“I’ve been an activist since I was around 20-years-old,” Maria Beatrice Giovanardi, now head of marketing at a non-profit foundation, tells British Vogue. “It’s going to sound cliché but… I’d gone from living in Miami for five years to then living in India, and I was shocked to see the lack of women’s and human rights. I was also shocked by my own level of privilege. I didn’t realise how privileged I was, because I was always around people like me.”
Now living in London, Italian-born Giovanardi has been putting her passion for activism and equality to very good use. “I was doing some online research at the start of 2019, looking up synonyms for the word ‘woman’,” she recalls. “That’s when I first read the list of synonyms, like ‘piece’, ‘bint’, ‘baggage’ and ‘bitch’. Basically, around 80 per cent of them were extremely derogatory.” For Giovanardi, the word bitch was the one that irked her most. “I was mad at bitch because I think it can be a trigger for women,” she explains. (Cast your mind back to the Taylor Swift and Kanye West feud, and the pointed, “I made that bitch famous” lyric on his track “Famous”.) “But the other words, I thought: why are they there? A lot of the listed examples of how to use the synonym in a sentence were very sexist, too. I sent it to some friends and fellow activists, and they were also shocked by it.” Oxford Dictionaries’ examples included: “Ms September will embody the professional yet sexy career woman”, and “male fisherfolk who take their catch home for the little woman to gut”.
Deciding to take matters into her own hands, Giovanardi wrote letters questioning the dictionary entry, but says no one got back to her. In June 2019, she wrote an essay for Medium explaining why it was imperative that the current dictionary definition for “woman” be changed. By the end of the month, she had launched a petition that caught the attention of the Guardian. “I’m so grateful to the Guardian,” says Giovanardi. “By the third day we had like 150 signatures, but they published a double-page spread in print. It gave so much authority to the campaign and really explained the issue.” The petition called for all definitions and phrases that “discriminate and patronise” or “connote men’s ownership” of women to be removed. It also demanded that examples included lesbian and transgender women, too.
By August, the petition had tens of thousands of signatures and the campaign had really “picked up pace”, says Giovanardi. A critical moment for the campaign came on International Women’s Day in March 2020, when an open letter was published with Women’s Aid and the leaders of the Women’s Equality party on board, too. “Bitch is not a synonym for woman. It is dehumanising to call a woman a bitch. It is but one sad, albeit extremely damaging, example of everyday sexism. And that should be explained clearly in the dictionary entry used to describe us,” it read. The next day, the Oxford University Press committed to changing the definition.
But then Covid-19 hit, and the world came to a halt. Regardless, Giovanardi, who had been promised a meeting, did not give up. Instead she hounded them. By September she’d “got angry”, she says, and once again demanded that the definition be changed. With over 30,000 signatures on the petition, come November, it happened. The amendments included the acknowledgement that a woman can be “a person’s wife, girlfriend, or female lover”, rather than only a man’s. The same gender-neutral terminology has now been applied to the definition of the word “man”, too. The words “bint” and “bitch” are still listed as synonyms for “woman”, but labels have now been applied to terms considered “offensive”, “derogatory”, or “dated”. As an OUP spokesperson explained, their dictionaries “reflect, rather than dictate, how language is used. This is driven solely by evidence of how real people use English in their daily lives.”
The victory left Giovanardi feeling “so happy”, she says. During the campaign, men told her she was crazy for demanding change, but Giovanardi likens the naysaying to “dogs barking”. “The world has always been like this and we’re [women] trying to change it,” she says. “By them [men] doing that, they actually just proved exactly what the campaign was fighting to get changed.” Now, she’s launched a similar campaign in her home country. “Gender discrimination is still not considered as hate speech,” she says. “I think it was important to prove with this campaign that it’s not okay, and for men to actually be told that it’s not okay. It’s symbolic.” (vogue)
