By the 18th century, the modern, narrow sense of man was firmly established as the predominant one. When Edmund Burke, writing of the French Revolution, used men in the old, inclusive way, he took pains to spell out his meaning: Such a deplorable havoc is made in the minds of men in France... Thomas Jefferson did not make the same distinction in declaring that all men are created equal and governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. In a time when women, having no vote, could neither give nor withhold consent, Jefferson had to be using the word men in its principal sense of males, and it probably never occurred to him that anyone would think otherwise. Looking at modern dictionaries indicate that the definition that links man with males is the predominant one. Studies of college students and school children indicate that even when the broad definitions of msn and men are taught, they tend to conjure up images of male people only. We would never use the sentence A girl grows up to be a man, because we assume the narrower definition of the word man.
The Pronoun Problem
The first grammars of modern English were written in the 16th and 17th centuries. They were mainly intended to help boys from upper class families prepare for the study of Latin, a language most scholars considered superior to English. The male authors of these earliest English grammars wrote for male readers in an age when few women were literate. The masculine-gender pronouns did not reflect a belief that masculine pronouns could refer to both sexes. The grammars of this period contain no indication that masculine pronouns were sex-inclusive when used in general references. Instead these pronouns reflected the reality of male cultural dominance and the male-centered world view that resulted.
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