ABSTRACT
The first step will be the reform of language. Instead of speaking of ‘man and the lower animals’ we shall be taught to speak of ‘woman and the lower animals’. I had occasion recently to remark on the surprising slowness of pupils in learning, and I wrote: ‘The ordinary boy learns his lesson much more slowly than his teacher expects him to do.’ The everyday feminist would substitute: ‘The ordinary boy or girl learns his or her lesson much more slowly than his or her teacher expects him or her to do.’ But the thoroughgoing feminist substitutes: ‘The ordinary girl learns her lesson much more slowly than her teacher expects her to do.’ In French, if you wish to speak collectively of a hundred women and one male infant, the ‘they’ that alludes to them is masculine, as is reasonable; but under the reformed system a collection of a hundred men and one female infant will be feminine.
