The feminine pronoun she has been used since the Middle Ages to refer to such inanimate objects as Earth, the sea, and ships. It has also been frequently used to refer to female personifications of nations and cities, as in “San Francisco never failed to surprise her summertime visitors” (Edwin Chen). This practice may have originated, and was certainly encouraged by, reference to words that were grammatically feminine in the language from which they had been translated. Thus, the soul was sometimes conceived as female at least in part because it is a feminine noun in Latin (anima). A further influence was the personification of certain objects, such as the Moon, and certain ideas, such as fortune or philosophy, as goddesses by ancient writers.
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Whatever its origin, many writers still observe this usage today. People commonly refer to cars, musical instruments, and other objects with which they have close association with the pronoun she. But others find this practice objectionable because it seems to ascribe stereotypically feminine characteristics to these entities and because it lacks balance in that people tend not to personify objects as masculine. These objections contributed to the decision by the National Weather Service to discontinue its practice of identifying hurricanes by women’s names only. Now you can be subjected to a hurricane of either sex.
