Gender-neutral language really burns some people’s beans. One common argument against gender-neutral language is that it’s something new. See, everyone was fine with generic he up until [insert some turning point usually in the 1960s or 1970s], which means concerns about gender neutrality in language are just manufactured complaints by “arrogant ideologues” or people over-concerned with “sensitivity”, and therefore ought to be ignored.
I have two thoughts on this argument. The first: so what? Society progresses, and over time we tend to realize that certain things we used to think were just fine weren’t. The fact that we didn’t see anything wrong with it before doesn’t mean we were right then and wrong now. Furthermore, women have gained power and prominence in many traditionally male-dominated areas, so even if gender-neutral language had been unnecessary in the past (e.g., when all Congressmen were men), that wouldn’t mean it’s a bad idea now.
But my second thought is this: the very premise is wrong. Concerns about gender-neutral language date back far beyond our lifetimes. Here are a few examples:
Freshmen. In the mid-19th century, the first American women’s colleges appeared. One of the earliest of these, Elmira College, had to figure out what to call the first year students, i.e. freshmen. For its first ten years, Elmira referred to this class as the protomathians, before deciding to return to the established usage. Rutgers, similarly, proposed novian to replace “freshman” when they began accepting female students.
Mankind. You can go pretty far back in English and see examples of mankind being viewed as non-gender-neutral. This led some authors who wanted to avoid any confusion about whether they were including women to use the phrase “mankind and womankind”; here’s Anthony Trollope doing so in 1874, and other people’s attestations from 1858, 1843, 1783, and 1740. This suggests that mankind was viewed as sufficiently likely to be non-generic as to cause at least hesitation if not confusion. In some sense, this is sort of an early generic he or she. Speaking of which…
He or she. He or she really gets people’s goats, and to some extent I can see why; it’s not short and simple like pronouns standardly are, and it can throw off the rhythm of the sentence. (This is why I prefer singular they.) Given that it’s ungainly, you might suspect, as most people do, that this is a new usage that only appeared once it was too politically incorrect to ignore women. But while it only started getting popular in the 70s, it’s been used much longer than that. Here it appears 19 times in two paragraphs in an 1864 book of Mormon Doctrine. Turning from religion to law, here it is in an 1844 Maryland law, and here it is in various British laws from 1815. Here’re examples from Acts passed by the First American Congress in 1790, and so on and so on.
Person as a morpheme. Another common complaint is about supposedly ugly new words like salesperson or chairperson or firefighter.* But such gender-neutralized forms were already being created as needed before the 1970s. Here’s salesperson used 100 times in a book from 1916.** Here’s another example, in the title of an article discussing paying commission to salespeople back in 1919. The OED offers even older examples, with tradesperson in 1886 and work-person in 1807.
Singular they. I know I sound like a broken record on this point, but singular they — using they in place of generic he for singular referents of unknown gender — has been around a long, long time. Henry Churchyard’s site lists off examples spanning from 1400 to the present day, with a special focus on Jane Austen’s 75 singular uses of their.
In conclusion, I’m definitely not saying that gender-neutral language was as prominent in the past as it is today. I’m just saying that when someone says that everyone was fine with non-neutral English up until the 1970s, they’re wrong. Clearly people were concerned about this before then, and adjusted the language to be gender-neutral when it seemed appropriate. This is not something totally new; it is not unprecedented; it is not a dastardly attempt to undermine the English language. It is just an expansion of an existing concern about English usage.
—
*: I just want to jump in and note that I find firefighter more precise and cooler-sounding than fireman; then again, I may have some unresolved issues with the latter term stemming from the difficulties I had in beating Fire Man when playing Mega Man.
**: The first part of this book is even titled “The Salesperson and Efficient Salesmanship”, showing gradient gender-neutrality decision-making, where gender-neutral forms are used when the gender is prominent or easily removed, and non-neutral forms when the gender is subtler or difficult to remove.
