Marked Women Deborah Tannen Analysis

Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, is a popular author in the United States of America. Mostly of her focus in her articles and books is on the expression of interpersonal relationships in contentious interaction. Tannen became well known after her book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation was published. However, this was not her only claim to fame. Along with this book, she also wrote many other essays and articles including the popular article “Marked Women, Unmarked Men.” In the article, “Marked Women, Unmarked Men,” Tannen differentiates how women and men are judged prematurely by their attire and appearance. She explains how women are judged and marked but men are not, but I believe that men are also marked in society. Tannen’s article, written in 1993, relates relatively well to today’s judgemental society. Her article takes place during a conference meeting of eight men and four women. Instead of Tannen concentrating on the meeting, she began to examine the attire of the men and women. She explained how the women were marked but the men were unmarked. The term “marked” is a principle of linguistic theory that refers to the way language alters the base meaning of a word by adding a linguistic piece that has no meaning on its

Tannen was aware of this problem and she asked herself “what style we women could have adopted that would have been unmarked, like the men's. The answer was none. There is no unmarked woman” (Tannen). I agree that there is no unmarked woman. Whatever a woman wears makes her become judged prematurely. If a woman has no particular hairstyle, it is perceived that she does not care about the way she looks. If a women wears tight or revealing clothing, it is perceived that she wants to be seen as attractive. Discrimination in society has become so common that people make opinions on others without being aware of