“De-Sexing the English Language” appeared in the first issue of Ms. magazine. Since that spring of 1972, the effort to remove sex bias from English has gone in and out of intellectual and cultural fashion, but it has succeeded in some ways.
What Sparked the Idea?
The “De-Sexing the English Language” article was written by Casey Miller and Kate Swift. Both had worked as editors and said they became “revolutionized” upon editing a junior high sex education manual which seemed to pay more attention to boys than girls. They realized that the problem was in the use of mostly male pronouns.
Words Loaded With Sex Bias
Casey Miller and Kate Swift argued that a word such as “mankind” is problematic because it defines both men and women as male. In other words, the generic human is assumed to be male. This recalls Simone de Beauvoir’s argument in The Second Sex that woman is “the Other,” always the object of a male subject. By calling attention to the hidden bias in words like “mankind,” feminists attempted to make not just language but also society more inclusive of women.
Policing the Language?
Some critics of inclusive language efforts use terms like “language police” to describe the de-sexing of language. However, Casey Miller and Kate Swift actually resisted the notion of telling people what to do. They were more interested in analysis of how language reflects bias in society than in writing a manual of how to replace one word with another.
The Next Steps
Some English language use has changed since the 1960s. For example, people commonly refer to police officers instead of policemen and flight attendants instead of stewardesses. These titles demonstrate that sex bias in language can go along with sex bias in societal roles. The very title of the magazine, Ms., is an alternative to forcing a woman to reveal her marital status through the use of either Mrs. or Miss.
After “De-Sexing the English Language” appeared, Casey Miller and Kate Swift continued their research and eventually wrote books on the subject, including Words and Women in 1977 and The Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing in 1980.
De-sexing of the English language has become a significant part of feminism since the day Gloria Steinem surprised Casey Miller and Kate Swift with the news that she wanted to publish their article in the first issue of Ms.