Motivated Grammar 
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May 30, 2012 at 6:10 pm
Lisa
I generally use “she or he” because I find that always saying ‘she’ in writing isn’t quite right either. I use ‘they’ when talking though.
May 30, 2012 at 8:02 pm
tdaxp
Hi,
I have never read this blog before. A friend of mine, who I respect, shared this page with me, and urged me to comment. So that is why I am writing.
This is the crux of your post:
“In conclusion, I’m definitely not saying that gender-neutral language was as prominent in the past as it is today. I’m just saying that when someone says that everyone was fine with non-neutral English up until the 1970s, they’re wrong”
In other words, you spend all these word to attack a strawman argument no one can seriously believe. At best this post is a waste of time. At worst it is intentionally deceptive — a form of lying.
Or perhaps its just cheap infotainment. Again, I don’t read this blog. Maybe that was your intention.
To be actually worth listening to, it strikes me that this post on gender-neutral language should in some way address the tension over the introduction of prespective gender-usage around the 1970s. There’s trade-offs here, including ideological and aesthetic ones.
But instead, this post (if not a waste of time or a form of deceipt) is cheap infotainment. I’m curious what your motive was for writing it, because it does seem from your writing that you’re capable of better than this.
May 30, 2012 at 11:54 pm
Rilian
People *do* think that gender neutral terms were invented out of nowhere in the 70’s. People have said that to me.
May 31, 2012 at 3:16 am
Eugene
tdaxp,
Because this is your first time reading the blog, you are forgiven for not being able to even imagine that there’s a long history of discussion on this topic and that the issue goes back all the way to Middle English when the language transitioned from grammatical gender to natural gender.
There’s a book called The Story of English which nicely lays out the social history of the language (with a few linguistic details) and a really interesting book called A History of the English Language by Baugh and Cable that provides a lot of technical details.
I think that you are actually looking for cheap infotainment and not finding it;.
May 31, 2012 at 4:48 am
tdaxp
Rilian,
Have you ever followed up, or did you leap to the conclusion that people are idiots?
Did you ever ask: “So you are telling me that never, not once, were these terms been used, correctly or incorrectly, in a standard or non-standard way, before 1970”?
Because that’s all this post is. Arguing that the presence of these usages are greater than 0, and one or two authors was fond of them.
Ain’t that a kicker? ;-)
Eugene,
I’m not as ignorant as you think. Attacking me might be easier than attacking what I’ve written, but it’s a distraction. I assure you I’m able to imagine that the use of a neuter gender, and for that matter all sorts of latinizations, were of interest in England long ago.
Perhaps it had a different motive than the current push for gender-neutral language, though.
May 31, 2012 at 5:31 am
Reflecting on the reflexive pronoun ‘themself’ « Sentence first
[…] they has featured a few times in the lingua-blog world of late, with Motivated Grammar noting its antiquity and Language Hat linking to Language Hippie’s sensible defence of it. On a […]
May 31, 2012 at 8:24 am
Eugene
tdaxp,
No attack intended.I was just suggesting that there is another point of view. It is my opinion that a historical perspective tends to temper our positions on these issues.
There are empirical facts out there to be discovered and discussed.
These things really are complicated, and I would not pretend to know everything about how the language has come to be how it is today.
I mentioned Baugh and Cable because I was by chance reading their discussion of English pronouns earlier today. Big changes were going on, and we’ve inherited a relatively messy situation.
We do not have a completely logical person/gender pronoun system. How we might resolve this problem is interesting. I can’t see that there is some infallible right or wrong about it.
I did not use the term “ignorant” in reference to your comment. Nor did I accuse anybody of lying or wasting anybody’s time as you did.
This is an interesting blog. I really learn a lot here. That’s the spirit of the thing. We sometimes mix it up and misunderstand each other, but I wouldn’t take it personally.
May 31, 2012 at 8:57 am
tdaxp
Eugene,
Thank you for your comment in reply.
