Chapter XIII of Language devotes an entire chapter to “The Woman.” Its opening ethnographic observations (descriptions of Carib peoples having distinct vocabularies for men and women, for instance) still hold some value as source material. But by the end, in §11, “General Characteristics,” Jespersen presents claims that are plainly indefensible by today’s standards as a scholarly conclusion. This feature reads that section directly, as another side of a writer this feature has otherwise credited with fairness and foresight.
“Women are faster, but that’s no proof of intelligence”
Jespersen introduces an experimental finding (Romanes’s speed-reading test) that women tend to read and speak faster than men, then continues:
it was found that this rapidity was no proof of intellectual power, and some of the slowest readers were highly distinguished men.
Presenting data that looks like an advantage for women, and immediately discounting its significance — this gesture takes on a much more explicit form by the end of the chapter.
The era’s pseudo-science of “greater male variability”
Citing the English sexologist Havelock Ellis, Jespersen writes:
In language we see this very clearly: the highest linguistic genius and the lowest degree of linguistic imbecility are very rarely found among women. The greatest orators, the most famous literary artists, have been men.
This wasn’t a notion of his alone. From the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century, a theory — the “greater male variability hypothesis” — was seriously advanced by some scientists: that men have a biologically wider range of variation, and that both genius and idiocy therefore skew toward men. Havelock Ellis, whom Jespersen cites, was one of the figures who tried to apply this hypothesis across every field. Jespersen takes it up not as a secondary reference on women, but as “data” within his own specialist field, language.
This feature’s assessment
The greater male variability hypothesis itself has since lost its evidentiary footing in biology and psychology. The statistical claim that genius and idiocy both skew male has been shown, repeatedly, in later research, to reflect biases in how the era’s data was collected and interpreted in the first place. Women, at the time, were largely excluded from higher education and from particular professions altogether — which means the observation that “there are few famous orators or literary figures among women” more likely reflects a difference in opportunity than a difference in ability. Jespersen never touches on that possibility at all. His claim is built on this foundation — that is, on a theory that had already lost its footing.
An even larger shift came from within sociolinguistics itself. In 1975, the American linguist Robin Lakoff published Language and Woman’s Place, questioning the very framework that described women’s speech as “inferior” or “uncertain.” Sociolinguistics since then has moved toward reframing differences in how men and women speak not as a matter of superiority, but as a matter of differing social function. Using more hedges, favoring indirect phrasing over blunt assertion — even where such tendencies exist, the position goes, they aren’t evidence of a deficiency in intelligence; they can be explained as rational linguistic behavior reflecting one’s social position and the role expected of one. The individual differences Jespersen observed — tendencies in vocabulary and phrasing — aren’t worthless as source material in themselves. But the framework he built around them, ranking those differences as a measure of intelligence, was decisively rejected by the linguistics that followed.
Summary
| Point | Content |
|---|---|
| Jespersen’s claim | Linguistic genius and imbecility alike are rarely found among women |
| The theory behind it | The “greater male variability hypothesis” — the era’s pseudo-scientific theory of sex difference |
| What happened next | The hypothesis itself lost its evidentiary footing |
| The turn in sociolinguistics | After Robin Lakoff (1975), reframed as a difference in social function, not superiority |
In a nutshell — Jespersen showed a fairness ahead of his time in his observations of children and his analysis of pidgin languages. But in the chapter on “the woman,” he adopted his era’s pseudo-science wholesale as a scholarly conclusion. Sharp observation and an unguarded susceptibility to the prejudice of his time lived inside the very same scholar. Judging him by only one side or the other would be unfair — the closing article in this feature grades both.