“MAN is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” So wrote Rousseau (“L’homme est né libre, et est partout dans les fers.“) Did he mean that just half the world’s population, that half with a Y chromosome, was doomed to a life dans les fers? No, he meant everyone. But as a man of his times, he wrote “man” (l’homme) and “he” (il). Even Karl Marx, a proto-feminist who wrote that “social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex,” otherwise used a German as male as Rousseau’s French:

And the [masculine] worker, who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads etc. – does he hold this twelve hours’ weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shoveling, stone breaking to be an expresion of his life, as life?  [Und der Arbeiter, der zwölf Stunden webt, spinnt, bohrt, dreht, baut, schaufelt, Steine klopft, trägt usw. – gilt ihm dies zwölfstündige Weben, Spinnen, Bohren, Drehen, Bauen, Schaufeln, Steinklopfen als Äußerung seines Lebens, als Leben?]

Note “weaving” and “spinning”. Marx was not referring to the work that only men did in his time. But nonetheless, the German of the mid-19th century called for a “he” when referring to “the worker”. Language, it seems, was in sexist chains for…Continue reading

via Johnson http://www.economist.com/node/21576594?fsrc=rss