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.