| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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5. Gender: Sexist Language and Assumptions
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| § 22. man |
| Traditionally, many writers have used man and certain compounds derived from it to designate any or all members of the human race regardless of sex. This practice has the strength of history on its side. In Old English the principal sense of man meant “a human being"; the words wer and wyf (or woepman and wifman) were used to refer to “a male human being” and “a female human being” respectively. But in Middle English man displaced wer as the term for “a male human being,” while wyfman (the word that evolved into present-day woman) was retained for “a female human being.” Despite this change, man continued to carry its original sense of “a human being” as well, and so the result is an asymmetrical arrangement that many criticize as sexist: man can stand for all people, but woman cannot. Because of a growing belief that man and words formed from it are not inclusive of women, more and more writers are showing an unwillingness to use the word man in its sense of “a human being” or men in its sense of “members of the human race.” | 1 |
| Another concern about the use of generic man is that it can often be ambiguous, at least in the plural, since men can refer exclusively to adult human males, and for this reason too you may want to avoid it. There are a number of ways to reword such sentences as The capacity for making tools is unique to men, for example. When you are talking about the human race, you may substitute such words as humans, humanity, humankind, or the human race. And in sentences such as Man has (or men have) long yearned to unlock the secrets of the atom, you may substitute the word people for man or men, often with a gain in clarity. | 2 |
| Sometimes these alternative wordings sound tinny. This is because they are not monosyllables, and rhythm sometimes makes a monosyllable like man particularly alluring. Consider titles, for instance. There is a strong iambic beat to Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, and a strong finish to Victor McKusick’s Mendelian Inheritance in Man. Somehow The Ascent of Humanity and Mendelian Inheritance in Humans are just not as musical. Here if you want to avoid man, you simply have to bid farewell to the old song and compose an entirely new construction with a rhythm that benefits from polysyllabic words. | 3 |
| Despite the objections to the generic use of man, a majority of Usage Panel members still approve of it. Not surprisingly, the women members are significantly less enthusiastic than the men. For example, the sentence If early man suffered from a lack of information, modern man is tyrannized by an excess of it is acceptable to 81 percent of the panel—but a breakdown by sex shows that only 58 percent of the women panelists accept it, while 92 percent of the men do. | 4 |
| A majority of the panel also accepts compound words derived from generic man. The sentence The Great Wall is the only man-made structure visible from space is acceptable to 86 percent, and in this case the gender gap narrows: 76 percent of the women accept it, as well as 91 percent of the men. The sentence “The history of language is the history of mankind” (James Bradstreet Greenough and George Lyman Kittredge) is acceptable to a majority of 76 percent, which includes 63 percent of the women and 82 percent of the men. Such compounds are significantly less acceptable when applied to women, however; only 66 percent of the panel members (57 percent of the women and 71 percent of the men) accept the use of the word manpower as it applies specifically to women. | 5 |
| A related set of problems is raised by the use of man in forming the names of occupational and social roles, such as businessman, chairman, spokesman, layman, and freshman, as well as in formations like unsportsmanlike and showmanship. For more on this, see
-man compounds. | 6 |
| Man is also used as a verb. This is another time-honored usage, going back to the Middle Ages, that many people consider sexist when the subject includes or is limited to women. Fifty-six percent of the Usage Panel rejects the verb when it is used in the sense “to take stations at” to refer to an activity performed by women in the sentence Members of the League of Women Voters will be manning the registration desk. As a verb man was originally a military or nautical term and like the pronoun he is unobjectionable in most historical contexts: in the days when only men manned the decks, there was no need for a different word to include women. But a wise man would admit that those days are past. | 7 |
| More at
he. | 8 |
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| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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