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The reason behind gendered words is likely more complex than just "oppression". They arose and stayed part of language because in some way they were linguistically useful, such as helping to provide better context clues. This is especially the case when talking about languages that heavily rely on grammatical gender, such as French or Italian. You have to remember that language is complex and certain grammatical rules don't usually arise because people consciously decide everyone should speak/sign/write this way instead of that way. Oftentimes these rules come along naturally over the course of linguistic evolution.
