As society changes, language reflects what is changing. Forexample, the fact that many occupations used to end in -man(mailman, workman, etc) reflected the reality that men ha
…d jobsoutside the home, while women were expected to be housewives,focused on raising the kids and keeping the house clean. Similarly,the English language used the pronouns "he" and "his" and the noun"man" to represent society in general, even if females wereincluded in the group: "Everyone must bring his book to class."This reflected that men were dominant in the culture; in fact,under the common law, the husband or father was considered a legal"person" while the wife or daughter was considered his property.And when a woman did enter an occupation that society consideredunusual, the language noted it: "doctor" was the norm, but if thedoctor was female, it was a "woman doctor." (In older English, an-ess suffix showed that the person was a woman: stewardess oreditress, to cite two examples.) And then it all changed, beginning with the second wave of feminismand the women's movement of the 1960s-1970s. Women wanted to knowwhy traditional gender roles were enshrined in language, and theybegan to ask for more neutral language. As more young women went tocollege and entered medical school, dental school, even engineeringschool, seeing a female in one of those roles no longer was so odd,and gradually the idea of a "woman doctor" or a "woman scientist"was replaced by just a "doctor" or a "scientist," whether male orfemale. The pronoun problem has remained a problem, however-- "heor she" is cumbersome to say, and "their" is ungrammatical,although some people do use it these days. But more important,words about occupations that used to be gendered and reserved formen are now expressed in a more neutral way-- "letter carrier" or"postal worker" rather than "mail man," or "flight attendant"rather than "stewardess." And men who go into the nursingprofession are much more common now, so we don't hear about a "malenurse"-- it's just a nurse, whether male or female. (MORE)