Women’s lack of access to public speech, the resultant silence, and their attempts to
reclaim voice have invited serious debates in recent critical discourse studies. The
problematic categories of male speech and female silence have been traced to the unequal
gender positions which turn men into active speakers while rendering women muted and
passive listeners. Access to public speech is a privilege men have enjoyed in patriarchal
cultures. For men, the transition from private to public speech does not pose much of a
challenge, whereas women’s speech is either restricted by gendered speech systems, or,
if permitted, characterized by its private nature. Social identification in patriarchal cultures
is made linguistically, through speech. The words women speak situate them in their
gender locations and class, thus precluding the possibility of expressing individual opinion.
Women’s speech does not, therefore, enable them to either resist or challenge the ideological constraints superimposed by patriarchy. Such control of speech is a crucial
part of the hegemony of dominant groups, which implies that the denial of access to
public speech is one of the major forms of the oppression of women within a social class
as well as in trans-class situations.
What constitutes this silence? What pre-empts women’s entry into the public sphere
and the vocalization of their gendered experiences? In Johnson’s (1997, p. 5) words, “a
society is patriarchal to the degree that it promotes male privilege by being male-dominated,
male-identified, and male-centered.” Patriarchy, used as an apparatus, serves to embody
the dominant values that influence various social structures including speech. Feminist
activist hooks (1989, p. 211) examined how patriarchal culture influenced the gender
sphere which is evident in the gender hierarchy in both public and private speech patterns;
hooks further insists that patriarchal culture operates in social spheres through the apparatus
of silence as women are conditioned against venturing into male-dominated public spheres
and take upon themselves the roles that patriarchy determines for them. The silencing of
women in patriarchal modes of discourse remains unchallenged and continues to dominate
cultural spheres through the reaffirmation of ideologically-determined gender roles.
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