feminish

I try to be here in my body as often as I can.

I remember my feet, and let them sink into the floor under my desk. I feel my bottom where it meets the chair, and my elbows on the desk. And I notice my forehead sinking towards this screen, and reel it in.

The Patterner sat well this morning. His breath furled and unfurled, he said. Like a long, soft banner into the wind. (Or like a chameleon’s tongue, I said. Or like one of those plastic party horns, I might have added, but didn’t.)

Sometimes my breath is steady, falling into my lungs and breezing out again gently. Sometimes it bathes me like water lapping in and out of the shore. Other times it gets caught, taut around my chest, like apron strings in the washing machine.

Which is what happened yesterday, when I read this:
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This is an excerpt from Anne C. Klein Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists and the Art of Self (1995), p.51

Tibetan language itself is hierarchical, particularly as spoken in centres of power like Lhasa. Most nouns and verbs have honorific forms, usually entirely different in sound and spelling from the non-honorific forms, and these must be used whenever one addresses someone socially, economically or spiritually superior to oneself.

The most widely used word for woman (skyes dman) literally means “low born” and is also the non-honorific word for “wife”. A man might use this term to refer to his own wife, or he might call her chung ma, literally, “little woman”. But he would always use an honorific for the wife of someone of rank greater than his. Other terms are less explicitly offensive. Women are known as those not to be put out (bud med) because a woman is not to be left outside the house at night. Another less common phrase is lus phra ma, “female of slight body”. Other synonyms, also relatively rare in ordinary speech, are gnas byed, “maker of a dwelling” or “maker of stability”; mi mo, “a female person”; and mtshams ldan ma, perhaps a pun, which can be understood either as “one who has a boundary” or “one who has an intermediate space”. Other epithets include ‘dzin ma, “female grasper”, and lan bu can bcas, “one who has long plaits [of hair]”. These terms fall into two main groups, those associated with a womans more ‘essential’ physical characteristics, and others with her community or family position.

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 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:
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re: “A 15-year-old boy is being prosecuted in connection with the case of a girl who fell pregnant at the age of 11.” ( c/o Online)

Apart from anything else, it sat oddly with me that the journalist said the 11year old ‘fell’ pregnant. In one sense, there seems to be a mildness to it - like ‘oops, I fell pregnant’, like tripping over a pavement. The phrase missed the concrete causal event - she had sex. But there’s also so much more to saying she ‘fell pregnant’: as though she tumbled(!), or fell-down, or fell-ill. And then all I could think of was Eve and The Fall. (But felt less outraged when I thought of falling-in-love).

In any case:

Under “fall” as a verb, the OED classifies “fall in love” with some other phrases, such as “fall asleep” and “fall into laughter.” The definition for that sense of “fall” is “To pass suddenly, accidentally, or in the course of events, into a certain condition.” ‘Fall’ here did not originally have the present sense of dropping from a higher state to a lower, but of passing suddenly from one state to another. It’s from the Indo European root, phol which does mean literally “to fall” but also “to happen”.

(I wonder whether feminist linguists agree…)