To add to the historical debate (and hopefully without getting a slap on the e-fingers from Melissa :-) ), you need to go back to the era of Molieres.
If I remember my grade 2 primary school grammar correctly, and with apologies to Sister Marguerite Marie if I got it wrong, the French convention prior to Molieres was that whatever gender was mentioned last, that was the gender assigned to the conjugated verb and to the group. So for example, "John (3rd person masculin singular) and Mary (3rd person feminin singular) went (conjugated to the 3rd person feminin plural) to [...]". About Molieres times, a very well known mysoginist advisor to the king and to the Academie de la langue francaise decreed that women, "being of the inferior gender should not take predominance, regardless of the order within a sentence structure". Therefore, in a sentence of mixed gender, the verb is conjugated to the 3rd person masculin pleural and the group follows. Since this suited the King's political struggle with a certain powerful female figure of the French Court, this was decreed as "right and just". At this point all of the little girls in my class got very upset and the little boys remained totally clueless as to why. Sister Marguerite Marie just stated that life and grammar would be so simple if we could just adopt the latin convention of the third gender neutral.
Between my grandmother fighting for the vote, my mother combatting injustices within the workplace and Sister Marguerite Marie, I guess I come by my feminism quite honestly.
So, let's get really regressive and return to the latin language!
Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amantis, amant
With tongue firmly in cheek,
Emelie Lamothe
lamothee@aecl.ca
----------
From: William V Lipton[SMTP:liptonw@dteenergy.com]
Reply To: radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu
Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 1999 2:06 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: Re: personrem/personSievert
I am appalled by those whose "pronoun envy" makes them see gender bias where
none exists. Perhaps the following paragraph, from "A Handbook for
Scholars," by Mary-Clair van Leunen (NY, Alfred A. Knopf 1978) will be of
some comfort: