In an era when a woman could be anything—a chef, an astronaut, a Supreme Court justice—the traditional feminine forms of vocation words (“hostess,” “waitress,” “usherette”) were becoming obsolete. H. W. Fowler, compiling his Dictionary of Modern English Usage at the dawn of women’s suffrage (he would have preferred the term “female suffrage”), held the well-intentioned view that as more women found their way into the workplace, taking traditionally masculine jobs, the need for “feminine designations” would grow. But it didn’t work out that way. “Authoress” had never been popular—from Victorian times, it sounded patronizing. And no female poet I know has ever wanted to be called a “poetess” (or, for that matter, a “female poet”). In English, the feminine suffix has a whiff of the diminutive, as if to say, “The little lady sometimes turns her hand to poesy.”
By now, “Ms.” is surprisingly well established (even Ms. magazine is still around), and “actress” and “comedienne” have been largely subsumed by the uninflected “actor” and “comedian.” In some cases, we’ve switched over to a new, gender-neutral job description. When men started slinging coffee on airplanes, “stewardess” gave way to “flight attendant”; in restaurants, we now have “servers”; the mail is delivered by “postal carriers.” David Marsh, an Irishman who is the usage expert for the Guardian, proposes that where a person’s sex makes a difference “the words male and female are perfectly adequate,” and offers as an example the Grammy category “best international female artist.” But there is no agreement even on which adjective to use, and some women bristle, in certain contexts, at being called female: it seems to focus exclusively on the reproductive system, and makes you feel like a chicken, all thighs and breasts.
I’ve heard people refer to a “lady doctor” and a “lady dentist,” an odd overlay of the aristocratic and the biological on the vocational. On the male side, there is “gentleman farmer,” which means rich and landed. (“Lady farmer” doesn’t have the same effect, but “lady rancher” would work.) “Male nurse,” “male stripper,” and “male prostitute” are all crossover terms, indicating that men are making inroads into female strongholds. Generally, in English, to have your sex tacked onto your occupation is unnecessary and often insulting. Except for the handful of professions defined by biology, like wet nurse and midwife and madam, why should sex enter into it? There are a few imperishable English words where the feminine ending is strong and useful—“heroine,” from the Greek, and, from the Latin, “dominatrix.” Take that, sexist pigs.
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Sister Abram could have saved us both a lot of grief if she had quoted what Robert Graves and Alan Hodge wrote on the subject of gender in The Reader Over Your Shoulder: “English . . . has certain unusual advantages in structure. In the first place, it is almost uninflected and has no genders. The Romance and Germanic languages, not having had occasion to simplify themselves to the same degree, still retain their genders and inflections. They are a decorative survival from a primitive time when the supposed sex of all concepts—trees, diseases, cooking implements—had to be considered for the sake of religious convention or taboo.”
A little farther in, Graves adds something that, had I heard it from Sister Abram in 1969, might have made the course of my education less fraught: “Gender is illogical, in being used partly to express actual sex, e.g. le gar?on, la femme, and partly to dress words up, e.g. la masculinité, le féminisme; le festin, la fête.” Note that “masculinity” is feminine and “feminism” is masculine.