a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

On Thursday, I phoned Kate Swift from Middletown, Connecticut, where I taught at Wesleyan University for almost twenty years, from 1975 until 1993. It was during those years that I had come to know Kate and her partner Casey Miller, who were great heroines of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Everyone knew their article “One Small Step for Genkind,” which had appeared in the New York Times Magazine, 1972. It had sent out into the world a completely revolutionary idea: we could stop using the pronoun “he” for all people, male and female; we could stop referring unthinkingly to “mankind,” leaving half the human species, half of genkind, unacknowledged. We could become aware of how deeply and thoroughly our way of speaking –our vocabulary—shapes our ways of thinking and acting. A few years later, when Kate Swift and Casey Miller were the leaders of an emergent language-consciousness movement within the Movement, women everywhere could immediately identify “sexist language.”

Kate answered the phone. I told her that Christine and I had driven down from Toronto, on our way to visit my old friend Jerome Kohn on Long Island, and wondered if we could stop in at East Haddam, her home, to say hello. She welcomed us, but told me that she was in “a bit of shock” because she had gotten terrible medical news the day before.  “I am waiting for the people to call me from the hospice at Middlesex Hospital –you know, it’s a very good one –two of my friends have died there in recent years—and I am going to die there, within the month, my doctor says. But you must come. How very lucky we are to see each other while I’m still home. We can say a proper good-bye.”

I was in a “bit of a shock.” But while we drove to Kate’s house, I tried to give Christine a portrait of  Kate.  The way she delivered her news and welcomed us were so characteristic of her –warm, gracious, lucid, without sentimentality, without self-pity, and always, no matter what, attentive to others. She was so loved, and so admired, by her family and friends. At the age of 90, she was the perfect elder: a repository of wisdom, but also a visionary –still, as she had been since 1970, when she and Casey Miller had had had a revelation.

After WWII, when Kate had been in the Army and Casey in the Navy, both both she, a New Yorker, and Casey, who was from Ohio, had worked as copyeditors and writers for various publishing houses and institutions. In the 60s, Casey was at Seabury Press; Kate was a science writer for the Museum of Natural History. But they decided to form a partnership in 1970 and work free lance. One of their first projects was a junior high school sex education textbook. While they were getting it into shape they realized that the author had unthinkingly directed most of it to boys and spoken throughout about “him.”  The intended reader was obviously “him” as well. The book was not really about human sexuality, it was about male sexuality, and from a male point of view and for boys.

Their revelation was about the power of pronouns. They wrote an article about generic pronouns and what our speech –and our world–might be like if women were not hidden under “he.” Gloria Steinem and the other founding editors of the magazine Ms. featured this piece, “Desexing Language,” in their first stand alone issue, January, 1972. (Ms. had premiered in 1971 as a supplement embedded within Clay Felker’s New York.)  That whole first issue had been like a clarion “Speak Out!” call to the Women’s Liberation Movement.  It contained, for example, a statement signed by 50 prominent women entitled “We have had abortions.” The field of what women could talk about publicly was opening, and Kate and Casey were reflecting on the language that should be available to talk freely and truthfully.

Their next manifesto was written for the New York Times Magazine, at the request of Victor Navasky, the editor, and at the suggestion of Gloria Steinem. And that piece, “One Small Step for Genkind” not only propelled their analysis of sexist language into the mainstream of American cultural discussion, but assured that there would never be any turning back –although there certainly has been back-sliding—on the topic. We do not use the word they proposed, “genkind”; but, on the other hand, mankind has given way to humankind.

Kate Swift and Casey Miller summarized their critique in a book, Words and Women, in 1976. Their suggestions for new words, new ways of forming pronouns and reforming syntax were summarized in the Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing in 1980. For three decades now, the Handbook has been a standard reference for every writer and copyeditor in English-speaking countries. The authors were influential in getting the New York Times to take the lead among newspapers in using the abbreviation Ms. rather than Mrs. for adult women, so that a woman’s marital status was not her definition. Married women were named by their first names, not their husbands’. (The Times editors were conscientious about this reform until recently, when the general conservativism of the country pulled them backwards, so that now you can often find Ms. and Mrs. on the same page.)

In 1990, while I was still teaching at Wesleyan, I invited Kate Swift and Casey Miller to talk about their consciousness-raising work with my Women’s Studies students. They carefully and thoroughly answered all my students’ questions about the non-sexist language effort and why it was –and is–so crucial to modern feminism. My students were fascinated, but also impressed by how modest and reserved they were. They did not behave like celebrities, they did not advertise themselves, they did not talk about their own partnership and what it had been like to live together in decades when even the Women’s Liberation Movement was not very supportive of any Ms. who was not heterosexual.

Kate was sitting in her favorite chair by the picture window that looks out over her  azalea garden and down to the Connecticut River, which is flowing high now with the melt from the long winter. She was wearing a heavy coat because, as she said, she gets chills. But as I hugged her, she announced that she is not in pain. “I’m alright except for this damn disease, which is going to kill me.” I introduced her to Christine, and immediately she wanted to know “Is your accent British?” “No, I’m from New Zealand.” “Ah! A Kiwi.” Kate has always attended, first and foremost, to how people speak, what words they use and how their words reveal them.

We talked, as always, about politics, joined by Kate’s niece and a good neighbor friend, who will be looking after her and helping her settle her affairs. She will be buried next to Casey Miller, who died in 1997, in the cemetery where Kate’s mother is also buried. Kate told me about these arrangements, and then went on to deplore what has happened to American political life since the late 1960s, when it seemed, for a moment, that the country might take a progressive turn—moved by the feminism she and Casey had supported so strongly. “Well,” she said, summing up, “I won’t live to see it, but it is possible that this generation will be the one to wake up and understand the danger we are in –all of us.”  Then she laughed and said, “All of us –genkind!”

I told Kate, as we were getting up to go,  knowing we would not see each other again, how much she had meant to me, she and Casey, the example of them. Women who had gotten superb educations before the War –Casey at Smith, Kate at Connecticut College and Chapel Hill—and who had been able to make such contributions  to our Movement, to American cultural and political life. Strong women, who had supported each other for decades so lovingly and so thoughtfully, radiating nurturance and care from their persons and their partnership. “We all have to go sometime,” she said, consoling me. “You should just carry on, there really is so much that needs doing.”