Fire exercice aboard the frigate La Motte-Picquet. The term Fireman now almost invariably refers to a Firefighter.
Traditionally, the term fireman denoted a person who was supposed to fight fires. Now the gender-neutral term firefighter is preferably used, especially since there is a growing need for female firefighters, as the fire department is often also called upon to do decontamination duty, and it is necessary to have separate areas for men and women to be decontaminated by male and female firefighters.
Fireman as a firestarter
In the 19th century and early 20th century "Fireman" was also the designation for someone whose job it was to tend a fire, usually for running a steam engine. Steam locomotives, saw mills, etc would employ "Firemen". Often much of the job was hard physical labor, such as shoveling coal into the engine's burner.
Steam locomotive firemen were also usually responsible for cleaning the ash and dust from the burner prior to lighting the fire, adding water to the engine's boiler, making sure the a proper supply of fuel for the engine is on board before starting journeys, starting the fire, raising or banking the fire as appropriate for the amount of power needed along particular parts of the route, and performing other tasks for maintaining the locomotive according to the orders of the locomotive engineer. Some firemen served these duties as a form of apprenticeship, aspiring to be locomotive engineers themselves.
In the novel Fahrenheit 451, a fireman as a person who's job it was to start fires, to burn banned books, etc.. Since paper ignites at 451 degrees F, the title of the book suggests therefore the burning of paper.
Freudian implications
The traditionally male-dominated firefighting profession is not without precedent in the scholarly literature in gender studies.
Freud wrote extensively on the blurring of the lines between fireman as fire preventer, and fireman as fire starter. In his seminal work on fire, Freud showed that people who are fascinated with putting out fire, are also often fascinated with starting fire. Thus it is no surprise that fireman has a double meaning (double entendre) in which the two meanings (putting out fires and starting fires) are opposite. Thus in addition to being gender-neutral, the term firefighter is also more clear in disambiguating this double entendre.
Freud also made connections to sexuality, i.e. the analog between fire and passion (erection) and between water and urine, and the way in which the two states cannot co-exist (water quenches passion, i.e. inability to urinate during erection). The Freudian connection has also been carried over into academic discourse and research on mass decontamination, and the concomitant desire to control large numbers of people, e.g. on hosing down people rather than fire.
These issues were discussed and presented extensively at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA 2002):
From fire extinguishers to riot extinguishers (big cans of pepper spray), the need for crowd control has been marketed
as a new social order. And with fire hoses for crowd control the need for the fireman has changed from controlling fire
to controlling people. Is he the firefighter cum people fighter? Or has his desire to control fire merely evolved into
a desire to control people? [S. Freud, The acquisition of power over fire., Int. J. Psychoanal., 13: 405-410.]
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