Framing Requests for Help: Language and Gender in Parental Advice-Seeking Letters

Confirming the importance of language to not just relay thoughts but also construct hierarchies, 251 parental advice-seeking letters written at the dawn of the parent education movement in the 1920s and 1930s were coded with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count computerized text analysis program. An examination of language use patterns shows how parents framed their requests and how they manifested signs of “doing gender” in the process. The fathers’ and mothers’ letters differed in length, common verb use, negation word use, pronoun use, preposition use, and locus on three summary variables (analytic, authenticity, and clout). They did not differ in the use of words associated with general affect, positive emotion, negative emotion, anger, and anxiety, thus exemplifying how the practice of “doing gender” can be circumstantial. The findings underscore the importance of studying the rhetorical aspects of parental advice-seeking communications and illustrate how language and gender influence these communications.