You never called me ignorant. You said I was “unable to imagine” that this is a top that’s been interesting for a long time. That’s an accusaion much closer to stupidity (lack of mental ability) than ignorance (lack of specific knowledge). Though in my experience it seems to be rare to encounter someone who both is affectionate for gender-neutral pronouns and also believes that intelligence is a meaningful concept. But I disgress….
You intended no attack. I intended no offense. We’re both here to be interesting. :-)
I agree with you completely on the messy nature of english. A Germanic tongue with a Latinate vocabulary? Could you invent a better form of torture if you tried?! :-)
I stand by my original comment, by the way — it’s hard to imagine a motivation for the original post which wasn’t deception or cheap infotainment. Did the author believe he (or she, or he or she, or they, if you insist ;-) ) was being insightful?
May 31, 2012 at 10:47 am
Gabe
tdaxp: I don’t think this argument is as straw-mannish as you suggest, mostly because I think you’ve misunderstood my intended argument. In fact, I intended the caveat to avoid deceit by pointing out what I hadn’t shown.
The claim I’m arguing against is that there is no motivation underlying gender-neutral language other than radical feminism. That it’s an “enforced agenda” rather than a “natural evolution” (see this article by a professor of English at Houston Baptist University). That, as Yale prof David Gelernter put it in the first link in my post:
“students have been ordered since first grade to put “he or she” in spots where “he” would mean exactly the same thing, and “firefighter” where “fireman” would mean exactly the same thing”
My point with this data is to show that, before anything that one could call “radical feminism” had power, people were adjusting their language to be more gender-neutral, and that this in turn suggests the presence of a bottom-up interest in gender-neutrality. This data shows that, contrary to Gelernter’s claim, people don’t all think of “he or she” as meaning the exact same thing as generic “he”, not even in the pure language that Gelernter imagines existed some time ago. (In fact, Gelernter praises Austen’s “pure simple English”, but she’s one of the most extensive literary users of singular “they”.)
My use of “everyone” in my conclusion is based off of the arguments I see; here’s an example from the second link in the post:
“Everyone understood that ‘he’ was just a generic pronoun to be used when referring to an antecedent of unknown gender or which could be of either gender.”
Now, clearly, “everyone” isn’t quite “everyone”; the point isn’t invalidated if I find a single person (who might have an axe to grind or not understand English) who replaced generic “he” with “he or she”. That’s why I compiled multiple examples, in different constructions, and with sources ranging from high-minded (e.g., the women’s colleges) to the everyday (e.g., the commissioned salespeople). To establish the specific rate of gender-neutral language usage over time is difficult and I simply don’t have time to do so. But the argument I am making in this post is that it was historically higher than many people think. Concerns about gender-neutrality in English predated the later ideological push; if it’s an enforced agenda, it’s one based on a natural evolution.
Lastly, I agree with your proposed post; to some extent I’ve already talked about this trade-off in another post, but not in real depth. Were this a paper, I’d certainly have to address it.
May 31, 2012 at 11:25 am
tdaxp
Hey Gabe,
Thank you for your kind comment. I retract my claims that your post appears to be either an example of deceit or infotainment. I no longer hold either of these views.
That said, you continue to attack strawmen, and the method you try to use appears to be (radicaly?) inappropriate to the question you are interested in.
For the straw-man, I don’t know what “radical feminism” is. I don’t know where it would fall in, say, the waves of feminist theory which are often discussed in the IR literature, or for that matter in other areas. It sounds like it’s either an insult one might use against all feminists generally, or else as an ironic insult, as a way to describe the boggeymen of someone who opposes one’s preferred brand of feminism. The wikipedia page gives a vague, widely-encompassing , and self-contradictory definition followed by a long list of criticisms from all over the ideological map.
In my experience, advocates of gender-neutral usages tend to be highly educated (or aspire to be), white, native-born, reliable voters for the Democratic Party, and politically left-of-center (at least when it comes to social issues). I know of no “radical feminists” in that group, but that seems irrelevent to usage prescriptions being an enforced agenda.
