” is controversial in the sense that it is subject to constant renegotiation and drift. Just a few thousand years ago, the ancestor term that would give us the English “sow” did not mean “adult female suidian”; it meant, simply, “suidian”. “Bitch” for female dog seems controversial in both senses, and this plainly has something to do with the exceptionally intimate integration of Canis familiaris into human society. “Doe” is interesting, in that it appears to be a fairly stable historical designator of the female of a wide number of silent, docile, herbivorous animal species: not just deer, but also, e.g., hares, rabbits, and mice. Yet it pertains to deer paradigmatically, and seems to be extended analogically to other species. But this is exactly what we would expect, given that as a generic non-sex-specific term “deer” is paradigmatic for all silent, docile, herbivorous wild animals; thus it is cognate with the German Tier (“animal”), and into the early modern period could be used in English, modified by “small”, to desigate, e.g., rabbits. Thus the deer is the paradigmatic non-predatorial wild animal, and the doe is the paradigmatic non-predatorial wild female animal. These are species whose sex differences matter to us (unlike, usually, those of jellyfish), but over which we do not generally exercise control (unlike, usually, those of pigs and cows); rabbits, in fact, stand symbolically in many cultures for reproduction that has gone out of control (“to breed like rabbits,” etc.), a situation that is generally imagined with horror, the very emblem of anarchy.
Byrne also acknowledges the reality of semantic drift, so that he would be perfectly able to accommodate, and likely also ready to appreciate, the observations I have made here on terms such as “sow” and their ancestors. But one thing the discussion of the semantics of animal kinds shows us is that it is not necessarily the case that, when a term drifts into a new semantic role, another term must come along to play the role that has been vacated by the previous one. In our ever-increasing estrangement from the rural existence of our recent ancestors, most of us are becoming ever less proficient in the correct use of specialised sex-specific terminology for domestically bred animals. In the near future, the decline of factory farming and the rise of widespread insectivorism might lead to a condition where none of us knows the term for “male bovine,” yet we have highly specialised vocabulary for the different sex roles of roaches.
And similarly with “woman”. “A woman is an adult human female” would seem to be a case, if there ever was one, in which biology speaks for itself, but again there are countless adult females of countless species for which I do not have a specialised term, and there are countless species of which I'm not even sure at all whether they include males and females, or not. It is perfectly possible that the reproductive function that has underlain sex-specific language about our own species (and that has been at the root of gender inequality and oppression) will continue to decline in social salience, at which point we might well expect that “woman” will no longer mean “adult human female,” a possibility that Byrne acknowledges, and, moreover, a possibility he does not acknowledge, that no other term moves in to do the same work that “woman” continues to do, under some strain, for now. If it were to come to this, we would find ourselves regarding our own species somewhat as we now regard all those distant species whose reproductive function we generally take to be no business of ours: again, for many, many species of animal, I have no idea whether they reproduce sexually at all, and I do not even know how to go about examining representative members of these species in order to find an answer.
Yet the fact that I am ignorant in this regard seems to go together, almost by definition, with the fact that I recognize no zoopolitical concitoyenneté with jellyfish and worms, very much in contrast with the case of horses and dogs. Politics, one fears, is in the end nothing other than the control of breeding, even if among humans, at the most elementary level, it does not look like politics at all, but only “kinship”. This is why animal domestication develops as an institution in parallel with the state in human history. And this is what Karl Marx had in mind when, observing the importance for the preservation of powerful dynasties of getting the right royals to copulate, he noted with wonderful acerbity that “the secret of aristocracy is zoology.” And this is why, finally, a future in which sex-specific terms for members of socially salient kinds --including that most socially salient kind of all, the human-- fall away, and “woman” comes to designate something other than “adult human female” without being replaced by another term that will do that old job, appears either as a future of anarchic disorder, or a post-political utopia of the sort that Byrne is for the most part not prepared to imagine: in which, with the significant aid of biotechnology, we begin to bud like polyps.
