Kate Swift

Who was Kate Swift?

Kate Swift was an American feminist writer and editor who co-wrote influential books and articles about sexism in the English language.

Their work, in the words of Swift "examined the male-dominated evolution of English usage and the ways it defined women negatively as secondary, irrelevant, or invisible."

She was born Barbara Peabody Swift on December 9, 1923 in Yonkers, New York. In 1944, she graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in Journalism. She worked as a copy runner in the NBC newsroom, and later joined the Women’s Army Corps as a writer and editor for the Army’s information and education department. She also worked as an editorial assistant at Time, a news writer for the Girl Scouts of the USA's public relations department, and a writer for the Port of New Orleans. Then in 1954 she joined the public-affairs staff of the Museum of Natural History in New York as a science writer; she was the press liaison for the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. In 1965, she became the director of the news bureau of Yale School of Medicine.

In 1970, she and Casey Miller formed a professional editing partnership, and they were soon hired to copy-edit a sex education manual for junior high school students. Although the author intended to promote mutual respect between women and men in his manual, Swift and Casey Miller came to realize that sexist language usage was preventing this point from getting made. Swift said, "We suddenly realized what was keeping his message – his good message – from getting across, and it hit us like a bombshell. It was the pronouns! They were overwhelmingly masculine gendered. We turned in the manuscript with our suggestions such as putting singular sexist pronouns into plural gender-free ones, avoiding pronouns wherever possible, and changing word order so that girls or women sometimes preceded rather than always followed boys or men. The publisher accepted some suggestions and not others as always happens. But we had been revolutionized."