3 - A history of gender, people, and pronouns: the story of generic he

Summary

Introduction

Contemporary question

The sexist nature of generic he has been established in linguistic scholarship for at least two decades. (Martyna 1978, 1980a, 1980b are perhaps the most cited studies; see Newman 1997: 9–61 for a good summary.) As the brief survey of selected grammar books at the end of this chapter shows, modern grammarians and style guide writers have reached a consensus: generic he is sexist and should be avoided. There are, however, still grammatical pundits who hold fast to generic he as stylistically preferred; and findings about the sexist nature of generic he have certainly been contested even within linguistic circles. The Harvard “incident” in 1971 is one of the more famous instances; the head of the Linguistics department described the generic masculine as simply a feature of grammar (and a “natural” one at that) and dismissed protesting female students as having “pronoun envy” (as cited in Romaine 1999: 105–106).

Modern debate on this question has been framed as though it were a grammatical question (e.g., number agreement), and feminists have fought hard to move the debate from the rhetoric of “objective” grammar rules to a discussion of the semantic and social implications of those rules. In a natural gender system, the pronoun he can no longer be a purely grammatical form with no meaningful content about the gender of the referent.