Was "man" a gender-neutral word in common usage at some point?

Question

I've seen some times the claim that in the past "man" was a non-gendered word, with "wifman" referring to female individuals and "wereman" referring to male individuals. I've found some indications that "wifman" was either a predecessor or a complement to "woman", and even the root for the current "wife". I've failed to find solid information regarding "man" being a truly neutral word (and not just a masculine word applied to both female and male individuals) and "wereman" or any alternative being the default word for male individuals.

So, was "man" a non-gendered word in the English language or its predecessors at some point, with different words derived from it (as woman is today) to refer to both male and female individuals?

Note: My main language is entirely gendered, and we have no way to address someone in a gender-neutral way that is common usage. If anything comes across as rude, please say so and I'll correct it. I understand this may be a sensitive topic.

Answer 1

Man in Old English could be either gendered or non-gendered. We inherited that ambiguity.

In Old English, man referred to both an adult male and a human being of either sex. Here is Stephen A. Barney in Word-Hoard: An Introduction to Old English Vocabulary, entry 8:

Mann serves for both "adult male" and "human being (of either sex)," in English; the other Germanic langs. adopted distinct words for the two senses: ModG Mann and Mensch "human being." The latter form occurs in OE (not in our texts) as mennisc (adj.) "human(s)," which survived to the 12th c. The OE terms which discriminate sexes are wer (Lat. vir) and wif (+ man = woman). ModG, like OE, has man in nom. (unstressed) meaning "one" (cf. French on).

Compounds include an early version of mankind, man-cynn. So what we have is a word that can refer to either adult males or human beings. Furthermore, it was sometimes hard to distinguish these uses. While the context makes telling them apart easily enough in this usage OED:

lOE Anglo-Saxon Chron. (Laud) anno 639 Þæs dohter wæs gehaten Ercongota halifemne, & wundorlic man. (This daughter was called Eorcengota holywoman and wonderful man)

Can you tell which man is meant in the next two uses? Testicles makes the second men obvious. The first manne (referring to men being hanged for thievery) is rather harder, unless you believe that only men could be hanged for thievery.

lOE Anglo-Saxon Chron. (Laud) (Peterborough contin.) anno 1124 Þet wæron on þa litle hwile ealles feower & feowerti manne, & six men spilde of here ægon & of here stanes. (There were in a little while four and forty men*, and six **men spoiled of their eyes and their testicles.)

Or how about the following usage? In the Old English Homilies, did Jesus became both man (an adult male) or man (a human being) for us? Either fits.

a1200 MS Trin. Cambr. in R. Morris Old Eng. Homilies (1873) 2nd Ser. 199 (MED) He bi-com man for us.

Also, to the extent we've been discussing a word in a language that still had grammatical gender, man in Old English is masculine. While grammatical gender should not be confused with biological gender (see Latin poeta, agricola, incola, nauta, all appear feminine in form but function masculine when modified by adjectives and most likely refer to men), grammatical gender doesn't help us distinguish semantically gender-neutral cases here.

So it would oversimplify to calling this usage gender-neutral OR strictly gendered, since the reading as adult male and the reading as human being may lead to ambiguity. Furthermore, such ambiguity doesn't exist for any word that refers to women - wif, bryd, faemne, cwene, and other words for women do not enjoy double-status as words referring to humans in general. Thus, while Old English man could be used to refer to human beings (including individual women), man (and the adult male it sometimes refers to) possesses a dual quality that woman and other female terms lack.

Answer 2

I'm old enough to remember when "man" or the combining for "-man" was just common usage. "All men are created equal" was just taken for granted as meaning "All persons were created equal." Words like spokesman, craftsman, chairman, etc. were easy to use and didn't raise any gender questions.

Of course "man" could also be used in a strictly male sense. "Be a man, my son." "This is a job for a strong man." etc.

So you have a word which COULD be gender-specific or COULD be used otherwise. Languages aren't always consistent.

Answer 3

Yes. From the Oxford English Dictionary (subscription required):

Man was considered until the 20th cent. to include women by implication, though referring primarily to males. It is now frequently understood to exclude women, and is therefore avoided by many people.

and then, before beginning its selection of quotations, remarks

In some of the quotations in this section, it is difficult or impossible to tell whether man is intended to mean ‘person’ or ‘male human being’.

Answer 4

There have been many historical uses of man to mean all people well into the 20th century as well. In 1942, Disney released Bambi which has this line

BAMBI: What happened mother? Why did we all run?

