THIRTY-NINE years ago, when the Jewish Chronicle was still recognisable as a newspaper, my partner and I sent a notice to the Social and Personal column announcing the birth of our twin sons.

The JC was happy to include our announcement, they said, but would need to edit our names, changing Julia Bard and David Rosenberg to David and Julia Bard-Rosenberg. We protested. They insisted. It was “policy.”

Couples with children, it seemed, had to have the same surname in case their readers suspected, God forbid, that they weren’t married. We were, as it happens (which is another story), and I kept my name.

The rise of Second Wave feminism in the late 1960s and early ’70s gave us confidence not just to start describing our lives, publicly, as women, and to demand change, but to challenge the bias in the very words at our disposal to name ourselves and define our experiences.

I’m an editor, too, and still regularly have to use my skills and hard-won power to change “man-made” to “manufactured,” “mankind” to “humanity,” “manned” to “staffed” … But still the male-as-norm persists, and woman remains rather obscured in these capacious, supposedly all-embracing terms.

The difficulty is that when we devise new terminology to reflect previously muted or distorted realities, our raw materials are the old words and the concepts they carry. They can and do change their meanings but we can’t remove them completely from the patriarchal contexts in which they were coined and have evolved and been used.

So the old ideas persist. Some organisations insist on addressing me as “Mrs” to avoid inadvertently “downgrading” me to “Miss,” and I still receive occasional letters addressed to Julia Rosenberg or Julia Bard-Rosenberg — and in my fury and frustration I shout words that we have inherited from the sexist Saxons.

When this happened recently, I was reminded of the work of a ground-breaking feminist writer, Dale Spender. Her book, Man Made Language, published in 1980, explored how language is imbued with assumptions of male dominance so that, for women, the meanings of words do not reflect their reality.

As a result, we have traditionally distorted our perceptions, self-expression and image to match the way we were described by men. The feminism of the 1970s, when women brought their previously hidden woman-to-woman conversations out into the light, started to remould our language to match our world.

This was a profound challenge to the very fabric of the personal, political, social and economic inequality of our world. And as our means of self-expression changed to describe our experiences more accurately, our demands gathered pace.

Just one example. It’s hard to imagine now, but the term “sexual harassment” did not exist until the 1970s. Before that, women in the workplace were seen as fair game.

The very word “secretary” carried a whole constellation of ideas in popular culture. It evoked an image of a pretty young thing — a girl — perhaps unconscious of her power, luring her helpless boss into sexual encounters, leaving his wife — another word bearing a heavy burden of meanings — an unequal competitor.

The droit du seigneur — the medieval right claimed by noblemen to have sexual relations with (rape) their women subjects, particularly young women before they joined their husbands on their wedding night, which was challenged so powerfully during the Enlightenment in the 18th century — was thriving, unnamed and tacitly accepted, in offices, shops, factories and film studios in the late 20th century.

Describing this as sexual harassment was transformative: it shifted the presumption of guilt from the woman to the man. It enabled women to define the experience and their feelings about it. That was the first step to challenging it in law. It didn’t end it, and often results in claims that the sex was consensual, that no meant yes, or that the woman is simply lying — as they do. The struggle goes on.

This is not just about women: it’s about power. Spender’s work drew on what other writers, from Gramsci onwards, had said about class and ethnic minorities: that our culture embodies the values and interests of those with power and influence, and this embeds the powerless in an ideological frame of reference that doesn’t match their reality.

The very words at the disposal of marginalised and powerless people to express themselves and describe their world have been forged and defined as the norm by those who hold power over them.

The weirdly posh language of old BBC programmes, with regional and working-class speech reserved for comedy or crime, was the backdrop to my 1950s childhood. There were real social and economic penalties for deviating from the “respectable” norm.

The Beatles’ refusal to conceal their Scouse backgrounds generated a great deal of harrumphing at the time. One interviewer said to Paul McCartney: “Mr Edward Heath, the Lord Privy Seal, said the other night he found it difficult to distinguish what you were saying as Queen’s English.” “Oh yeah,” replied McCartney. The interviewer persisted: “Are you going to try and lose some of your Liverpool dialect for the Royal Show?” “No,” said McCartney, “We wouldn’t bother doing that. We don’t all speak like them BBC posh fellas, you know.”

The cultural and political rebellions of the 1960s set the foundations for people like Harold Rosen and Chris Searle to argue in the following decade that black and working-class people were discriminated against through the very medium they had to express themselves. They said that requiring them to use white middle-class code was like requiring them to use a foreign language.

This was true but it was — and is — not just a “foreign” language. Most people in the world, apart from mother-tongue English speakers, function effortlessly in more than one language. What they were describing was domination. The hierarchies we experience in our daily lives are embedded in and normalised by the words we use, and the meanings we attribute to them, and we need to change that — continuously.

There have been so many analyses of the differences between words that describe women and men which, even after so many decades of campaigning, and real gains achieved by feminists, mean it is still hard to escape the assumption that male is the norm and female the deviation or lesser version — male minus (lacking, among other things, that marvellous appendage, which, apparently, we envy).

On TV quiz shows, men are called men and women are still routinely called girls. When former boys’ names like Shirley, Beverley and Evelyn started to be popular for girls, they instantly acquired a low-status (feminine) association and are almost unknown in men today.

Meanwhile, actual girls’ names, like Karen or Shanice, are used as terms of sexist, racist and class abuse and derision. This has real, terrible consequences, and indicates the fragility of the changes feminism has won.

Spender wrote: “Those who have the power to name the word are in a position to influence reality.” We can change both the words and the meanings, but knowing that we are building on a history of competition and domination, we have to do more than turn the inequalities embodied in our language upside down.

No-one is liberated from oppression by becoming an oppressor. Instead, we have to forge a truly liberatory, non-hierarchical language to envisage and describe the future we need to win.