The Burka Avenger

Pakistani heroine Burka Avenger is a mild-mannered teacher with secret martial arts skills.
She uses a flowing black burka to hide her identity as she fights local thugs seeking to shut down the girls’ school where she works.

Awesome.

Thanks, S!

Reader query: pronouns and historical texts

I had a question which I thought might be of interest to discuss on the blog.

Normally I work on contemporary political philosophy and I standardly use “she” or “her” whenever I can. But I am now trying to write a historical piece that deals with a political philosopher who uses “man” to refer to “people” and only uses the male pronouns “he”, “him”, etc.

Looking around the literature the standard thing to do seems to be to follow the practice of the original philosopher, because they don’t want to appear anachronistic. But this seems unsatisfactory to me, since it just reproduces the sexism of the original. But I’m not sure sticking to the language I would use for contemporary philosophy is a perfect option either.

Are there any thoughts on how to get around this, or what is a good compromise?