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SHE_HE_IT

                                             February 24, 2015
                                             February 28, 2026

                                              MULTI_FEMINISMS    
                                              
    MISSING_PIECES            

There was a long series of symbolic issues that the feminists
of the 70s were interested in fighting, and a lot of them were
all about trying to correct linguistic biases.

                                    SYMBOLIC_ACTION

In this, as in many other things, they were influenced by the
civil rights movement, which had wanted to change the
terminology used to refer to the Americans too often called
demeaning names like "nigger".  The newly approved terms went
through a number of different phases: "negro",
"african-american", "black"...

Some battlegrounds in the feminist "language wars" (I bet
*someone* has called them that) were:

 o  Instead of using marital status to choose a woman's title,
    "Ms" was pushed as an alternate to "Miss" or "Mrs".

 o  Pushing explicitly gender-neutral names like "congressperson"
    vs. congressman.

 o  "Woman" was preferred to "girl" when speaking of adult women.

 o  Avoiding the use of "Man" to mean "humanity" (e.g. as in
    something like "The Ascent of Man").

 o  Begin using "he or she" rather than "he" as 3rd person
    general case.

These discussions were extremely widespread, and I think you'd
have to call this a big part of the mainstream of feminist
thought.  At a guess you'd find the source of most of them was
something very prominent like Gloria Steinam, "Ms. Magazine"
and NOW-- but I had very little direct knowledge of that
"mainstream" in those days.

                                                     ALL_ABOUT_ME_AND_FEMINISM

Since I'm doing a sort of half-assed "personal odyssey"
format (where I pretend it matters a lot what I thought and
think about these things): I was greatly distressed at the
clumsiness of the language required by all this, and the
way it undercut some great, ringing poetic phrases, like
"the destiny of man".  But then... if you look at what
actually gets done with a phrase like that, maybe we're
better off doing without it.  There's a lazy quality to
using grand phrases where people rarely examine the hidden
premises (Do we all have one joint destiny?  How do you
know?).

And in the case of "he or she": here was an insistance on some
really clumsy language they wanted to add to the core of the
language-- and to this day, I refuse to write this way,
typically I either dodge third person general pronouns
entirely, or abuse the plural form as a singular ("they"
instead of "he or she").  Later, I accumulated other
objections: the theory of linguistic determinism assumed here
seemed dubious to me (you might like to call this
"Sapir-Whorf", but to me it was always "Korzybski"-- the
pedigree was not impressive, and the idea philosophically
questionable).  There was an argument going around that people
who insisted on "he or she" just didn't understand standard
english very well.

But there were problems with my objections that became
apparent: For one thing, wasn't it clear that the feminists
had *succeeded* in changing standard english?  If you
believe in sticking to standard usage that also means you
need to change if standard usage changes.  Another point
was that if you actually listened to the way people talked,
it was clear that *no one* ever understood this point of
"standard" english.   My shop teacher would use "he" when
talking about typesetters, but suddenly switch to "she"
when talking about typists.

Recently, there's been some scientific evidence that the
structure of language really can influence thought and
perception, but even if we didn't have that, it was pretty clear
that arguing about this "symbolic" issue gave people an excuse
to make more substantive points-- I was in a computer science
class (with at least one female student) where the instructor
had to correct himself, because his pronoun usage showed he was
assuming women weren't progammers but that keypunch operators were.

But there were other linguistic experiments like this that were
less successful, like attempts at finding alternate spellings
for women such as "womyn" (so as not to imply that women were
some odd, alternate form of human)-- if anything, things liked this
help discredit feminists as silly fanatics.

And I think it's fair to say that the endless barrage of
demands for compliance on issues like this led to a
problem with fatigue.  The phrase "politically correct" was
originally an ironic joke used by members of the left.

                                                      ORIGINALPC


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