First appearance of word ‘feminist’ in Britain
August 18th, 2006
My fairly obsessive trail to uncover (and photograph!) the first appearance of the word feminist (as feministe in France, and feminist in Britain) continues.
I can now tell you that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “feminist” first appeared in print in Britain in 1895, in book review in the Athenaeum on April 27 1895 (no.3522, p.533). The review was of The Grasshoppers, a novel by ‘Mrs Andrew Dean’, the pseudonym for one Mrs Alfred Sidgwick, who wrote 35 novels between the 1890s and mid-1930s.
‘Feminist’ was used by the Athenaeum reviewer to describe a woman who “has in her the capacity of fighting her way back to independence”.
The Oxford English Dictionary dated the first use of ‘feminism’ in Britain to 1895 and ‘feminist’ in its adjectival form to 1894. [Although this suggests there must have been another appearance of ‘feminist’ before the Athenaeum review - I’m working on it!] The word didn’t escape inverted commas in the dictionary until 1898. Feminist as a noun only dates from 1904 - year after the popular novelist Sarah Grand had coined the phrase New Woman to describe the new generation of women who sought independence and refused the traditional confines of marriage.
(I found this all out following references in Susan Faludi’s Backlash and playing around with a Google Books search.)
See also: feminish » Feministe, feminista, feminist: origin of the word feminist.
October 9th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
Hi I found your blog while googling for the origins of the word feminism, and more particularly how widespread was its use before the 2nd Wave.
My enquiry is prompted by a blog discussion thread i’m currently involved. The blog can be found at steph- dot blog dot co dot uk
The blog entry is titled; Feminism Is Anti Women
The blogger claims that to call for example, the Suffrage movement ‘feminist’ is nothing more than a revisionist lie.
I am not a scholar in womens studies but I’ve read widely enough to know that the blogger is in error.
If you can give me any leads or would like to contribute to the discussion, that would be helpful.
my email is alice73 at eml dot cc
My blog is realies dot blog dot co dot uk
thank you
October 9th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
Hi Alice,
Thanks for dropping by at feminish…
I can’t seem to open the blog URL you described. I’ve been trying: www dot steph dot blog dot co dot uk and it doesn’t come up. Maybe you could send it as an email link?
One question that people get exercised about is whether campaigners on women’s behalf called themselves ‘feminist’. As soon as the word was invented it became a derogatory word, and so pragmatic women who just wanted above all a change in the law (ie. for the suffragettes, the new right to vote), often shyed away from using it. They used phrases like ‘women’s rights’ or ‘the Woman question’. That campaign some say began with JSMill etc in the 1860s, a full three decades before the word’s first known use in the U.K., so this alternative language was very well-established.
If I have a chance today I’ll see what else I can find. I have a lot of stuff on this - amongst all my papers, somewhere!