Kate Swift, 1923–2011

last updated 8 January 2015

The revelation came to Kate Swift in 1970, as she and her business partner were editing a sex-education textbook for junior-high-school students. The manual’s goal was to encourage respect and equality between boys and girls, but its language undermined that goal at every turn. “It hit us like a bombshell,” she said in a 1994 interview. “It was the pronouns—they were overwhelmingly masculine-gendered.” She turned in the textbook manuscript with a lengthy memo suggesting how its language could be tweaked to make it more gender-neutral.

The experience launched her on a quest to make the English language recognize the full humanity of women. Born in Yonkers, N.Y., in 1923 to journalist parents, Swift graduated with a journalism degree from the University of North Carolina in 1944, said The New York Times. She worked in a wide range of writing jobs, including at Time, the Girl Scouts of America, and the Museum of Natural History in New York City, before becoming the director of the news bureau of the Yale University School of Medicine in 1965. In 1970 she started a business with Casey Miller providing writing services for not-for-profit institutions.

Once Swift noticed how tightly gender discrimination was woven into the English language, she couldn’t stop finding examples, said the Hartford Courant. Not only did the Declaration of Independence state that “all men are created equal” but newspaper articles also had a tendency to describe women, no matter their role in a story, as “perky” or “dimpled” or “divorced” or “blonde.” She wrote a groundbreaking article, “De-sexing the English language,” for Ms. and a style guide, The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing, that offered writers suggestions for eliminating gender bias from their work. She even coined several gender-neutral nouns and pronouns that would, if adopted, solve forever the problem of choosing between “he” and “she” and “him” and “her.” They never caught on, but Swift did manage to get “stewardess” banned from polite society.