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.

I’ve just put together a Three Guineas Redux. Everything I wanted to know about Woolf’s book on Wednesday, but has taken me four days to dig up and distill. I’ve written it because, firstly, my mind is not unlike a sieve and, second, because it’s so good I want the gems of the book to be available to those (like me, last year) who want to read it, to really take savour every word, but just don’t have the time. So it’s partly to remember and partly to cheat.

After all, there’s only so many hours on buses and the tube topping-and-tailing a working day. And in any case, when I was on the beloved numbers 8 and 38 in London Town I’d prefer to rest my dreary computered eyes and quietly soak in the metropolitan company. I had newspapers at breakfast, precious few moments at lunch, Gun Street Girls at tea-time and a lover in bed - no wonder I never finished Elaine Showalter’s Inventing Herself or ever started Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.

So please check it out and let me know what you think: » Three Guineas Redux

If you like it, I’ll do you another. Maybe even a Second Sex Redux, if I dare…

Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf

a feminish redux: all a girl needs to know

Full text online:
University of Adelaide Library, electronic texts collection: Three Guineas

Recommended printed editions:
Penguin (Classics) ISBN: 0141184604 | Oxford (Classics) ISBN: 0192834843 | Blackwell (Critical ed’n) ISBN: 0631177248

i. the book in a nutshell
ii. what else the book says
iii. about the author
iv. key passages, quotes
v. Three Guineas trivia
vi. publications about Three Guineas

i. the book in a nutshell
Three Guineas is Virginia Woolf’s most controversial and polemical feminist work. The essay was written in Winter 1936/7 and published in 1938 to the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and the muscle-flexing of fascists in Italy and Germany. It takes the form of a letter replying to a request (from a grey-haired old English barrister) for a guinea (21 shillings - about £1.05 in new money) towards a Society for the Justice, Equality and Liberty of all men and women. A donation, it is claimed, would help to prevent war.

By all means take your guinea, says Woolf, delighting in the fact it’s one she, a woman, has earned herself ( ‘the professions’ were only unbarred in 1919). But first she will give one guinea for women’s colleges:

if [daughters] are going to be restricted to the education of the private house they are going… to exert all their influence both consciously and unconsciously in favour of war. Of that there can be little doubt. Chapter 1

and a second to a society for the advancement of women in ‘the professions’:

to help women to earn their livings in the professions is to help them to possess that weapon of independent opinion which is still their most powerful weapon. It is to help them to have a mind of their own and a will of their own with which to help you to prevent war. Chapter 2

Woolf’s comprehensive, elaborate and well-defended argument over 190 pages is that the more women there are in positions of power (in politics, science, culture or the church) the less warmongering society will be. Three Guineas was an original foray into 1930s debates about war because it tackled head-on “what was regarded as too obvious or inapposite to be mentioned, much less brooded over: that war is a man’s game — that the killing machine has a gender, and it is male.” (Susan Sontag)

Read the rest of this entry »

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:
Read the rest of this entry »

What does a woman need to know? Does she not, as a self-conscious, self defining human being need a knowledge of her history, her much politicised biology, an awareness of the creative work of women in the past, the skills and crafts and techniques and powers exercised by women in different times and cultures, a knowledge of women’s rebellions and organised movements against our oppression and how they have been routed or diminished?

Without such knowledge women live and have lived without context, vulnerable to the projections of male fantasy, male prescriptions for us, estranged from our own experience because our education has not reflected or echoed it. I would suggest that not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness.

Adrienne Rich, “Taking Women Students Seriously,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (1980)