Kate Swift, Writer Who Rooted Out Sexism in Language, Dies at 87

Kate Swift, a writer and editor who in two groundbreaking books — “Words and Women” and “The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing” — brought attention to the sexual discrimination embedded in ordinary English usage, died on Saturday in Middletown, Conn. She was 87.

Ms. Swift turned her attention to the issue of sexist language when she and Casey Miller, her companion, formed a professional editing partnership in 1970 and were asked to copy-edit a sex education manual for junior high school students.

The stated goal of the manual was to encourage mutual respect and equality between boys and girls, but Ms. Swift and Ms. Miller, who died in 1997, concluded that the author’s intent was being undermined by the English language.

"We suddenly realized what was keeping his message — his good message — from getting across, and it hit us like a bombshell,” Ms. Swift said in a 1994 interview for the National Council of Teachers of English. “It was the pronouns! They were overwhelmingly masculine gendered.”

The partners turned in a manuscript with suggestions that sex-identifying singular pronouns be made plural, or that pronouns be avoided altogether, and that word order be changed so girls preceded boys as often as the reverse.

“The publisher accepted some suggestions and not others, as always happens,” Ms. Swift said. “But we had been revolutionized."

Now, they wrote in the preface to their first book, “Words and Women,” “everything we read, heard on the radio and television, or worked on professionally confirmed our new awareness that the way English is used to make the simplest points can either acknowledge women’s full humanity or relegate the female half of the species to secondary status.”

The word “firefighter” was not used years ago. The word was “firemen”. It was changed because of this very idea the article talks about.

The assault on the "-man" occupation words predated the latest spasm of feminism. When those two, er, women got that particular bee in their lacy bonnets, they were hitching an ideological ride on an earlier disapproval of the association of work with one's sex.

In the early 1960s, I recall hearing firemen described as "fye-uh fightas" in suburban New York by callers to a local radio talk show. They were calling in to support some action against the City of New York by one of the firemen's unions.

The distinction in the air then was that, to firemen and their wives, it sounded more professional and educated to identify yourself by your technical expertise—fighting fires—rather than as a man doing a job because he was from the working-class caste, as the word "fireman" might imply.

At the same time, for similar reasons, in place of "policeman," a man would describe himself as a "pu-leese aw-fissa," and instead of a "garbage man," he was a "sanitation woika." They're still cops, firemen, and garbagemen to me, and I like 'em just fine. And as you've probably noticed, in private, firemen still call themselves "firemen."

Both feminism and working-class self-consciousness view the idea of work being a function of one's body as limiting to class aspirations: The higher you go on the social scale, the less connection there is between your body and your work. At the end of the day, "firefighters" still put out fires. Meanwhile, feminists . . . I haven't figured out exactly what they do, but it's a lot of talk, and very little work.

The feminist manipulation of language was based on misrepresentations, but was necessary to create the aura of victimhood around women and to provide the feminazis a “basis” for harassing and intimidating people over minutiae so that they would be afraid to raise the bigger issues.

Feminism was manufactured by the left and males interested in women becoming “more available”.

Feminism destroys, and it has a legacy worse than Nazism.

I don’t mind saying “he or she” at all, but it is one of those points where the cultural marxists came in demanding this change and we all went along with it — why not, we thought? Maybe it was a good idea.

I’ve teased out what I think is one of the tropes of the leftists. Tell people they must do something they already do. Then tell them they must do something that they don’t already do, but would like to do. Then tell them they must do something they don’t care about either way.

Then start telling them they must do something they do not want to do. Frog in the pot.

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