This thread reminded me of an old Eric Ambler spy novel from the late '30s (“Cause For Alarm”). One of the characters who appears briefly is Mrs. Moskowitz, a secretary at an arms manufacturing company, and who Ambler describes (if memory serves) as a “harassed-looking Jewess”). It’s a casual stereotype by an author* whose works never struck me as anti-Semitic, but it’s kind of jarring to a modern reader (who would also be taken aback by seeing an original edition of Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Niggers”).
more embarrassing from a historical standpoint is Ambler’s gushing treatment of Communist characters, including a pair of charming Soviet agents who were busy saving the world from Fascism in a couple of his novels.* Oddly, they never appeared in any of his books written after Hitler and Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939.
Heh, that same skit came to my mind. The things they could get away with…
And yes, if someone’s quoting from something written in the 1920s, people should chill about wording that is inappropriate in 2014. (Though now I am curious as to how come so many other nationalities/ethnicities/faiths got the -man/-woman form in English, but it ended up with Jewess and Negress…)
I’m not sure I agree with this. I’m acquainted with a woman who is now the associate dean in charge of diversity issues (or something like that) at a small college, who is CERTAINLY up on what is and is not the proper terminology to use, and she, a Mexican-born woman, refers to herself as a “Chicana”.
That’s as may be, but the assertion was that gendered nouns were always associated with animal husbandry:
(which make it interesting so far as the “master” and the “mistress” on the plantation are concerned), and I was just pointing that up as the arrant nonsense it is. You can carry on desperately trying to defend this, or you can move on. The fact that there are gendered words for members of a few ethnicities, and for many farm animals, does not entitle you to ignore that there are gendered nouns for many professions and probably most of the titled heads of dear old England, and argue that the first is like the second while the third and fourth are beside the point.
Other languages have gendered nouns as a matter of grammar. English does not tend to, and when nouns are deliberately gender-fied, it definitely raises my eyebrows. If someone is making a point of the sex of the person, I want to know why it matters.
I don’t think this really matters for this OP, however.
For the (fortunately very few) people who are saying, “oh, it’s no different from Duke/Duchess, etc.,” what’s your theory on why the terminology was never applied to other religions/races? Or am I wrong and 19th century folks actually wrote about seeing a Catholicess, Methodistess, Lutheraness, or Caucasianess?
To me it reeks of the exoticism and otherness (which I guess is a female ‘other,’ heh) of specific minorities. I believe “Mormoness” was in use too, but you sure as heck don’t see it nearly as often (in fairness*, there weren’t nearly as many during the time when such words were in common use).
I can’t really speak for those who are saying that “it’s no different from Duke, Duchess etc”, because what I was driving at was the point about “differently gendered words imply that the people are to be regarded as livestock”, which ain’t so.
It’s true that most ethnicities don’t have this unusual feature, but so far as “otherness” goes, you would have to argue for the “otherness” of sculptors, poets, murderers, and a whole lot more besides - and I don’t think that the people responsible for “earl/countess”, “marquess/marchioness”, “Sir/Dame” and so on were implying that these people ought to be despised.
Since most of us these days would find it slightly artificial to even call someone “a Jew” or “a Negro”, naturally the gendered forms look even odder. But it weren’t necessarily so ninety-odd years ago.
edit: One oddity occurred to me. A “governor” might be responsible for anything from a school to a state or province (or a steam engine), but a “governess” might have authority over nothing more than a nursery…
I’s say it’s offensive because it’s sexist. We no longer use the word “doctress” or even “actress.” One word should be equally applied to both genders.
‘Actress’ and ‘waitress’ are still in frequent usage, and rarely found offensive. I don’t think people find gender specific terms offensive in and of themselves, it’s when there’s a history of discrimination behind specific words that people get bothered.
Simply provide some context, such that the letter is from the 1920’s, and that the term “Jewess” was used to refer to a Jewish women. I would assume that if your grandmother did not use it in an obviously pejorative manner, based on the framing of your question, so just a simple note should suffice.
I think it might go further than that; the history of discrimination is what makes it feel a little “off” when we turn adjectives into nouns in general, not just the gender-specificity. Particularly when it’s something innate and not an occupation. Irrespective of gender (unless there is a reason to think that Jewish women were more discriminated against than Jewish men?), there’s a difference between “you’re a person” and “you’re a .”
When we say “a Jewish man” or “a homosexual woman” it’s clearer that “Jewish” or “homosexual” is a thing that a human can be, like “tall” or “long-haired.” When the adjective becomes the noun and they’re just “a Jew” or “a homosexual” there’s an implied otherness to it that makes some people uncomfortable. Adding gender specificity to it just compounds that otherness and maybe it’s telling that when we make those gendered nouns from innate traits it generally shows up in marginalised groups (Jewess*, Negress, Mulattress, Mooress etc.).
One of the few religious examples. There were, for the record, Jesuitesses, at least in the form of an order that Urban VIII suppressed, but not as the common term for a female Jesuit.
That this comment comes from a goddess makes me smile. Irony aside, I agree completely with the point you’re making.
And I think this gets to the heart of why the term has become outdated; the unspoken assumptions behind it have become outdated, thank goodness. Still, in its historic context, I don’t see the particular instance in the old letter as being offensive, just a reflection of the lexicon of an earlier time.
