A Tale of Two Scripts

John D. Berry commented on "Women's Literation":

"Loved your "anecdotal evidence" paragraph. But I'm bothered by the relentlessly Anglo-American focus of your essay. Only when I read the quote from Kristof's editorial could I be sure that he was talking only about the United States, for instance. The 19th-century developments that you describe all happened, and Britain was in the forefront, but they didn't happen in a vacuum; nor does any aspect of American literacy today exist only within the confines of these fifty states."

Good points, John.

Certainly, the scope of literacy extends far beyond the Anglophonic and Angloliterate world in time and space, but it is useful to limit the number of variables when trying to isolate and understand causes and effects, and because the impetus for my discussion was an opinion column in an English-language newspaper of record, about the literacy of English-speaking students in the U.S., where the primary language is English, and because I was writing for English-literate readers, I stuck to English. If that is a deplorable example of post-imperialist Anglo-American linguistic hegemony, I will try to make amends by mentioning some examples of women's literacy in non-Anglo cultures.

To reprise: Nicholas Kristof's column "The Boys Have Fallen Behind" discussed data showing current disparities in literacy between boys and girls (or men and women) in the U.S. To get a deeper perspective, I looked at essays examining literacy rates in pre-industrial and industrial England. The U.S. and England had a common history up to the beginning of the industrial revolution, and continued to have strong cultural, commercial, and political associations, notwithstanding a few spats like the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Hence, I figured that literacy in the U.S. would probably be linked to literacy in England.

For historical comparison to Kristof's figures, I looked at data-derived estimates of literacy in the pre-industrial and industrial eras in England (as noted in the references at the end of my post). England was the first country to industrialize and it established a model that later nineteenth century industrializers, including Germany and the U.S., used and eventually leapfrogged. Both prior to and during its industrial revolution, England kept records pertaining to the literacy of its population, and, at least to some extent, engaged in study, debate and social action to increase literacy. Hence, just as England was a pioneer in the industrial revolution, it was a pioneer in the literacy revolution (though a few countries may have been ahead of it in one way or another).

I suggested that today's gender disparity in literacy - which alarms some people and for which explanations as well as remedies are sought or proposed - was the result of a centuries-long historical process of women's literation. (Not my coinage, by the way.)

There is certainly nothing preventing one from looking further afield than my comments on England and America, but it's good to have reliable comparative data when trying to model an historical process, and such data are not always easy to find.

If you want to hop across the English channel to a discussion of literacy in France from the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, see François Furet and Jacques Ozouf, "Three Centuries of Cultural Cross-fertilization: France" in Literacy and Social Development in the West: a reader, edited by Harvey Graff, Cambridge University Press, 1981. For a book-length version by the same authors, see Reading and Writing: literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry, Cambridge U. Press, 1982.

Furet and Ozouf frame their discussion in terms of social class, rivalry between church and state, and competition between nations. Prior to the nineteenth century, the French aristocracy was much more literate than the lower classes, and women were much less literate than men, especially among the laboring and rural population, but Furet and Ozouf note that literacy increased among women faster than among men. Although politics, religion and culture in France differed from those in England, literacy trends were similar, though France lagged by a dozen years or so. In France, the so-called "Jules Ferry" laws of 1881 and 1882 established universal, free, secular public education for girls and boys, with motivations similar to those of the Education Act of 1870 in England, including international competition and the role of literacy in the armed forces.

In England, women's suffrage was established to a limited degree in 1918 and made fully equal with that of men in 1928, fifty-eight years after the Education Act of 1870. In France, women's suffrage was established in 1945, sixty-three years after the second Jules Ferry law of 1882. In Germany, women's suffrage was established in 1919, some 47 years after secondary education for girls was decreed in Prussia. (Establishment of elementary education of girls in Germany is not as easy to date because there was more regional variation prior to the unification of Germany.)

With data from these three industrializing nations, we can estimate that there was a time lag of a half-century, give or take a few years, between the establishment of universal education of women and achievement of women's suffrage? (On a country by country basis, the data are more variable and complex, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader, as professors sometimes say when they don't have time or inclination to figure something out themselves.)

