In 1973, when Sally McConnell-Ginet had just received her doctorate for a dissertation on the semantics of English comparative constructions, she was asked to teach a class on language and gender for the recently introduced Women's Studies programme at Cornell University. It was, she recalls in her preface to this volume, ‘a topic I had never thought much at all about until that summer’ (ix). Gender, sexuality, and meaning testifies to the range, depth and influence of her thinking about this subject during the subsequent four decades.

The main part of the book consists of ten previously published articles, arranged thematically into three parts, each with a brief contextualizing introduction. The articles are framed by two new contributions, which provide a theoretical overview at the beginning and a political/practical coda at the end. This selection and ordering of material offers a fascinating insight into the development of the field of language and gender studies since the 1970s, and also into the history of women and of feminism in the academic profession (a theme that figures most prominently in Part I, ‘Politics and scholarship’). Most importantly, however, it is a record of the contribution made to the study of language and gender by one of the most intelligent and original thinkers that field has so far produced.

Today, the label ‘language and gender’ tends to be used primarily in relation to what is actually only one part of the field, the empirical investigation of male and female speech behaviour. McConnell-Ginet's contribution to this strand of work is represented by Part II of this collection, ‘Social meaning, social practices, and selves’. One of the three chapters which make up the section is the groundbreaking ‘Intonation in a man's world’ (first published in 1978 and still well worth reading), while the other two feature her more recent work with the variationist Penelope Eckert. Eckert & McConnell-Ginet's (1992) article ‘Communities of practice: Where language, gender and power all live’, published here as Chapter 5, is possibly the single most influential piece of writing on language and gender to have appeared in the last twenty years: its call for researchers to ‘think practically and look locally’ (95) galvanized the community it was addressed to, and went on to influence many socio- and applied linguists who did not necessarily specialize in gender.

Yet as impressive as these chapters are, in my own view McConnell-Ginet's most notable contribution to the field is the one showcased in Part III of the book, ‘Constructing content in discourse’, which consists of four articles in which her interest in gender is combined with her interest in semantics and pragmatics. It seems she was initially reluctant to mix the two: the introduction to this section tells us that her early language and gender courses focused on sociolinguistic issues that were ‘safely outside my own realm of expertise, and thus nonthreatening to my views about my particular domain of linguistic inquiry’ (165). At the time she inclined to the orthodox position that sexism was not strictly speaking a linguistic matter – not an inherent property of the system which pairs linguistic forms and meanings, but an emergent product of the choices made by speakers in their use of that system. But encountering the views of feminists in other disciplines eventually prompted her to interrogate that argument, and to conclude that the distinction it rested on was oversimplified. ‘Rather than seeing content as firmly attached to linguistic forms’, she explains, ‘I began to view those forms as being filled with content … in the course of language-using social practices’ (166).

In her 1989 article, ‘The sexual (re)production of meaning: A discourse-based theory’ (included in the book as Chapter 8), McConnell-Ginet rejects the idea that ‘languages merely paste linguistic labels on the semantic furniture of the universe’, and instead draws on Gricean pragmatics to construct what she glosses as a ‘theoretical account of the roots of sexist semantics in sexist discourse’ (170). Among other things, this account proposes a concrete mechanism to explain the well-known historical tendency for words denoting women to undergo semantic pejoration. The shaping of meaning by use is a process whose effects are seen over time: something that starts as a variable and contingent aspect of ‘language-using social practice’ may eventually be reanalysed as a categorical semantic feature. It is because earlier generations of speakers so often used words like hussy (=‘housewife’) as derogatory labels, relying on tacit cultural assumptions to make their intended meaning intelligible, that the derogatory meaning has now become the primary sense.

The same process can also produce amelioration, as is arguably illustrated by contemporary uses of queer, which provides an interesting case because the change was clearly kick-started by a deliberate effort to ‘reclaim’ a derogatory label. McConnell-Ginet's account suggests, however, that prevailing social attitudes and practices exert more influence on the discourse in circulation, and thus eventually on word meaning, than organized campaigns; there is therefore a strong tendency for labels applied to subaltern groups to acquire negative meanings over time. As she notes, for example, the initially successful promotion of gay as a neutral or positive term is now being challenged by its increasingly widespread use to disparage anything uncool or ‘lame’ (not long ago, the British radio presenter Chris Moyles provoked controversy when he called a mobile phone ringtone ‘gay’). A comparable example is the English female title Ms, which was meant to eliminate marital status-based distinctions by replacing Miss and Mrs, but which has apparently been incorporated by many English speakers into a three-term system, where it denotes what are perceived as anomalous or ‘deviant’ cases (for example, unmarried older women, divorcees, feminists and lesbians).

