Man and wife

In September 2011, a British married couple on holiday in Kenya were attacked by bandits. The male partner was shot dead, and the female taken hostage. Not surprisingly, the event made national headlines. The BBC released repeated updates on the situation:

'Briton killed and wife kidnapped in Kenya.' (11/09/11)

'Police in Kenya are hunting a gang who killed a British man and kidnapped his wife at a resort in the country.' (12/09/11)

'A second man has appeared in a Kenyan court over the murder of a British tourist and the abduction of his wife.' (21/09/11)

The choice of pronouns here is interesting. The murdered man is a 'Briton', a 'man', and a 'tourist'. The kidnapped woman is only a 'wife'. Presumably she is not just a wife, but also a woman, a tourist, and a Briton. But when it is necessary to boil down her identity to one snappy headline or byline, 'wife' is the clear favourite. It's common sense, almost; he is a man, and she is his wife.

This is a phenomenon which the Critical Discourse Analyst Norman Fairclough has coined 'naturalisation'. We don't think about describing a kidnapped British woman as a 'wife', because it seems natural to us that a woman's marital status is socially important. And perhaps it's harmless; after all, it's only for the purpose of a news report. In this age of minute-by-minute journalism, summaries and sound-bites are necessary.

But Fairclough has a warning for all those reporters with hectic schedules. When they write 'wife', they don't only reflect social attitudes towards women and marriage, but reproduce them. Without realising, they bolster the assumption that a woman is ultimately defined by her relationships with men.

Something to think on:

• Norman Fairclough, 2010. Critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language. 2nd edn (Harlow: Pearson).