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English nouns aren't tagged with grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter) as they are in other languages. But there's an interesting asymmetry: we occasionally use feminine pronouns for impersonal objects.

I'm thinking about this because of a line in last night's speech by Teresa Heinz Kerry to the Democratic National Convention:

[O]ur voices — yours and mine — must be the voices of freedom. And if we do not speak, neither does she.

It's not a bad line, though perhaps a bit confusing. I for one did a double-take before realizing that it was freedom personified that was the antecedent to "she." (Was it perhaps knowing that English is not Kerry's first language that made me wonder whether it was just a slip of the tongue?)

But my point here is that for stylistic reasons we sometimes use feminine pronouns (she and her) to refer to impersonal nouns, but rarely, if ever, do we use masculine pronouns. Here are typical examples of things we personify in the feminine:

• the sea
• vehicles (ships, trains, airplanes, cars)
• hurricanes (until 1979, when masculine names were added)
• abstract political ideals

Or if you're my dad you can use she for just about anything (as my brother and I never tire of pointing out): "She sure was a big job, but I got her done." For another choice example, see Steve Martin's movie, The Jerk, where he tries to weasel out of trouble by claiming that a gang is "just one of the many things you can call 'she.'"

These uses are a form of personification (which Henry Fowler regards as almost always "ill-advised") — and we do it all the time. But without flagging the pronouns as feminine, we don't seem willing to risk confusion by using personal pronouns standing alone.

Feminine personification is certainly becoming more rare, undoubtedly to avoid the sexism that can lie just beneath the surface. That is, the destructive caprice of hurricanes used to seem typically feminine (to men, at least), as did the way ideals needed defending or how ships were to be loved but controlled with a steady hand. We now rightly avoid the reductionism of looking at things this way.

I think that's why Mrs. Kerry's elliptical reference to freedom as "she" sounded at first more like a slip of the tongue than the flight of rhetorical fancy she intended. And I do mean "she."

first published Jul 28, 2004