Anna Livia, Pronoun envy: Literary uses of linguistic gender. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. x, 237 (including index). Hb $49.95, pb $29.95.

Extract

In 1971, women students at the Harvard Divinity School began protesting the use in their classes of BOMFOG (“brotherhood of man, fatherhood of god”) talk, the equation of the universal with the masculine exemplified by apparently generic uses of forms like he and man. Responding to reports of these protests in the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's linguistics faculty wrote a letter to the editor explaining that English masculine forms were linguistically “unmarked” for gender and patronizingly assuring the protestors that “there is no need for anxiety or pronoun envy” (quoted in Livia, p. 3). Once launched, that phrase begged to be a title, and Anna Livia's enlightening book is a most suitable bearer. This is a volume from which linguists and others interested in the linguistic encoding of gender can learn much.