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Dear Boston Globe: What were you thinking?

Kate Swift died earlier this month. In the 70s she and partner Casey Miller wrote Words and Women. The New York Times and the Boston Globe published the same obit with one glaring difference. The Times obit titles Swift as Ms. Swift and Miller as Ms. Miller. The Globe titled Swift as Miss Swift and Miller as Miller. As in Times: "Although Ms. Swift and Ms. Miller followed up..." Globe "Although Miss Swift and Miller followed up.." Geez Globe you couldn't just cut and paste the piece from the Times, you had to goof it up in of all places an obit you titled "Kate Swift; editor rooted out gender bias."

Ok it gets funnier-- I just went to get the link. The on-line version replaced Miss with Ms. so it is now "Ms. Swift and Miller followed up...".

BTW Rosalie Maggio wrote a lovely obit:

In the early 1970s, Swift and her longtime partner and coworker Casey Miller were editing a sex-education program for junior-high students when they realized that the materials spoke to “men,” “boys,” and “him.” They ended up not only making girls and women visible in the text, but writing an article on sexist language for the first issue of Ms. magazine (“Desexing the English Language”) and later for The New York Times Magazine (“One Small Step for Genkind”). Casey Geddes Miller, a writer who was graduated from Smith College as a philosophy major and had worked in naval intelligence, died in 1997.

The ultimate flowering of the Miller-Swift hybrid was Words and Women (1976), a world-changing book that demonstrated so conclusively that our everyday words disparaged and discriminated against women that no one should ever have needed to say another word. The world being what it is, of course, many more words were needed. But Casey and Kate nailed the issue. (When trying to get their book published in 1973, they were rejected by one editor because “the Women’s Movement has peaked.”)