Query: Why "she" in reference to a ship?

[Laurence Horn]

At 7:17 PM -0800 1/17/06, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>FWIW, the use of feminine pronouns to refer to ships has been
>condemned as "demeaning to women,"  though I'm not sure how
>influential the condemnation - made a quarter century ago - has been.
>
>   JL

It's certainly cited in a good deal of feminist linguistics
treatises, for the reason I mentioned:  if the canonical assumption
is that the captain/pilot/leader is "he" and the ship/country [ship
of state] is "she", it locks women out of (certain) positions of
power.

LH

>
>"Gordon, Matthew J." <GordonMJ at MISSOURI.EDU> wrote:
>   ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: "Gordon, Matthew J."
>Subject: Re: Query: Why "she" in reference to a ship?
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Anne Curzan gives several examples of OE nouns (e.g. wif) behaving =
>according to biological gender against their grammatical gender =
>assignments in her book, Gender Shifts in the History of English (2003, =
>Cambridge). I think she may also discuss similar examples of gender =
>reassignment with inanimate nouns, but I don't have the book with me =
>now.
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Laurence Horn
>Sent: Tue 1/17/2006 6:38 PM
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject: Re: Query: Why "she" in reference to a ship?
>=20
>Again, even that's a necessary condition, it can't be
>sufficient--it's not an accident that it's ships, cars, and countries
>(each canonically conducted or piloted by a male "driver") that
>retain their OE feminine in the form of a pronoun and not tables,
>feathers, or whatever. (Sorry I don't know enough OE to come up with
>actual examples of feminine OE nouns that are never anything but "it"
>now, but virtually any will do other than the above short list.)
>
>larry
>
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