>When I attended UC Berkeley, "their" was a term acceptable to the English Department. Then suddenly around 1970 it was deemed incorrect for a number of reasons. Call it political correctness or whatever. At the time women’s liberation had a great influence and wanted to have a specific sexual recognition and not be grouped into an indifferent object such as the word “their”.

I think you're mistaken. I think what actually happened is that we cut down on the use of the male form, and since English doesn't have a genderless singular pronoun, people started using "their" to avoid gender.

For example, an employee manual might previously have said:

Each employee will punch his own timecard.

In the new version, to avoid gender, people used:

Each employee will punch their own timecard.

This is grammatically incorrect. A better choice would be:

Employees will punch their own timecards.

Tamar