Last month, one of the least well-known but culturally important women in this country died at the age of 87: Kate Swift. If you’ve never heard of her, well that just proves the point. In 1970, she was asked to edit a sex-ed textbook, and in doing so, it suddenly struck her how biased the English language is against women. “It was the pronouns—they were overwhelmingly masculine-gendered.” So when she and her partner turned in the text, they added the recommendation to work on gender-neutral language such as replacing he, she, his, hers, him, and her with neutral pronouns. Although she failed to implement brand new words (some languages like French have gender-neutral personal pronouns already), she did manage to get people to stop saying stewardess and began a linguistic trend which we are still living with today. So the next time you’re frustrated at politically correct anti-gendering in language (or celebrating it, I suppose), blame Kate Swift.
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