Here is a contemporary example (from the editor’s introduction to a book published in 2010) of the untraditional generic use of the feminine pronoun instead of the masculine: “If mathematical reasoning is in some sense maximally perspicuous, then no other kind of reasoning can be capable, by dint of its greater perspicuity, of rescuing the mathematician when she goes wrong.” The writer of this sentence––a man––uses the feminine pronouns she/her without fail in every case where he/his is demanded by the norms of English grammar. This practice––perceived by Y-H-B as a verbal tic––is evidently intended by the writer as a badge of his ideological bias against the exclusivity of the masculine gender when the personal pronoun refers to a noun unspecified as to biological sex.
What writers of English who resort to the blatant inversion of the generic/specific distinction fail (or care not) to understand is that their practice is a grammatical error. This error is rooted in the markedness value of the feminine in all languages which have gender as a grammatical category. That value is marked, i. e., conceptually restricted vis-à-vis the masculine (and the neuter gender, if the latter is extant), which is correspondingly unmarked. In a language like English, where gender in nouns is not overtly specified morphologically (unlike, say, Russian), the only other way for gender to inhere in the grammatical makeup of a word is to be part of its lexical meaning. Thus woman can only refer to a member of the biologically female human sex, just as bitch in its straightforward (i. e., non-emotive, non-pejorative) application can only designate a female dog; or gander a male goose, etc.
Thus the use of the feminine pronoun to refer to a word like mathematician––which is neutral, i. e., undesignated lexically as to biological sex––is not only a violation of the rules of English grammar but a distortion of the specific/generic distinction rooted in nature, of which grammar, like biology, is an integral part. The ideological motivation for this contravention of grammar, far from advancing the cause of feminism, only serves to undercut it.
MICHAEL SHAPIRO
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