The Personal is Still the Political “Anything you can do I can do better; I can do anything better than you” (Berlin). These iconic lyrics were part of a cheerful duet in a 1940’s Broadway musical making jest that a woman could compete against a man in various tasks such as singing and archery. Little did society know that women truly believed that this was the case, and it was an idea worth fighting for. Over the course of the twentieth-century, women have fought and protested for equality among men in a male-dominate society. Women have rallied under one of the best known slogans of the movement the “personal is political”, the concept that the personal (private) life should be addressed equally with the public (political) life that had yet to integrate women into its realm. “the personal is political refers to the private life or “realm” of women having anything to do with marriage, children or household roles and the public realm of men having anything to do with business, politics, art, or sports. Renowed poet and writer Gloria Anzaldua has her own interpretation of what the “personal is political” means and what she was challenging specifically when she argued using her own experiences such as the loss of culture through the loss of language, and sexism in language as a starting point. “The personal is political” played a very significant role in helping shape the women’s rights movement from its roots all the way to its end in the 1960’s with the advent of the Civil Rights Act. T.V. Reed, an English professor specializing in U.S. social movements at Washington State University and author of the book “The Art of Protest” proposed the idea that women of the movement focused primarily on conscious-raising of “the personal is political” out to the public en masse by forming small action committees to address household issues and bring them to the political level (Reed 76). By doing so, women were able to effectively raise awareness regarding the multiple problems that women faced on a daily basis at home that were often left ignored due to the social norms that oppressed women at the time. These problems concerned primarily on altering “the issue of politics to include the personal ‘private’ sphere [thereby] address[ing] the full range of ways in which women were oppressed” (Reed 77). Women wanted a say in when they wanted to have children, they wanted the choice to whether or not have sex with their partner, and wanted to do more than just cooking and cleaning every day. Women were also interested in becoming part of the “public” sphere that was dominated by as they deemed themselves just as capable of working in business, politics, the government, or professional sports as men were. However, “The personal is political” is not limited to just addressing the private issues of women at the public level as Reed described it; it can also be used to raise awareness about other issues such as how language is very representative of one’s native culture. When language comes to mind, one usually associated certain ethnic groups to a particular language such as English to Americans, or Spanish to Latinos, but most people do not consider that language is also a cultural identity and that it can be lost when a new language is imposed onto said groups. This is also an example of “The personal is political”. Gloria Anzaldua explains the concept of the loss of cultural identity through the learning of a new language in her essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” when she mentions how “Chicano Spanish, a language considered by purist Spanish speakers as a mutilation of the language, is anevolving tongue that came to be due to the Chicano population’s need to identify themselves as a separate entity from the rest o the world (Anzaldua 75). As a result, this created a large sense of nationalistic pride among her audience that they were not Mexican-Americans; rather they were Mexicans born in America (Chicanos) and unashamed to be them. According to Lea Ramsdell, author of the book Language and Identity Politic; the Linguistic Autobiographies of Latinos in the United States, she agrees with the idea that “The personal is political” when she mentions how Anzaldua embraces her Chicano Spanish or “Spanglish” medium through which to communicate her politics of tolerance, of acceptance of the grey area, of mestizaje (Ramsdell 166). In the process, she is speaking not only for herself but for her community as well, many of whom have been displaced by their families solely based on how they speak and not what they say. In relation to language and families, language was also used to belittle women and female children in Mexican culture. Gloria Anzaldua recalled how as a child she was often reprimanded “[por] ser habladora” for a being a gossip and talking too much, ignoring the norm that “Muchachitas bien ciradas” do not talk back to their parents (Alzaldua 76). Such words would never be used to refer to a boy or a man, further raising the idea that language itself can be sexist, another idea that Anzaldua raised through her platform “The personal is political”. Anne L. Bower, supporting author of the “Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism” Journal, makes notes that “mujeres de color” or women of color often fell victim to oppression language with either their husbands or society to the point where “many of her sister-writers’ have been tempted to sell out their beliefs” or conform to what the norm for colored female writers was (Bower). In doing so, they avoided persecution form their families and society for “ser habladora” and had a better chance in becoming successful in their field but their writings often lacked the punch that Gloria Anzaldua had in her writing with Borderlands La Frontera. Digging deeper into Anzaldua’s chapter in Borderlands La Frontera “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” she recalls a visit to the dentist’s office where the dentist was telling her repeatedly “’We’re going to have to control your tongue’… ‘We’re going to have to do something about your tongue’”, hear[ing] the raising anger in his voice she ponders “how do you tame a wild, train it to be quiet?” (Anzaldua 75) Taming a wild tongue is a metaphor for how to change someone’s use of their native language, to the American Standard: English. Tongue struggling represents the anger expressed Gloria continually speaking her ative “tongue”, and her dentist’s anger represents the anger expressed by Americans who do not know the language and are unwilling to adapt. Anzaldua briefly elaborates on two speech courses all Chicano students had to take at Pan American University: “their purpose: to get rid of out accents… wild tongues are “tamed” by cutting them out, or forcing them to “cut” their accent out (Anzaldua 76). By having their tongues forcibly tamed, Chicanos are being corralled away from their cultural heritage, abandoning it in the process in order to fit in with American culture and for a change to be successful in life. Anzaldua fully believed that no one should have to give up their culture in order to succeed in life. By using her Chicano Spanish to convey her message of tolerance to both the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking populations, she embodied “The personal is political” and gave it her own meaning, making her argument even stronger. Women challenged the status quo when they marched the streets in enormous numbers, demanding that they be treated equally alongside men under the law using “The personal is political” as one of their main platforms. As a result, they garnered much attention from the media and the government eventually giving women both the right and the opportunity to have the same jobs as men do such as being a business executive, a professional athlete, or becoming a part of politics. Despite the fact that these changes occurred over forty years ago, there is still a lasting impact resulting from women integrating into the previously male dominated public sphere such as the elimination of the term “businessman” in a favor of a more gender-friendly term “business executive” and “news anchor” for “anchorman”. Also, the right to freely speak any language without fear of having one’s tongue tamed in public institutions such as schools and restaurants was at least influenced through Gloria Anzaldua and her politics of personal language reflecting one’s own culture. “The personal is political” is very relevant even today with the U.S. Supreme Court now attempting to redefine what marriage is in plight of gay couples across the nation who cannot get married or their marriage is not recognized at the federal level as being real due to current laws allowing only heterosexual couples to be married. Whether or not gay marriage becomes officially recognized in the United States, “The personal is political” still served its purpose as being a very effective method to raise consciousness about issues that often ignored, and that is its own feat.

Works Cited
Anzaldúa, Gloria. "How to Tame a Wild Tongue." Borderlands = La Frontera. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. 75-81. Print.
Berlin, Irving, Bing Crosby, Dick Haymes, and Vic Schoen. "Anything You Can Do." Annie Get Your Gun. Decca, 1947. Vinyl recording.
Bower, Anne L. "Dear----: In Search of New (Old) Forms of Critical Address." Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture. Ed. Gilroy Amanda and W. M. Verhoeven. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. 155-175. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 230. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 14 Apr. 2013.
Ramsdell, Lea. "Language and Identity Politics: the Linguistic Autobiographies of Latinos in the United States." Journal of Modern Literature 28.1 (2004): 166+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 2 Apr. 2013
Reed, T. V. "The Poetical Is the Political." The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle. 1st ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2005. 75-102. Print.