Women and the Alphabet: Eight Speculative Leaps
 

For Kay Morrison 

·        What is commonly called thought is linear thought, expressed in logical or mathematical language.  The phonetic structure of language, reinforced by alphabetic writing, is linear and pushes the lesser linearity of syntax into line.  English and Chinese, being word-order languages, are more necessarily syntactically linear than, say, Russian, Latin, or Greek, with their elaborate case and verb systems.

·        The old goddess religions may reflect a stage of culture that is not just pre-alphabetic but pre-linguistic, even preverbal.  Grammar, a wag once said, is a device that keeps us from saying everything at once.  Time, another said, is what keeps everything from happening at once.  Well, maybe the goddess religions reflect a time when we said, or “said,” everything at once.  That would be non-linear thought, language, grunting and pointing, whatever.

·        So, if language is linear in our practice of it, why on the Scholastic Aptitude Test have boys traditionally scored higher in math, girls in language?  Math, once you get past arithmetic, is more visual than linguistic.  Analytic geometry may be analytic, but it is also geometry.  What makes girls better in language?

·        Thought is contained in feeling.  Brain research supports this contention by finding that there is no such thing as “cold” thought.  All thought and all learning are embedded in feeling.

·        Girls are clearly better at social functions than boys, because they mature faster and perhaps also because they understand and deal with the emotional dimension of relationships better than boys.  Women control relationships.

·        Do girls score higher on the SAT verbal—if they still do—write better English papers, and have more legible handwriting because they understand the preverbal, the bed of feeling on which language rides, where linear distinctions do not apply and everything happens at once?

·        Is this preverbal thought-feeling pool something that travels with us through space and time, generation by generation, intuitively understood better by women but elucidated by psychoanalysts like Freud and Jung, poets like Yeats and Roethke, all men?  Don’t women want us to know?

·        “We think by feeling,” alcoholic, manic-depressive, and poet Theodore Roethke said.  “What is there to know?”

This shaking keeps me steady.  I should know.

What falls away is always.  And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

            --from “The Waking”

TCH

7/18/01