Free Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman

superintendent Ella Young in 1912: “To each his’er own.” I’m sorry. I just can’t. My reactionary self has aesthetic as well as grammatical standards, and
his’er
is hideous. Unlike
Ms., his’er
could never become reflexive. (I might interject here that when I posed the His’er Problem to my brother, who was raised in the same grammatical hothouse as I, he surprised me by saying, “I won’t say
his’er
. That would be a capitulation to barbarism. But I would be willing to consider a more rhythmically acceptable neologism such as
hyr
or
hes
, which would be preferable to having to avoid
his
by plotting each sentence in advance like a military campaign.” My brother clearly doesn’t warm to the same challenges as Messrs. Shawn and Perec.)
    What about “to each his or her own”? I do resort to that construction occasionally, but I find the double pronoun an ungainly burden. More frequently I recast the entire sentence in the plural, although “to all their own” is slightly off pitch. Even a phrase that is not stylistically disfigured—for example, “all writers worth their salt,” which is only marginally more lumpish than “every writer worth his salt”—loses its specificity, that fleeting moment in which the reader conjures up an individual writer (Isaiah Berlin in one mind’s eye, Robert James Waller in another) instead of a faceless throng.
    But I can’t go back. I said “to each his own” until about five years ago, believing what my sixth-grade grammar textbook,
Easy English Exercises
, had told me: that “or her” was “understood,” just as womankind was understood to be lurking somewhere within “mankind.” I no longer understand. The other day I came across the following sentence by my beloved role model, E. B. White: “There is one thing the essayist cannot do—he cannot indulge himself in deceit or concealment, for he will be found out in no time.” I felt the door slamming in my face so fast I could feel the wind against my cheek. “But he
meant
to include you!” some of you may be murmuring. “It was understood!”
    I don’t think so. Long ago, my father wrote something similar: “The best essays [do not] develop original themes. They develop original men, their composers.” Since my father, unlike E. B. White, is still around to testify, I called him up last night and said, “Be honest. What was really in your mind when you wrote those sentences?” He replied, “Males. I was thinking about males. I viewed the world of literature—indeed, the entire world of artistic creation—as a world of males, and so did most writers. Any writer of fifty years ago who denies that is lying. Any male writer, I mean.”
    I believe that although my father and E. B. White were not misogynists, they didn’t really
see
women, and their language reflected and reinforced that blind spot. Our invisibility was brought home to me fifteen years ago, after
Thunder Out of China
, a 1946 best-seller about China’s role in the Second World War, was reissued in paperback. Its co-authors were Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby, my mother. In his foreword to the new edition, Harrison Salisbury mentioned White nineteen times and my mother once. His first sentence was “There is, in the end, no substitute for the right man in the right place at the right moment.” I wrote to Salisbury, suggesting that sometimes—for example, in half of
Thunder Out of China
—there is no substitute for the right woman in the right place at the right moment. To his credit, he responded with the following mea culpa: “Oh, oh, oh! You are totally right. I am entirely guilty. You are the second person who has pointed that out to me. What can I say? It is just one of those totally dumb things which I do sometimes.” I believe that Salisbury was motivated by neither malice nor premeditated sexism; my mother, by being a woman, just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong moment.
    For as long as anyone can