摘 要

习语作为语言很重要的一部分，揭示了人们的生活状况，在很大程度上反映了人们的价值观和信仰，因此从习语方面探讨社会问题更具有广泛的代表性和极强的说服力。然而有一部分的英语习语表达出对女性性别歧视的这一社会现象。本文利用大量实例从女性的地位、婚姻、言语、智慧和性吸引五个方面阐述了英语习语中反映女性歧视的现象，分析了性别歧视形成的历史根源、社会现实和文化影响。旨在通过对英语习语的分析揭示语言中对女性的歧视，从而提高人们对这一现象的认识，继而减少甚至消除在日常生活及语言中的性别歧视现象，使歧视性的语言得以改善，最终提高女性的社会地位，使男女平等的观念深入人心。

关键词：英语习语；性别歧视；歧视语言；女性地位
 
Abstract

    Idiom, as a quite important part of language, reflects the colorful life of people throughout history. To a great extent, idioms can show the values and beliefs of human beings. Thus, idioms are more representative and persuasive to be used to          probe into the social problems in language. However, some idioms tend to reflect the sex bias that females are defamed and valueless. This paper discusses the phenomenon of female discrimination in English idioms with a great number of examples from  four aspects of status, marriage, wisdom and sex attraction , then try to analyze the causes of the phenomenon from four standpoints of Social Reality, Cultural influences, physiological factor and psychological factor.. The thesis aims to expose sex discrimination through analyzing English idioms, thereby helping improve people’s awareness, to better modify sex bias language, so as to reduce even eliminate the sexism phenomenon in language and daily life and to enhance greatly the social status of women. As a result, the concept of men and women being equal will sink deep into the hearts of people.

Key words: English idiom; sex bias; sexism in language; women's status
 
1. Introduction
Language is a mirror of the world. Everything is reflected in the mirror. In English countries, though people advocate equal rights for everyone, there are a lot of inequities, such as unequal rights between men and women, which are also reflected in the mirror of language. This phenomenon is called sexism in the English language. It can be
either explicit, as in the prejudicial use of male or female pronouns, or implicit. From
the development and changes of the language, people can conclude that sex discrimination does not only exists in China, but in all the countries. Therefore how does English language reflect the social phenomenon? Language, which is a social phenomenon, has a close relationship with the social attitudes of human beings. It is a communication tool that has no sexism in itself. However, as language is affected a lot by society, sexism, which exists in society, can also be found in language. Idiom is actually a pure concentration of the entire culture and social life. Thus, idioms are more representative and persuasive to be used to make a research on gender bias in language. With the development of sociolinguistics and the coming of women’s rights movement, language and gender researches have developed into a period of rapid development. Many linguists have done a lot of researches, and most results of their works are valuable. From those researches they have an amazing discovery that sex discrimination against women exists in language. Linguists say the main cause of this specific phenomenon is that, people in different nations have common ground in experience and concepts, so idioms in different cultures have inevitable coincidences.As for the cause of the phenomena of sexist language, the forming mechanisms of gender difference in language are very complicated.