Gender Specific

Back in the misty days of 7th grade, first-year French I remember a particular class somewhere in the middle of the year in which a boy, Willie C., raised his hand and asked, “Why are ‘question’ and ‘problem’ feminine but ‘book’ and ‘paper’ masculine?” This question seemed to hit a nerve: up until then we had obediently accepted this seemingly random categorization of nouns into male and female words but had not the faintest clue why. Willie’s question prompted an outpouring: who decided that ‘pen’ and ‘pencil’ were masculine, but ‘door,’ ‘roof,’ and ‘window’ were feminine?” Why was ‘the wind’ masculine and ‘war’ feminine? and so on. Ultimately, was this a boy-girl thing, or what?

The teacher calmly – but firmly – told us it was strictly grammatical, nothing personal. There was an edge in her tone that said, “Don’t ask me anymore.” (Perhaps she thought looking any deeper would stall the growing Women’s Movement?) A few years later I found out that Spanish had a similar masculine-feminine randomness but at least it was visually easier to tell male nouns from female nouns.

In college, when I started taking German, I discovered that language not only divided nouns into masculine and feminine, but neuter as well. I didn’t try to make sense of the categories – including why “girl” was neuter; instead, I simply tried to master the differences by color-coding my vocabulary sheets – I wrote masculine words in red; feminine in green; and neuter in yellow. (Bad idea: by the time I took my exam, I couldn’t remember if a word were green or red or yellow and botched the whole thing.)

But despite what my French teacher said, I am not convinced” that “gender” and “grammatical gender” have nothing to do with each other – why would they both be called “gender”? And if it weren’t a male-female thing, then why are nouns called masculine, feminine, and yes, even neuter – and not just Type A, B or C?

Some languages – including aboriginal Australian and Polish – distinguish between animate and inanimate things, in addition to the usual masculine, feminine and neuter. (And one aboriginal language even has a noun category for hunting weapons and dogs.)

Given that languages and their genders were formed in prehistory, the reasons for categorizing nouns and corresponding parts of speech into genders have been lost to time. My guess is that people began classifying each other as “masculine” or “feminine” and then started extending the classifications to other things, with each culture deciding what had male qualities and what had female or neuter qualities. Mixed in with spiritual beliefs as portrayed in say, Disney’s Pocohantas, -- i.e. that one’s ancestors could be reborn as animate or inanimate objects -- could have lent further chaos among those early “language deciders.” Imagine: “Tree is feminine – that’s my grandmother.” “Are you kidding? Look at that tree – big, strong, straight up! It’s masculine!”

Thus, for example, “tree” is masculine in French, Spanish, and German but feminine in Portuguese, and neuter in Norwegian. Different cultures, different perspectives.

Still, after a while people must have given up trying to see the “maleness” or “femaleness” or even neutrality of a noun and instead just randomly gave it a gender. That might explain why the Portuguese “tree” is feminine but their word for tree “trunk” is masculine – the Whatever! Syndrome no doubt set in.

English has a “natural gender” style – anything that isn’t a living-breathing male or female human, or domestic pet, is an “it.” What could be easier? Yet does that make our language and culture free of gender distinctions and contradictions – no way! The Women’s Movement has helped change a lot of words or terms that once defined roles or jobs that belonged predominantly to one sex or the other -- words like, “chairman” and “stewardess” have become “chair person” and “flight attendant.” Even “actress” and “waitress” – with French-inspired feminine endings – are beginning to be discarded in favor of simply “actor” and “waiter.”

The one pronoun English needs now is for a singular gender-neutral third person, singular, possessive, which would rid us of dilemmas in sentences like: “Each employee must fill out his/her own time sheet.” At this point, the choices are either the awkward “his/her” or the ungrammatical “their.” Linguists have come up with some suggestions but, just as English itself was formed, the masses will ultimately make the decision over time.

Women have already forged ahead with how they choose to be called in business when a courtesy title is necessary: Some married professionals go with Ms. and their maiden names; some with Ms. and their married names; some with Mrs. and their married names. All are accepted.

As more women appear in powerful positions in government – and sooner or later as leader of the Free World – it will be interesting to watch our genders change with the times: Madame President? (too French; and there’s the association with “madames” in “other” types of houses) Ms. President? or Mrs. President? Mr. First Gentleman? Or Mr. First Man? I guess we’ll cross that gender-bender when we come to it.