Agency and the "Girl"

Ellen Barton's "Textual Practices of Erasure" deals with the way disabled persons are represented in United Way advertisements, and the loss of individuality they suffer through them. She also describes the United Way's infantile image of disabled persons as either children or dependent, childlike adults.

One such case is in the advertisement on page 181 of the article, a blind woman with a helper dog. While most of the ads created between 1949 and 1964 (21 out of 32) "featured children, with able-bodied adults as  parents, caregivers, or volunteers", "only two ads from this set actually focused on adults with disabilities" (178). Now, it is the verbiage here that I really take issue with. Barton introduces the advertisement by describing the image as "a young woman with a leader dog". Clearly, the illustration does depict a young woman. Mature of face, but not aged, with developed breasts. We know what we're dealing with here. Then comes the text: "You can see for yourself, and so can I, for now I have Pat, the smartest leader dog a girl ever had!" Girl. 

A girl is a child. A woman is not a girl. This advertisement does not depict a child, it depicts a grown woman. Not a woman of any venerable age, but a woman regardless. Speaking of the United Way's persistent depiction of children rather than adults in their ads, Barton writes: "Not only does it effectively erase the complex experience of disability by adults whose legitimate interests in independence and autonomy are therefore never represented; it also definitively establishes a binary distinction between the able-bodied and the disabled, spearating and distancing the disabled from the abled" (173).

If we apply that sentence to the advertisement's verbal infantilization of the woman, it is effectively saying A: Women have no "legitimate interests in independence and autonomy" and since the woman is reduced to girlhood while the men of the advertisements retain manhood, B: There is a "binary distinction" between men, who are adults, and women, who are children.

We have seen already some of the effects of the infantilization of women in  Gilbert & Gubar, where in the pursuit of superior femininity women develop severe cases of the nerves, to the point of hysteria, and "for women in particular patriarchal culture has always assumed mental exercises would have dire consequences"  (156) which has been a thinly-veiled attempt to keep the mind of a woman like the mind  of a child. Margaret E. Sangster wrote in her 1900 manual Winsome Womanhood: Familiar Talks on Life and Conduct, that "the best training of the school and of the home... makes woman patient, gentle, forceful and spontaneous, which keep in her, intact amid all changes the child-heart". The socially inflicted "female diseases" of hysteria, nervousness, anorexia, etc. all serve to make women  more fragile, more delicate, and more in need of care, just like a child. In John Harvey Kellogg's 1891 text on "Invalid Women" in The Household Monitor of Health, he suggests treating a woman with a history of nervous problems with "careful nursing" and in the case of a fit, says "the patient must have the most vigilant watchcare, not being left alone for a moment". Of course we are all familiar with S. Weir Mitchell's infamous "rest cure", which involved confining a hysterical woman to her bed for extended periods of time, with no mental exercise whatsoever.

We may call men "boys" on occasion, but even when we do it does not have the same effect, because men are not already marginalized in the same way as women. Calling a woman a "girl" takes us right back to the Victorian period. It demeans and infantilizes her, and by treating her like a child, denies her agency, "independence and autonomy". I've been making an effort never to say "girl" when I mean "woman", and I feel this small attention to diction is important in changing the way society views women.