I am shocked that male writers seek to 'blame' this vocabulary on feminists.
The opposition tends to be by males, and these are theologians. Very interesting! The fundamentalist right seem to fight hardest over theology. The backlash seems to appear from those who resent referring to Mother-Father-God, eschewing the goddess, the goddess movement, the crone, the Wiccan, witch, and the wise woman elder, and embracing the writings of dead white men.
" And this is precisely why Christians cannot allow a secular form of egalitarianism to determine the way Christians think and read Scripture," writes one male theologian.
(You, she, aren't the boss of me, he!)
If a reader feels that 'he', or 'man', or firewoman, leaves them out of the writing, I think it a valid argument.
Many argue that the Bible was written by God, and we use 'man' in the Bible,yet, the Bible was TRANLATED by scholars who lived in gender-biased eras in which the previously acceptable 'they' was replaced around the 17th century by 'he'.
The blame, it would appear, is Ann Fisher (1719-1778) , an 18th-century British schoolmistress. She was the first woman to write an English grammar book, according to the socio-historical linguist Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. Fisher’s, “A New Grammar” (1745), ran to more than 30 editions. More importantly, it’s believed to be the first to say that the pronoun he should apply to both sexes.
Now, this woman was a prominent business-woman. She ran a boarding school, and seemed not to have been infected by the proverbial glass ceiling in an era when it was the husband's place to support the family. How shocking, then, that she set the woman's movement back 200 years - well, gave it momentum, perhaps, by removing the previously accepted universal pronoun of 'they'.
The 14th edition of the Chicago manual of style: "the 'revival' of the singular use of they and their, citing...its venerable use by such writers as Addison, Austen, Chesterfield, Fielding, Ruskin, Scott, and Shakespeare."
There is no All-Purpose Pronoun in many modern pieces of writing, yet there are options.
I often use s/he, or deliberately include he or she in a piece if it is needed. But I truly prefer 'they'. Language is meant to be fluid, adaptive and flexible as humankind learns more about the world. It is criminal that we cannot refer to firewoman, but fireman is acceptable. My pet peeve is chairman, when chair will suffice. Or spokesman, when the speaker is clearly a woman! If in doubt, be specific.
Put some thought into your writing. Your daughters will appreciate it.
Examples...
*"Development of the Uterus in Rats, Guinea Pigs, and Men" (title of a research report)
*"The Pap test, which has greatly reduced mortality from uterine cancer, is a boon to mankind."
Even when authors insist that "man" is a general term of all humans, they can lapse into meaning it as a term for only males:
*"As for man, he is no different from the rest. His back aches, he ruptures easily, his women have difficulties in childbirth . . . "
*In James Baldwin's essay "Stranger in the Village" Baldwin refers to "white men" and "black men" (seemingly generic terms), but then he eventually refers to "that peculiar, intent, paranoiac malevolence which one sometimes surprises in the eyes of American white men when, out walking with their Sunday girl, they see a Negro male approach."
Examples taken from Sarah Werner, and *The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing* by Casey Miller and Kate Swift (New York: Lippincott, 1988)
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