In Chapter 11, which reprints McConnell-Ginet's (2002) essay, ‘“Queering” semantics: Definitional struggles’, the author summarizes the key points of her approach in a short commentary on the classic ‘what do words mean’ debate between Alice and Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass:

In developing this line of argument, informed by insights from formal linguistics and the philosophy of language as well as more socially-oriented approaches to discourse, McConnell-Ginet both challenged her own discipline's dismissal of feminist concerns and offered a credible alternative to other kinds of feminist theorizing about meaning, which were often linguistically naive and unnuanced.

That intervention has been particularly important for those of us who regard the production of gendered meanings, rather than simply gender-related differences in linguistic behaviour, as the central problem that feminist linguistic scholarship must address. The popular obsession with male–female linguistic differences glosses over two points which are crucial from a feminist perspective: first, that what matters politically about gender differences (where they exist) is not what they are, but what they mean or can be made to mean; and second, that how women and men are habitually spoken and written about in any given society plays at least as important a role in reproducing or challenging gender inequality as any differences in their ways of using language.

Both these points are explored in the concluding chapter of this volume, written specifically for it and entitled ‘Breaking through the “glass ceiling”: Can linguistic awareness help?’. Here McConnell-Ginet argues that what we need to be (and make others) aware of is less the supposed differences in communication styles, which are often said to put professional women at a disadvantage, and more the prevalence, among both sexes, of a ‘gender discourse … saturated with gender content that is seldom if ever made explicit’, but rather depends on ‘backstage semantic moves’ which must be interpreted with reference to underlying gender schemas (274). For instance, the perceived reasonableness of asking female (but not male) job candidates how they plan to combine professional and family responsibilities (a practice which has become less acceptable, but which is by no means unheard of even now) depends on the assumption that childcare is a primarily female rather than a male or joint responsibility. Another, perhaps less obvious example that McConnell-Ginet gives concerns the conjoining of adjectives denoting personal attributes such as intelligent and attractive with either and or but: she suggests speakers are more likely to choose but if the qualities are being attributed to a woman, and that this evidences – and reproduces – a schema in which female intelligence is axiomatically incompatible with sexual or social desirability. While linguistic analysis in and of itself will not eliminate the practices that produce the ‘glass ceiling’, McConnell-Ginet contends that it can help to further that aim by raising awareness of the sexist presuppositions that covertly organize many everyday interactions.

This concluding chapter, which foregrounds practical linguistic politics, might be read as one answer to a question posed in the introduction to Part I of the book: ‘Can linguistic research be at the same time credible as scholarship and potentially relevant to feminist concerns?’ (33). The question remains pertinent. After a long and distinguished career, McConnell-Ginet's own scholarly credentials are hardly in dispute; but the autobiographical details threaded through this collection make clear that her success was not easily come by. As well as reminding us how hard it was for women scholars of her generation to be taken seriously and treated equitably (interviewers in the 1970s did not hesitate to ask her how she proposed to combine a career with marriage, to which she replied, presciently as it turned out, that she would probably marry a fellow academic), she documents what she describes as the ‘struggle to construct myself as both a committed feminist and a serious linguist’ (33). One of her goals throughout her career has been ‘to make linguistics more hospitable to language and gender scholarship, to help legitimate a focus on gender issues’ (33). She acknowledges that this particular struggle continues: though more and more institutions have added language and gender to their teaching curricula, it is still not always accepted as a legitimate subject for research. But no one has done more than McConnell-Ginet to raise its profile and its status within the discipline: all of us who have followed are indebted to her efforts.

Gender, sexuality, and meaning contains material that might interest researchers in a number of areas (for example, semantics and pragmatics, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis), but it is most obviously addressed to those who work on language and gender. Though much of its content will be familiar to established scholars in the field (I myself had read most of the chapters before, though one or two of the earlier pieces were new to me), it is rewarding to re-read her work in this format. The way the chapters are ordered, introduced and annotated makes the whole volume more than just the sum of its parts. But it probably should not be taken as the definitive summing up: McConnell-Ginet has continued to write since her retirement, and her future contributions to debates on language and gender will undoubtedly deserve the same attention as the ones collected here.