A2.3 DALE SPENDER AND MAN MADE LANGUAGE Five years after Language and Woman's Place came out of the USA, a rather more hard-hitting book, Dale Spender's Man Made Language (1980), appeared in the UK. Spender had been a secondary-school teacher, and the book includes an important educational dimension. Aiming less at an academic and more ata popular audience, this work represented what can be seen as a radical feminist position. Writing from an explicitly feminist, committed perspective, Dale Spender was uncompromising in her early claims. Like Lakoff, Spender wrote about sexism in the English language and gender differences in language use. She saw both as operating to the clear disad- vantage of women, contributing to women being effectively silenced. Largely reporting and bringing together others’ findings, Spender focuses on how, in mixed- sex talk, men dominate the conversation, interrupt their conversational partners and are more successful at having the topics they bring up, taken up. This corre- sponds to what is now known as the (male) dominance’ approach characteristic of studies of language use and gender in the 1970s (and drawn on well into the 1980s and even the 1990s). Through Man Made Language, Dale Spender did a great deal to popularise the study of gender and language in the UK and beyond. She was a prolific writer — in the same year that Man Made Language was published she also published (with Elizabeth Sarah) an edited collection: Learning ta Lose: sexism and education and sustained an impressive publishing record throughout the 1980s. Her later books include (and the titles are illustrative of her stance): Men’s Studies Modified (1981), Invisible Women (1982, 1989), Fentinist Theorists (1983), Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them (1983, 1988), There's Always Been a Women's Movement this Century (1983), Time and Tide Wait for No Man (1984), For the Record: the making and meaning of feminine knowledge (1985), Mothers of the Novel