The decidedly not gender neutral singular “he” pronoun

The founding documents of the United States of America were primarily written in the 1700s, a period when formal writing was heavily influenced by two ideologies: linguistic prescriptivism and androcentrism. 18th century grammarians were in thrall to Latin and Ancient Greek, and many contemporary rules for educated language use were derived from written Latin. One that many schoolchildren are still familiar with is the prohibition against ending sentences with prepositions, an impossibility in Latin syntax but one that has been possible in English since the early Middle English period.

Another product of this androcentric prescripitivism is the epicene pronoun, sometimes called the “singular he.” For centuries speakers had happily used the pronoun “they” to refer to singular antecendents without gender marking. The earliest surviving example of this structure comes from the English romance William of Palerne:

Hastely hiȝed eche . . . þei neyȝþed so neiȝh . . .

Each man hurried . . . till they drew near . . .

Section of text from William of Palerne (written circa 1350) depicting the use of a gender neutral singular "they" pronoun to refer to the antecedent "each".
William of Palerne : (c 1350 ) :: Early English Text Society, (1867)
Sonnes of Aymon : Caxton (c. 1489) :: Early English Text Society, (1885).

During the 17th and 18th century, grammatical prescriptivists began to reject the use of “they” as a singular pronoun because they perceived it to violate the concord between referent and antecedent:”they” is a plural pronoun so it can only refer to plural antecedents. This was codified into grammar textbooks, and subsequent generations of school educated English speakers have been taught that it is wrong to use “they” for a singular antecedent despite the fact that this form has been widely in use for centuries, even while schools and school knowledge have been prohibiting it.

Herein rose the epicene pronoun, a singular “he” that was used to refer to antecedents that lacked any specific gender marking. This pronoun can still be found in grammar textbooks today, but its use was predominantly written rather than oral, and its heydey was in the 1700s and early 1800s.

Somebody left his book on the table.

The manager is on his break.

The founding documents of the USA, having been largely penned in the late 1700s, use the epicene pronoun almost exclusively. For example, Article II of the Massachusetts state Constitution which uses the pronoun “his” to refer to the antecedent “subject.”

Constitution of Massachusetts (October 25, 1780)

This pronoun use was not intended to exclude women, rather it was intended to indicate a man who represented women and children. The epicene pronoun is a product of contemporary androcentrism that subscribed to the idea of “man embraces woman”. Written texts produced in this time period use words like “man” to represent man and woman and child, with women and children having no defined legal identity.

Most founding documents in the USA- the The US Constitution, the Massachusetts Constitution, the New Hampshire Constitution and the South Carolina Constitution, for example-contain no female pronouns. The authors exclusively used the epicene pronoun to refer to grammatical subjects with non-gendered antecedents. This resulted in a significant dissonance in the regulation of rights: laws that allocated power were often treated as exclusively for men but laws that punished or offered small protections were treated as for men and women.

Subsequent scholars have called the epicene pronoun “gender neutral”, but it is decidedly the opposite. The singular “he” was intended to superimpose one gender above others, and has been subsequently used to justify depriving women their own legal identity and the ability to participate in civic life.

A Short Introduction of Grammar, generally to be used, etc. (1687)

Watch this video to see how a syntactic category that began life as a Latin noun class worked its way into the very framework of the documents that shape our rights:

@mathewssonya

Mediocre fragile men have been using this line to keep women out of office for nearly three centuries. It is a tiresome and lazy take which is also completely predictable. The founding slave owners were a bunch of guys who wrote according to their concepts of formal language. If they wanted to prevent a woman from being president they would have said so. Sure, they probably weren’t keen on the idea. But the epicene pronoun did not mean “no girls ever really really”. Using pronouns to discriminate is not new. It is a tale as old as white privilege. It was and remains both mean and very silly. #usconstitution #kamalaharris #pronouns #linguistics #kamalaforpresident #smashthepatriarchy #history

♬ original sound – Sonya