Phraseology and Culture in English

7. “Gendered” 
proverbs 
To focus, by way of illustration, on some particular subgroups of English 
speakers: Given the profound effect that “gender” has on the way a person 
perceives and interacts with the social world, we may wonder why the very 
concept of gender-specific proverbs has attracted so little attention. Perhaps 
because we assume (no doubt rightly) that women are the principal trans-
mitters of language itself – the “mother tongue” – from generation to gen-
eration, to children of both sexes. We have supposed that proverbs are 
taught indiscriminately, along with other sorts of language acts, to both 
boys and girls, who will then possess the same repertories of proverbs for 
their own use. 
As for proverbs about gender-specific concerns, the easy and common 
assumption has been that proverbs express and help perpetuate prevailing 
codes of male dominance, including not only outright misogyny but also a 
patronizing fondness for the fair sex and her foibles. The fact that women 
and men have presumably used many of the same proverbs about women – 
used them in similar ways, with some of the same implications – would 
simply show how thoroughly women have been acculturated and uncon-
sciously oppressed. So we have numerous scholarly articles and student 
papers and at least one full length book that examine proverbs in order to 
identify and analyze (and usually denounce) American culture’s, or Eng-
lish-speaking culture’s, or Western culture’s attitudes toward women. (The 
book is Lois Kerschen’s American Proverbs about Women, 1998.) Such dis-
cussions seldom stop to ask difficult questions: Just which speakers actually 
use given proverbs? With what frequency? How currently? With precisely 
what meanings? How often do so-called “sexist” proverbs, as they are actu-
ally used, imply skepticism or irony regarding the presumed attitudes ex-
pressed by the proverbs (as read out of context)? 

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Collections of proverbs and proverb dictionaries
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Wolfgang Mieder (1987), while noting “the obvious antifeminism preva-
lent in proverbs,” also identified an emerging trend, still “relatively rare,” 
he said, which he called “liberated” proverbs, most of them being what he 
would elsewhere term antiproverbs – parodies or ironic applications of 
familiar sayings (Mieder 1982–1989, Mieder and Tóthné Litovkina 1999). 
Thus “A woman’s place is in the home” was altered to become a political 
slogan of female candidates for Congress or state legislatures: “A woman’s 
place is in the House.” Proverbs in German, and less commonly in English, 
of the formula (often rhyming) “A woman without a man is like a _____ 
without a _____” (in English, for example, “A woman without a man is like 
a handle without a pan,” which itself parallels “A man without a wife is like 
a fork without a knife”) became the now-famous “A woman without a man 
is like a fish without a bicycle” (besides the grotesquery of the image, an-
other parodic attribute is the pointed lack of rhyme). In the year 2005, I 
believe, such “liberated” proverbs are no longer rare: now we hear the 
adapted saying “A woman’s place is any damned place she wants to be,” 
while “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. A woman has to do what 
he can’t.” And, it turns out, “Size does matter” to women. Examples could 
be multiplied. 
Not all “liberated” proverbs, however, are antiproverbs; some are simply 
proverbs, apparently of somewhat recent coinage. More proudly, even ag-
gressively, matriarchal than “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world” 
or “Mother always knows best” is the saying “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t 
nobody happy” – or (Mama speaking downright belligerently) “I brought 
you into this world, and I can take you out of it!” The proverb “You have to 
kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince” expresses the difficulty and 
frustration modern women may feel in locating a desirable male partner, 
and it warns against precipitous commitments, perhaps even licensing women 
to experiment physically in the course of their search (though the verb kiss
must be construed metaphorically as well). In the process of their experi-
menting, safe-sex-conscious women are now free to insist, “No glove, no 
love.” When the experimentation goes badly, a woman may lament, “Men 
are only good for one thing, and sometimes they aren’t even good for that.” 
While modern women may regret having been seen as mere sex objects, 
they need not feel inhibited: “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” And even among 
heterosexual women, sisterhood can be prized above the uncertain attrac-
tions of male companionship: “Chicks before dicks.” 
Some proverbs uttered by modern women are sad – and not very “liber-
ated”: College-aged women, with their “body-image issues” and their prone-

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