I've seen (and held) many discussions about how to avoid using "he" to
refer to a person of either gender. Some people say you should use "he
or she" all the time, although that gets cumbersome when there are many
references in one sentence. People tend to recommend against "he/she"
because that's hard to read aloud. Others say to turn the whole
sentence into the plural, which works some of the time.  My solution
has been to use "they" as a singular pronoun, which is what we do in
the spoken language anyway (and the spoken language almost always
changes before the written language). The objection to that solution is
that using "they" as a singular pronoun is ungrammatical, so many
people feel uncomfortable with it. I always felt that grammar is a
matter of convention anyway, so why can't we change it?

Anyway, I recently came across this article (which in fact is seven
years old), which shows that the use of "he" as a generic pronoun was
"decreed" by British law, and previously had been used to refer
specifically to men (including when the Declaration of Independence was
written).

I thought this might be of interest to some people. Maybe now we can
declare "they" as singular and stop excluding women in our language.

Ellen


>From Simply Stated, Vol. 62, January, 1986
The monthly newsletter of the Document Design Center, American
Institutes for Research, 1055 Thomas Jefferson Street, NW, Washington,
DC 20007, (202)342-5000

When Thomas Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal," and
"governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from
the consent of the goverened," he used *men* to refer to only the male
sex. In a time when women could not vote, Jeferson used the word
precisely. He probably never throught anyone would find the word
ambiguous.

When scholars wrote the first grammars of modern English in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they used *he* to refer to males
and *she* to refer to females.

According to Casey Miller and Kate Swift in *The Handbook of Nonsexist
Writing for Writers, Editors, and Speakers,* those first grammars were
developed to help boys from well-to-do families to study Latin, a
language that most people considered superior to English.

The masculine-gender pronouns that grammarians used then "did not
reflect a belief that masculine pronouns could refer to both sexes."
The reflected the cultural reality that males dominated society.

During the eighteenth century in England, scholars created a rule to
use masuline pronouns in general references, but the rule was not
taught widely until the ninteenth century.

Grammarians crated the rule to change the popular use of *they* as a
singular pronoun. For instance, in 1759, Lord Chesterfield said, "If a
person is born of a gloomy temper... they cannot help it."

But, in promoting the use of *he* as a generic pronoun, grammarians
did not address the gender issue.

Finally, the rule received high-level recognition in 1850, when an Act
of Parliament sanctioned the use of the "generic" *he.* But, this
British government blessing was often ignored. For instance, in 1879,
the all-male Massachusetts Medical Society barred female physicians on
the basis that the society's bylaws referred to members by using the
pronoun *he.*

We're still living in the shadow of that parliamentary attempt to
mandate a generic pronoun by using the masuline to refer to both men
and women -- and still fighting it. According to a recent study by Dr.
Mykol C. Hamilton of the University of California, Los Angeles, people
usually think that *he* refers to men -- not to men and women.

In her study, Hamilton tested her hypothesis that using the masculine
generic causes male bias in imagery. She had 120 students complete
sentence fragments and describe their images of the people in various
sentences. Students completed such fragments as, "Before a pedestrian
crosses the street..." and "When a lawyer presents opening arguments
in a court case...: Students also gave the subjects names.

Hamilton found that people who used *he* assigned male names to the
subjects five times more frequently than they did female names. Her
conclusions support earlier research findings that hearing or reading
sexist language reinforces or increases sexist images.