Figuring out actual literacy rates for societies distant from us in time and space is often a non-trivial task. Beginning in the eighteenth century, England and France kept moderately good records of rudimentary literacy, but if we go back in time, how literate was the populace of Elizabethan England? Or the populace of Athens in the time of Pericles? (Stay tuned to this blog for a future post on these questions.)

Using historical data on books and their authors, Denis Pelli and I examined rates of increase of authorship from the scribal era just prior to the advent of printing in Europe to the current electronic era of Twitter, and suggested present and future consequences if the current rate of increase of authorship were to continue. (http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/a_writing_revolution/)

But, let me get back to your objection to the Anglo-American focus. Among other problems, too narrow a focus may omit counter-examples. If you wish to disprove the suggestion that women's literacy leads to women's suffrage, you could look for non-Anglophone countries in which women got the vote *before* they became literate. It so happens that just such a situation is unfolding right now. Sudan - one of the poorest countries in Africa, riven by decades of civil war, former refuge for Carlos the Jackal and Osama bin Laden, land of the notorious Darfur conflict, many times designated by the U.S. State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism - is now holding national elections for the first time in twenty-four years, and illiterate women can vote.

More than one hundred languages are spoken in Sudan, written in Arabic, Ethiopic, and Latin scripts, but published literacy rates don't distinguish among these. Though statistics may be unreliable, Sudan appears to have literacy rates lower than those of pre-industrial England. One literacy estimate for Sudan is 57% males and 35% females - (http://www.hmnet.com/africa/sudan/sudan.html), and for Southern Sudan, 37% men and 12% women - (http://sudan.unfpa.org/souther_Sudan/index.htm). Elections in Sudan have been called a "logistical challenge" and a "logistical nightmare". (http://southsudaninfo.net/2010/01/elections-in-sudan-a-logistical-nightmare/). Several candidates and parties have withdrawn from the contest, charging election fraud by the ruling party. Not even former U.S. President and Nobel Laureate Jimmy Carter has been able to clean things up. (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-10/sudan-wraps-up-election-campaigns-amid-opposition-boycotts.html)

One of the remaining presidential candidates is a woman, Dr. Fatima Abdel Mahmoud, but she is not expected to win. The smart money is betting on President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the former brigadier general who has ruled Sudan since he took power in a military coup in 1989. Currently under indictment by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, President al-Bashir is one of the reasons Sudan enjoys the international reputation it has today. Nevertheless, Sudan will now permit illiterate women, as well as illiterate men, to vote. It is less certain that their votes or anyone else's will actually be counted.

From this, some people may conclude that a country that doesn't educate its women could fall into internecine war, poverty, tribalism, warlordism, terrorism and electoral logistic nightmare. OK, some might except Sudan as a special case. How about instead we look at a country that has been prominent in the news and which held elections not long ago? Afghanistan. Oh, wait, hmm, well, maybe let's not go there, either. How about Florida?

If we just want to stay at home and read books about literacy beyond the Anglo-American realm, there are plenty of good ones. A broad discussion of literacy, spanning millennia around the world, is by Albertine Gaur, Literacy and The Politics of Writing, Intellect Books, Bristol, Portland, 2000. Gaur is the former Head of the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books at the British Library. Discussions of the development of literacy in early modern Europe can be found in Literacy and Social Development in the West: a reader, edited by Harvey Graff, Cambridge University Press, 1981. British social anthropologist Jack Goody has written a series of books with thoughtful views of literacy and not limited to a present day Anglo-American focus. (See, for example, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, The Interface between the Written and the Oral, or The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society.)

On the relationship between historical and modern women's literacy within a culture, let's take a look at Japan. The first, and/or the greatest, Japanese novel was written by a woman in the Heian era of medieval Japan. It has an intriguing scribal connection to recent novels written by modern Japanese women on their cell-phones.

