Anita Taylor

Anita Taylor was born in southern Kansas, near Caldwell, during the dustbowl. She later attended the University of Missouri, where she obtained her Ph.D in Rhetoric and Public Address.

Taylor has taught or worked in administration at the university level for more than 45 years. She was chair of George Mason University Department of Communication and Performing Arts as well as the founding chair of the Communication Department there.

Taylor was elected president of the National Communication Association in 1981.

In 1991, Taylor received the Speech Communication Association’s first ever Francine Merritt award. This is an award from the National Communication Association in the memory of Francine Merritt who spent her career advocating for women. The award is presented every year at the NCA Women’s Caucus and goes to women who have contributed to women in communication.

Five years later, she was named Communicator of the Year by the Virginia Association of Communication Arts and Sciences.

In 2000, she was awarded the Distinguished Service Award by the National Communication Association, which she was selected to be a mentor for in 2003. She was also selected as inaugural Feminist Teacher/Mentor by the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language and Gender in 2002.

Taylor has contributed to the communication field by focusing mainly on women in education. Her first published book was Communicating, which was eventually published in six editions.

From 1989 until 2010 she was the editor of Women and Language, a research periodical. While working at this periodical she published many reviews of other scholars.

She has also edited the publications Gender and Conflict, Hearing Many Voices, and Women as Communicators: Studies of Women’s Talk.

• Taylor, A. (1975, 1992). Communicating (1st ed., 6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
• Taylor, A. (1979, 1984). Speaking in Public (1st ed.; 2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
• Taylor, A., Bate, B. (1988). Women Communicating: Studies of Women’s Talk. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
• Taylor, A. (1993). Language and the Construction of Gender: Clarifying Ideas about Gender. Annual Conference on Pragmatics and Language Learning, 1-27.
• Taylor, A. (1994). Meeting at the Crossroads. Women and Language, 17(2), 44.
• Taylor, A., Miller, J. B. (July 1994). Gender Diversity: Conceptions of a Changeable Variable. Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association, 1-42.
• Taylor, A. (1995). The Masculine Mystique: The politics of masculinity by Andrew Kimbrell. Women and Language, 13(2), 55.
• Taylor, A., Perry, L. A. M. (2001). Paradoxes: No simple matter. Women and Language, 24(2), 1-6.
• Taylor, A., & Hardman, M. J. (2004). War, language and gender, what new can be said? Framing the Issues. Women and Language, 27(2), 3-19.
• Taylor, A. (2007). Gender equity in communication skills. Handbook for Achieving Gender Equity Through Education. (pp. 281-303). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis Group.