More important is your method, which is just inappropriate. I assume from your (warm and lucid) response you’re a trained qualitative researcher. But you’re trying to measure a question which is essentially socially scientific with non-scientific methods. It seems that if you wanted to test whether or not there was an enforced agenda in the usage of neuter pronouns you’d first try to identify several corpora
1. A corpus of work by the potentially enforcing group
2. A corpus of work by the potentially enforced group
3. A mechanism by which enforcement could be transmitted
4. A change in the enforced corpus lagging the change in the enforcing corpus mediated through the identified mechanism
Perhaps you’re working on this, in which case this blog post (as an airy exploration) makes sense. Perhaps not. As I said above, I’ve not read your blog before.
May 31, 2012 at 11:59 am
Emily
Bonus points for us of the phrase “gradient gender-neutrality decision-making”.
May 31, 2012 at 3:51 pm
madbandril
I don’t see why Gabe’s method is inappropriate. As far as I can see, what’s going on here is pretty simple: people like Gelernter and Markos claim that gender-neutral language arose in the 70s because of some sort of feminist agenda. Gabe is demonstrating that this claim is false.
May 31, 2012 at 5:06 pm
tdaxp
madbandril,
I agree that Gabe is reacting to people who make such a claim.
What I am denying is that Gabe’s evidence — or even his approach — could possibly provide anything but the most hesitant or support for denying such a claim.
May 31, 2012 at 8:10 pm
madbandril
The burden of proof is with the people making the claim. To falsify the claim, it’s sufficient to provide evidence of attempts to use gender-neutral language before the 70s.
May 31, 2012 at 8:16 pm
tdaxp
“The burden of proof is with the people making the claim.”
Well, close.
More specifically, the null hypothesis is always against the person making the claim, so the onus is on disproving that.
“To falsify the claim, it’s sufficient to provide evidence of attempts to use gender-neutral language before the 70s.”
Your language is vague, so I’m not sure of your meaning. Let me put it this way:
The person making the claim, that, say, gender-neutral language is an enforced usage has the burden of proving that.
Likewise, the person making the claim that gender-neutral language is not an enforced usage, has the burden of so proving.
Between these two extremes, we say, “I don’t know.”
May 31, 2012 at 8:41 pm
madbandril
But the question here as I understand it is not whether it is enforced, it’s whether it’s new. And it’s not new, so the people claiming that it is new are wrong.
May 31, 2012 at 8:44 pm
madbandril
That is, if you think that gender-neutral language was started in the 70s by feminists, then go ahead and do the tests. But the evidence suggests that that isn’t the case, gender-neutral language started long before that.
May 31, 2012 at 8:47 pm
tdaxp
Hey madbandril,
“it’s whether it’s new”
That’s what I called the straw-man in my original comment. It’s such a stupid claim no one can possibly believe it. It’s a straw-man used to avoid actual engagement with the issue.
June 1, 2012 at 6:23 am
madbandril
People do believe it. Gelernter seems to believe it: “But in the 1970s and ’80s, arrogant ideologues began recasting English into heavy artillery to defend the borders of the New Feminist state.” Then he goes on to praise Jane Austen, unaware that she used gender neutral language.
June 1, 2012 at 6:25 am
tdaxp
Madbandril,
Again you persist in your strawman, even though the passage you quote has nothing to do with it being new!
He’s claiming – in the passage you quote – its enforced, beginning in the 1970s, by “arrogant ideologues” with a political-feminist agenda. That’s a separate discussion from it being new.
Are you so unsure of your position that you have to revert to this ridiculous strawmen?
June 1, 2012 at 10:29 am
Gabe
I think a lot of this discussion is still hinging on something that I’m not trying to say. I am not saying that, nor investigating whether, there is no agenda whatsoever behind the rise of gender-neutral language. That would be, to borrow the word of the moment, a strawman. Obviously the rise in gender-neutral language was not something that just happened; it happened because of reform efforts by people who care about gender-neutrality in English. I personally feel that this is a good thing, but that’s neither here nor there.
