This discussion of gender constructs compares them with racial constructs, and examines ways in which language tends to dichotomize or polarize them, and to reject ambiguity as unacceptable. Other curiosities about sexual categorization are noted, including the fact that femaleness is subsumed under the category of "man," which in turn…

From the beginnings of English grammar in the early sixteenth century, our language has been described by men, and the usage promulgated as the "standard" has been that of men. Because men have been able to effectively control English through their control of the communications media and educational institutions, they have made our language an…

The first section of this paper focuses on misunderstandings surrounding two of the proposals for changing sexist aspects of the English language, namely, avoiding the use of masculine pronouns (he, his, him, himself) with alleged sex-indefinite reference, and replacing the word and morpheme "man" with "person" in sex-indefinite usage. Several…

Drawing on recent research on sexism in English and the ways in which social forces affect language structure, this paper shows how prescriptive statements about English have been incorporated into linguistic grammars as descriptions of language. It is claimed that Chomsky's "universal grammar" is masculinist and that it is contradicted…

This paper examines the proposition that languages may differ in their potential for non-sexist usage, and that the structure of a language, in particular the gender system, affects the nature of the linguistic response to changing social attitudes regarding sex roles. A brief historical survey of gender and sex-marking is followed by a review of…