The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogotari) was written in the early eleventh century CE by a noblewoman known only by her pseudonym, Murasakai Shikibu. She wrote (with a brush) in a cursive script called hiragana, which, though derived from a cursive Chinese style, represented syllables of spoken Japanese rather than words, the latter being the basis of Chinese script. Thus, hiragana was a phonetically simpler script that was easier to learn, containing only a hundred or so characters instead of the thousands of characters of kanji, the logographic, Chinese-derived script that Japanese men wrote. Here is how Murasaki's name was written in hiragana: (http://japanese.about.com/library/blhiraculture33.htm)

When Lady Murasaki wrote her novel, the gender distinction between kanji as men's writing and hiragana as women's writing excluded most women from reading Chinese literature, but aristocratic women nevertheless became skilled at writing poetry and prose in Japanese and were sophisticated in the art of personal correspondence. Yaeko Sato Habein, in The History of the Japanese Written Language, University of Tokyo Press, Tokyo, 1984, writes that "Genji Monogotari is the most widely studied and best-known tale of the Heian period, or perhaps, of the entire history of Japanese literature." Yasunari Kawabata, Japanese novelist and Nobel laureate in literature, said: "The Tale of Genji in particular is the highest pinnacle of Japanese literature. Even down to our day there has not been a piece of fiction to compare with it". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Genji

Over several centuries, the kanji and hiragana scripts ceased to be separated on a gender basis (or bias) and instead were merged into one complex writing system. The logographic kanji characters are used for nouns, verb stems, adjective stems, and some adverbs, while the syllabic hiragana characters are used for particle words and inflectional prefixes and suffixes to nouns, verbs, and adjectives. To over-simplify it, the different scripts are used for different parts of speech - kanji  for most lexical words and hiragana for most grammatical particles and part-words.  In addition to kanji and hiragana, another syllabary, katakana, originally used for exegesis of Buddhist text, has also become part of standard Japanese writing where it is used for foreign words. Yet another script, romaji - Latin characters and numerals - has also been merged into the system for use in signage, acronyms, and company names. Recently, a fifth category of Japanese written symbol, eimoji, includes smile faces, hearts, and other characters to connote emotion and feeling. (See: Janet Shibamoto Smith, "Japanese Writing" in Peter Daniels and William Bright, The World's Writing Systems, Oxford U. Press, 1996.

In character frequency, kanji characters range from slightly more than fifty percent of printed Japanese text, to slightly less than twenty-five percent. Kanji usage is in inverse proportion to hiragana and katakana, but the relative proportions vary according to context. Publications of general interest and government publication may contain more than fifty percent kanji, but in magazines specifically for men or for women the percentage of kanji may fall below thirty percent, with proportional increase in hiragana. (See: http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/articles/2005/Tomoda.html).

Hence, in many publications, hiragana, by a complex process of socio-linguistic evolution, has become as frequent or more frequent in text than kanji. Moreover, this process has not yet ended. A recent literary phenomenon in Japan is novels written on cell phones, mainly by young women who type hiragana on cell phone keyboards. It has been claimed that these cell-phone novels, which are said to use an even greater percentage of hiragana characters than traditional literary prose (e.g. novels of Yasunari Kawabata), are of lower artistic quality than traditional literature. Nevertheless, once again, women are in the forefront of literary innovation in Japan, and they are writing in what was formerly women's script but using the most modern literate instrument.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/world/asia/20japan.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/books/review/EParker-t.html
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/22/081222fa_fact_goodyear)

I don't know of data on the frequencies of kanji, hiragana, katakana, romaji, and eimoji in cell-phone novels compared to traditional novels, but it would not be too hard to compile such data for cell-phone novels because they are first "published" in electronic form, and hence the characters can be identified and tallied by their digital codes.

(To get some idea of the kanji/kana distinction in Japanese literary style, we could draw an analogy to the distinction between Latinate and Anglo-Saxon vocabulary in English literature. More kanji = more educated, just as more Latin = more educated.)

One last small point. In 1980, Shiseido, the Japanese cosmetic company, brought out a perfume named "Murasaki" in honor of the novelist (presumably her name helps sell the product, especially in Japan). On the perfume bottle and packaging, Murasaki's name was written in cursive hiragana characters, as she may have written it herself, a thousand years ago. When the perfume is marketed in the west, "Murasaki" is transliterated into a highly cursive, informal Latin script that conveys some of the same relaxed elegance as handwritten hiragana, a signature translated, trailing in its wake an exotic fragrance.