My argument is nothing more than showing that in addition to the self-evident reform efforts (or “radical feminist agenda” if one thinks it sinister), there was also a baseline level of interest in gender-neutral language, and a perceived need for it at times, prior to the rise of women in American society. Despite the claims made by the detractors of gender-neutral language, generic he has not been seen by everyone to be sufficiently generic in all cases. That may sound like a strawman, but as the quote I put in my last comment shows, it’s a strawman held by some anti-neutralists.
June 1, 2012 at 11:42 am
tdaxp
“That may sound like a strawman, but as the quote I put in my last comment shows, it’s a strawman held by some anti-neutralists.”
When do you quote any such thing?
The closest you’ve come is a mention of ‘Everyone’ — but then you immediately backtrack, and appear to say that it was obvious from context the use of ‘everyone’ was rhetorical, to mean something like a great many, a large majority, etc.
If you admit your opponents are saying that, then establishing the existence of a ‘baseline’ level is pointless, as you concede your opponents also believe such a baseline level exists.
This goes back to why I originally assumed you were being deceptive: it is hard to understand the motive for going on about such an obvious, unconstested point, unless you are trying to paint your antagonist as a strawman.
June 1, 2012 at 12:05 pm
Gabe
My interpretation of the argument is that “everyone” does not mean merely a majority, but crucially any reasonable person — i.e., everyone save those who are pushing an agenda and thus willingly ignoring the standard interpretation. That is why I showed that a range of seemingly neutral language users used gender-neutral language.
June 1, 2012 at 2:03 pm
Jenny
Wow! Lots of discussion about very little. Gabe, I thought this was a very interesting article. It seems obvious (now that I think of it) that folks would have had a historical need for gender neutral language, but if you’d asked, I probably would have guessed them newer constructions. I have such mixed feelings about the neutralization of words, particularly those that came about during the sixties and seventies, probably because those words are still so politically charged for us. Politically charged language can be instrumental in making a set of issues more evident, but can also have the effect of letting people (who oppose your stance) know that they should stop listening. For this reason, i like having an avenue to express things in neutral language, both in terms of gender and politics. Our current (and probably all) political environment is so connected to party rhetoric, it spreads to the way we speak even about apolitical things. For this reason, I find it important to avoid red herring terms that might stop someone listening to me before they’ve begun (even when it may be something they’d want to hear). I think when we look at things level-headedly, we do all understand a neutral ‘he,’ but by the same token, we also understand a neutral ‘she.’ I don’t like what either of them communicates in our modern world, and unless I were trying to make a politicized statement of one form or another, I would avoid either in favor of the politically (though perhaps not grammatically) neutral singular ‘they,’ which doesn’t feel charged to me… Well, except that the little grammarian that still lives in my head (despite the eviction notice) dies a little each time I use it (although that’s another fine argument in favor of singular they :)
June 3, 2012 at 4:53 pm
Eric H. Roth (@compellingtalks)
Persuasive and pleasurable. You’ve done an exceptional job deconstructing the false premise behind the mysterious objective to using “their” too. Thank you!
June 3, 2012 at 5:27 pm
Andrew
I have another interesting example from the 19th century. The book “Bike Snob” quotes (on p. 26) a column from the New York Times in the 1890s referring to cyclists as “wheelmen and wheelwomen.”
August 22, 2012 at 7:12 am
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August 22, 2012 at 9:32 am
Gabe
Jenny: Sorry I forgot to respond to your comment earlier, but I appreciate your ability to end an argument that was getting less and less meaningful. Your point is well-taken and explained the sort of idea I had far better than I was.
April 1, 2013 at 4:45 am
Chloe
You’ve put gender neutrality into a whole new perspective.
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April 8, 2020 at 9:50 pm
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“My cousin enjoyed this exchange.” “Oh, what did they say?”