Gender Neutrality Made Easy and Constitutional: Why We Call Members of the House “Congressman” and “Congresswoman,” and Why We Should Not

Abstract

Abstract How did we come to use and accept “congressman” and, later, “congresswoman” instead of “representative” as the nearly default designation for members of the House, while at the same time referring to senators exclusively by that title? And despite it being inherently inaccurate and unnecessarily binary, this convention for members of the House has gone unchallenged, even as gender-neutral language advances and even as the House of Representatives has considered such things as adding more gender-neutral bathrooms. This article traces, for the first time, the history of “congressman” (and “congresswoman”) conceptualized as a linguistic meme subject to a process of replication and imitation. It explores the first uses of “congressman” prior to the Constitution, how the reporting of elections in the early decades of the republic embedded the use of “congressman” for House members in the national vocabulary, and how the arrival of congresswomen ironically reinforced this convention. This study also uses comparisons to the titles for legislators in American states and other nations to show how exceptional these terms are in being both gendered and institutionally inaccurate. Finally, it draws on that history to argue that the House, press, and public should drop these gendered, civically confusing, and politically inappropriate honorifics in favor of the one specified in the Constitution.