A while ago, I wrote a piece for the Washington Post blog answering this question they got from a reader:
“My mom just criticized me for describing Anna Kendrick as a comedienne. We’ve done away with stewardess and editrix, but what about actress? And should we stop referring to Hispanic women as ‘Latina’? When are gender-specific titles appropriate, if ever?”
And then, more recently, Michael L. from Palm Springs wrote in and said, “I just watched the new trailer for the coming Meryl Streep movie Suffragette. I’m very curious to know how that word came to be.” So it seemed like a good time to address the topic again.
These days, gender-specific nouns are often considered inappropriate. Our stewards and stewardesses are now flight attendants, and our policemen and policewomen are now just officers. All the major style guides recommend avoiding gender-biased language.
There are exceptions—for example, the AP Stylebook does still recommend waiter and waitress instead of server—but today, those exceptions seem surprising, and they are becoming more rare.
‘Actor’ or ‘Actress’?
To directly answer one of the reader’s questions, comedienne sounds old-fashioned to me, and casting director Bonnie Gillespie says that these days, people in the industry tend to use standup or comic to avoid the gender issue altogether.
Actress seems less antiquated because the industry still separates men and women for awards, choosing a "best actor"and "best actress," for example. Still, award shows are the exception and, according to Gillespie, people in the industry typically refer to men and women as simply actors. (In this case, the AP Stylebook says that both actress and actor are fine for a woman.)
“When I get emails or calls from talent agents pitching a new client for something I'm casting, they'll almost always say, 'I just signed this great new actor. She's a redhead,' and so on,” Gillespie says. “There is a negative connotation behind the word actress almost generationally. People in the industry who are 70 plus will still say 'actress' more than those of us who were raised during a different era, as feminism goes, and they mean nothing derogatory in using the word actress, whereas someone who is in her 30s may be trying to make a dig [if she uses the word].”
Is ‘Latina’ OK?
Moving on two the next part of the question, Latina doesn’t seem to carry the same stigma as other gendered words. Style guides support the Latino-Latina distinction and note that it is sometimes preferred over Hispanic. Since the Spanish language uses gendered nouns, having masculine and feminine forms may seem like less of a call-out―it follows a normal pattern instead of hinting at bias. Alternatively, David Morrow, a senior editor at the University of Chicago Press (the publisher of the Chicago Manual of Style), speculates that people may view Latina differently because the word isn’t formed by adding a diminutive suffix such as -ess to a noun that describes a man and therefore isn’t loaded with gender bias in the same way as words such as authoress.
In her book Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, Maya Angelou reiterates this sentiment, writing, “The woman who survives intact and happy must be at once tender and tough. … She must resist considering herself a lesser version of her male counterpart. She is not a sculptress, poetess, authoress, Jewess, Negress, or even (now rare) in university parlance a rectoress.… A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but a woman called by a devaluing name will only be weakened by the misnomer.”
Male-Female Noun Pairs
Linguist Neal Whitman also notes that using gendered nouns in English is usually fine when we have male-female pairs such as duke and duchess or abbot and abbess because "the male-specific term never refers to both males and females," so the sexes are treated equally. For example, if an organization describes itself as "a club for dukes," we know it allows only men, but if a talent agency says it represents actors, we know it represents both men and women. The inclusive nature of actor makes it different from duke, which, in turn, makes actress different from duchess.
Gendered Nouns of the Past
In the past, English gendered nouns were more common than they are today. A dive into the Oxford English Dictionary surfaces many feminine nouns that sunk under the weight of history. The Wycliffe Bible, an important Middle English document written in the late 1300s, introduced the terms neighboress, singeress, servantess, dwelleress, sinneress, friendess, and spousess. Around the same time, Chaucer coined herdess, charmeress, constabless, and guideress. Later, Shakespeare's "Two Noble Kinsmen" included a soldieress. Early Modern English speakers could also discuss a farmeress, monarchess, flatteress, and saintess.
Suffragettes
Although the -ess suffix is the most familiar to us today, it’s not the only suffix we can use to feminize a word. For example, women fighting for the right to vote were sometimes called suffragettes.
As Bonnie Trenga noted in a recent episode on diminutives, other -ette words include kitchenette, majorette, and coquette.
Suffrage comes from a Latin word that means “to vote or to support with a vote,” and according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the meaning “the right to vote" first showed up in the U.S. Constitution, which reads “No state shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.”
Suffragette’s first appearance was in the British newspaper The Daily Mail in 1906.
Spinsters
The feminine -ster suffix mainly survives in the word spinster to describe an unmarried woman (and which still sounds fusty enough to evoke Jane Austen or Downton Abbey), but spinster first simply meant a woman who spins as in spinning thread at a spinning wheel. Women during the same era could be called brewsters (female brewer), knitsters (female knitters), and seamsters (female sewers). Seamster lost a linguistic battle with seamstress, which, of course, we still have today.
Aviatrixes
Amelia Earhart was the most famous aviatrix, but English also once had admistratrixes, executrixes, mediatrixes (female mediators), and inheritrixes. And Alas, although editrix is more delightful to say, a Google Ngram search shows that editress has always been more popular--but unless you’re joking, eschew them both and stick with editor today.
The list goes on, but citations for most of these gendered terms mostly disappear by the late 1800s. A 1903 citation for poetess, for example, is simply someone writing that the word is outmoded, and when writers today use words such as heroess, the sentences sound ironic or comical.
The terms that survived to more modern times, such as comedienne, stewardess, and sculptress, began to encounter resistance in the 1970s when social change caused writers, editors, and public figures to rethink the role of gendered language.
In an article in the journal American Speech, Charles F. Meyer, professor of applied linguistics at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, noted that in 2000 when he taught students about language changing to de-emphasize nouns that flag a person as female, instead of dealing with angry objections as he had in decades past, he is now greeted with yawns and “so whats.”
Just as nobody misses neighboress, today’s younger people don’t seem to miss waitress or stewardess either.
A version of this article originally appeared on the Post Everything blog.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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