BAMBI'S MOTHER: Man was in the forest

Time Magazine had a long running tradition of naming a Man of the Year (Person of the Year since 1999). While women named were Woman of the Year, when they would name a group of people, that group would be Man of the Year. 1967 featured Baby Boomers

In 1962, the Twilight Zone had one of its most famous episodes, To Serve Man, in which aliens come with vast knowledge, ostensibly to help all mankind. The title, however,

is a bit of a pun. "To Serve Man", a book the aliens have, is not how to help mankind, but how to best cook the people they take back to their planet.

Answer 5

The 1662 A Brief and Easie Explanation of the Shorter Catechism says:

Q.[...] Did God create man both Male, and Female, after his own Image?
...
A. God created Man, Male and Female, after his own Image ...

The 1674 The Body of Divinity, Or, a Confession of Faith says:

God made man in his own image, male and female he created them. He created Man both Male and Female ; for by the word Man, is intended Mankind, i. e. both Man and Woman.

Answer 6

The simplest and by far the most famous example of this recent change is, of course:

In "old" Star Trek

"To boldly go where no man has gone before"

and in new Star Trek

"To boldly go where no one has gone before"

This is a fascinating question.

For anyone born before, oh, 1980 the answer to the title question

Was “man” a gender-neutral word in common usage at some point?

is ... "yes, of course, obviously."

BUT for folks born after about 1980 (?), it's a question!

---

Another exceedingly famous example of the "old" usage is, of course, one of the most famous utterances in English, and, the first utterance ever, off-world:

"One small step for man..."

So that was July 20, 1969. That year, it was utterly universal to use 'man' as 'human'.

Don't even mention "mankind" which is also on the way out these days.

Answer 7

Starting in Early Old English, "man" was used to refer to a human, without respect to sex. After Old English, the usage of the gender-neutral definition was restricted to to refer to a generic humans or humans in general. Starting around 1000 (which is during Old English), "man" was also used refer to a male human, so it would have been used in a purely gender-neutral way only before then. Using "man" to refer to humans without respect to gender started falling out of favor in the late 20th century, due to the influence of feminism.

Etymonline comments:

Specific sense of "adult male of the human race" (distinguished from a woman or boy) is by late Old English (c. 1000);

implying that "man" was used in a purely non-gendered way before then.

Indeed, OED's quotations for the definition of "a human being as a designation applied equally to particular individuals of either sex" are earlier than the ones for the definition referring to male humans. (eOE, Early Old English, is considered to be from 600–950.)

eOE Leechbk. (Royal) (1865) iii. xxxviii. 332 Gif wife to swiþe offlowe sio monað gecynd, genim niwe horses tord, lege on hate gleda, læt reocan swiþe betweoh þa þeoh up under þæt hrægl, þæt se mon swæte swiþe.

In contrast, the earliest quotation for the definition "a male human" is circa 1000:

OE Ælfric Lives of Saints (Julius) (1881) I. 28 He..sæde hyre gewislice hwæt heo man ne wæs.

Etymonline continues:

Old English used wer and wif to distinguish the sexes, but wer began to disappear late 13c. and was replaced by man. Universal sense of the word remains in mankind and manslaughter. Similarly, Latin had homo "human being" and vir "adult male human being," but they merged in Vulgar Latin, with homo extended to both senses.

Man also was in Old English as an indefinite pronoun, "one, people, they." It was used generically for "the human race, mankind" by c. 1200. As a word of familiar address, originally often implying impatience, c.1400; hence probably its use as an interjection of surprise or emphasis, since Middle English but especially popular from early 20c.

Oxford English Dictionary comments:

A human being (irrespective of sex or age). Man was considered until the 20th cent. to include women by implication, though referring primarily to males.

The last quotation for the non-gendered sense of "man" (and not "men") referring to a specific individual is also from Old English:

Ælfric's Homily De Initio Creaturae (Vesp. A.xxii) in R. Morris Old Eng. Homilies (1868) 1st Ser. 223 He com þa anedren hiwe toðam twam mannum, erest toðan wife.

But the usage of "man" and "men" to refer to a generic human or humans in general, irrespective of gender, continued well into the 20th century.

"Woman", meaning "an adult female human being", appears in Early Old English as "wifmon", as seen in the OED's quotation here:

eOE tr. Orosius Hist. (BL Add.) (1980) iii. vi. 60 Minutia hatte an wifmon þe on heora wisan sceolde nunne beon [L. Minucia uirgo Vestalis].

Thus, it is true that the "man" in "woman" is non-gendered, at least at the word was created.

As an aside, some other answers consider a word with both a gendered and non-gendered meaning, but primarily a gendered meaning, to be a gender-neutral word, which I find odd.