-- Chuck Bigelow

Women’s Literation

We can hardly read anything these days without reading about changes in reading. The changes result from new technology, but more than the technology itself, what worries, scares, or thrills those who write about the future of reading is how the technology will be adopted. What will be the consequences for our social institutions -- economic, political, cultural?

While many would agree that literacy is important to our social institutions, we often don't know how important, until literacy changes, and we witness the effects. Sometimes the effects become evident soon, as with the fiscal ill-fortunes of newspapers in the twenty-first century, but sometimes the effects take longer to become manifest. Like, centuries.

For example, let's look at the increase of literacy among women. This started before Twitter, before Craigslist, before blogging. Even, if you can believe it, before the Internet.

Nicholas Kristof, in a column in the New York Times on March 27, 2010, says that girls are doing better than boys in school, especially in reading and writing.

Referring to a report issued by the Center on Education Policy, Kristof says about literacy skills, "In every state, in each of the three school levels, girls did better on average than boys." Citing the book, Why Boys Fail, Kristof goes on to write, "In Federal writing tests, 32 percent of girls are considered 'proficient' or better. For boys, the figure is 16 percent." He adds, "Among whites, women earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 62 percent of master’s degrees. Among blacks, the figures are 66 percent and 72 percent."

We hear numbers like these a lot lately. Looks like we have to admit it, the girls have gotten ahead of the boys.

When did women start getting ahead of men in literacy? It didn't start in 1990. More like 1790. A series of studies of literacy in pre-industrial and early industrial England have shown that the literacy rate just before the start of the nineteenth century was around 55% to 60% for men but below 40% for women. In some early industrial areas, such as Lancashire, women's literacy was below 20%. (In these studies, literacy, is usually defined by a person's ability to sign his or her name in a parish registry upon marriage. We're not talking about reading David Hume and Edward Gibbon, just basic reading and writing.)

A hundred years later, literacy in England topped 90% for both sexes. Women had not only caught up with men in literacy, but in some parts of England, young women had become more literate than men of the same age. What had happened? Two main factors are usually cited.  One is the combination of social movements promoting universal public education and culminating in the Elementary Education Act of 1870, which provided for schooling of all children between ages of five and twelve.

Another is the Industrial Revolution, which decreased the cost and increased the numbers of books (among so many other goods), thus making books available and affordable to much more of the populace. Other effects of the Industrial Revolution were an increase in personal incomes and higher standards of living, which allowed more people to afford more books, along with a rising population, which created more potential book buyers, thus resulting in more books, longer print runs and greater economies of scale in publishing.

A principal motivation for the Education Act of 1870 was to maintain or increase England's industrial competitiveness. Although earlier generations of education reformers had emphasized the beneficial effect of literacy on moral character, progressive leaders argued that an educated populace was necessary to maintain England's industrial preeminence in world markets. Another motivation was the conviction that a literate populace would be more knowledgeable and would vote more wisely. Yet another was that literacy would improve the competence of England's armed forces.

Those are explicit motivations. Several important consequences, however, may have been unanticipated.

One consequence was that a more literate populace was better able to read, understand, and be influenced by the advertisements, handbills, labels, packaging, and posters promoting manufactured products churned out by industry. Greater literacy enabled greater domestic consumption. Modern advertising, whether luxury display ads in the New York Times or text snippets on Google ads, relies on literacy. Without a high degree of literacy, our modern market-based consumer economies could not function.

Indeed, in light of America's fiscal and educational woes, a value-added tax on advertising, with the revenues going to schools, would hardly be unreasonable, because without public education, modern literate advertising could not function.

Another consequence was the growth of the lucrative textbook market, which is still a major publishing sector today. Universal literate education required literate resources -- schoolbooks and libraries.

Among quirky indicators of the importance of literacy to marketing was the nineteenth-century proliferation of novel typefaces created by English typefounders for advertising and display. Calm, edifying book typefaces of earlier centuries were supplemented, and in some cases swamped, by wild new designs intended to shock, arrest, and above all, persuade the public to buy, buy, buy. Literacy became a vital foundation for the creation and promulgation of artificial needs for manufactured goods.

