feminish

I remembered yesterday that I still didn’t know when the word ‘feminist’ was invented.

And then, to my surprise, I noticed that in fact the whole point of living an improbably simple life (who says you need toilets?) in these four no-longer square walls (the floor and I fell an inch last week), with books lovingly lugged 700 miles in a rucksack, where I endure an internet dial-up as sporadic yet indispensable as the local baker, and take refuge in a warm river and friendly tomato plants - the whole point is so I have the time and clarity to find out; to fill in and figure out my feminist blanks.

So this morning I paid heed to Lucien Febvre - “It is never a waste of time to study the history of a word” - and got clicking and reading, mostly Karen Offen’s landmark essay for Signs, twenty years ago, Defining Feminism.

To the simple question, When was the word feminist first used? I can now answer:

In the 1870s in France (as feministe), roughly. Roughly, because the entire written world is not yet scanned into google and historians can’t read everything and (because they’re historians) they wouldn’t like to name a date and a document just in case there’s one they missed. It didn’t first appear in Charles Fourier’s Theorie des Quatre Mouvements et des Destines Generales (1808), as encyclopedias and dictionaries used to claim (the word just ain’t in there, folks).

Those who’ve devoted hundreds of hours to trawling dusty ink-spilled archives to find out, reckon the first self-proclaimed “feminist” was Hubertine Auclert in France, who from 1882 used the term in her periodical, La Citoyenne (from issue 64, Sept. 4-Oct. 1), to describe herself and her associates. It reached Britain and Germany by 1894/5, Spain by 1896 (feminista), Italy by 1897 (femminista), Russia by 1898 (feminizm) and Greece by 1896 (I promise a lolly (world delivery) to anyone who can find out how to write ‘feminist’ in Greek). By the late 1890’s it had reached the U.S. and Argentina (but was not commonly used in the U.S. until about 1910).

And what did everyone think they meant when they said ‘feminist’ or ‘feminism’? According to Karen Offen:

“Then, as now, many parties used the terms polemically, as epithets, rather than analytically; then, as now, the words were not used by everyone to mean the same thing. And, as the study of their history reveals, they referred far more often to the “rights of women” than to “rights equal to those of men.” This is a subtle but profound distinction. Even then the vocabulary of feminism connoted a far broader sociopolitical critique, a critique that was woman-centered and woman-celebratory in its onslaught on male privilege.”

The thing is that the word feminist and the thing to-be-feminist are essentially different. Can we say there were feminists before the word feminist? Could I be a feminist without calling myself one?

I need to find me a working idea of what it is to-be-feminist, ignoring the word itself……

…If you come back before bedtime I might be able to tell you!