Yet another consequence of greater literacy, presumably unanticipated by the high-minded promoters of universal education, was the rise of sensationalist literature published for the young, the "penny dreadful" -- the Victorian pioneer of pulp fiction. These lurid stories cheaply printed on pulp paper were widely deplored but wildly popular. Not only were they a popular form of literature, they established a genre that continues to be valuable to this day. A recent news report says that the 1938 first edition of a Superman comic book recently sold for $1.5 million. In contrast, an 1859 first edition of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" is priced at $160,000 from a rare book dealer.

Should it surprise us that a flimsy descendant of the penny dreadful is today worth nearly ten times more than the most important book of the nineteenth century. (OK, ok, some people will claim that Karl Marx's "Das Kapital" was the most important book of the nineteenth century, but its market value today is only around $40,000 for the first edition. Superman and Batman are way, way ahead. Is that because they are capitalists?)

Yet, these are mere footnotes compared to a powerful social trend that resulted from the rise in literacy -- the women's suffrage movement. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a new generation of literate English women began to agitate for the vote. Having become equal in literacy to men, educated middle-class women demanded political equality as well. Although Mary Wollstonecraft had argued eloquently for women's rights almost a century earlier, the new generation of suffragists and suffragettes were more organized, more militant, and, as they were continually rebuffed, eventually more violent in their demands. They interrupted parliament, threw stones at the Prime Minister's residence, fought with police, burned mailboxes, attacked paintings in the National Gallery, and blew up the chancellor of the exchequer's house. Several suffragettes were imprisoned and then went on hunger strikes to publicize their cause. When a prison doctor force-fed imprisoned suffragette hunger strikers, others suffragettes assaulted him outside prison and beat him with dog whips.

Is this what happens when you teach women to read -- they become terrorists?

Today, having long ago gained the vote, women in Anglo-American society seem to have no need to resort to the violent, confrontational tactics of a century ago. Instead, they simply surpass men in literate accomplishment and appear to be opening the gap wider and wider. How? Why? When will it stop?

Although it is only anecdotal evidence, as a college professor, I am persuaded that one way girls are getting ahead of boys is by sharing secret knowledge of how to do well in school. Many college women come to class, pay attention to lectures, take notes, ask questions, do assignments, turn in work on time, read the required readings, and study for exams. As baffling as these obscure techniques may seem, they may possibly account for higher grades among women students. Many men students are, however, working diligently on other techniques, like surfing the web for amusing stuff to keep them awake while ignoring boring lectures, or catching up on sleep in the back of the classroom, so as to be well rested in time for lunch. Maybe also the boys are spending time out of class rooting for their favorite teams, while the girls are reading Jane Austen and Margaret Atwood and learning words like "superfluous", "vilification" and "continuum." Hard to say for sure.

Is the current gender disparity in literacy a recent phenomenon, as some current pundits seem to suggest, or is it merely the most recent manifestation of a centuries-old, on-going historical process?

-- Chuck Bigelow

Notes:

Web references.

For Nicholas Kristof's column, see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28kristof.html

For the report from the Center for Education Policy, "State Test Score Trends Through 2007-08, Part 5: Are There Differences in Achievement Between Boys and Girls?" by Naomi Chudowsky and Victor Chudowsky, see:

http://www.cep-dc.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=document_ext.showDocumentByID&nodeID=1&DocumentID=304

For statistics on recent high-school graduation and college enrollment of women and men, see:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/hsgec.htm

For a history of actions by suffragettes, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette

For a history of an eminent suffragette, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmeline_Pankhurst

Book references.

On the rise of literacy in England during the Industrial Revolution, see Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750-1914 by David Vincent, Cambridge University Press, 1989. On social and economic aspects of publishing during the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, see: Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market 1836-1916 by Alexis Weedon, Ashgate Publishing, 2003. On English parish registries as indications of literacy rates, see, 'The Measurement of Literacy in Pre-Industrial England' by R. S. Schofleld, in Literacy in Traditional Societies, edited by Jack Goody, Cambridge University Press, 1968 (digital paperback reissue, 2005). The book Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Educational System That's Leaving Them Behind is by Richard Whitmire, AMACOM publishers, 2010.