Language Change Research Task - The Feminist Movement

The feminist movements of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century consisted of promoting equality between the sexes. From this political movement, we have seen coinages and neologisms enter our language, most of which are still part of our everyday vocabulary. As well as new words, the feminist movements led to words broadening and narrowing in meaning, also some words have undergone amelioration and pejoration.

The word “feminism” is credited to have been coined by Charles Fourier, a French Philosopher, in 1837.  Before this, in 1872 the terms “feminist” and “feminism” first appeared in France and the Netherlands. The words were introduced to Britain in the 1890s and 1910 in the USA. The term “feminism” has three meanings: it is the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men, it is an organized movement for the attainment of such rights for women and it can also mean a feminine character. It can be argued that the term “feminism” has undergone narrowing as the last denotation attributed to “feminism” is one that is unlikely we would associate with today. However, if we look at other denotations of the word, such as the ones found on Urban Dictionary, it seems that “feminism” may have undergone broadening to an extent. Part of the Urban Dictionary’s denotation states that “Feminism… embraces the belief that all people are entitled to freedom and liberty within reason-including equal civil rights-and that discrimination should not be made based on gender, sexual orientation, skin color, ethnicity, religion, culture, or lifestyle.” The ending suggests a broadening of the denotations of the word “feminism” in that in the future we may see it to have more associations with other groups in society that deserve equality and not just women. It can be argued that through diachronic language change, the term “feminism” has undergone pejoration because some people may associate feminism with negative connotations possibly because of views and actions of radical feminists which may have had a negative impact on the feminist perspective and views as a whole.

The term “herstory” originated around the mid 1970s. The detonation of this noun is that it means the same as history but it was coined in feminist literature and in women’s studies as an alternative form in order to distinguish and emphasise the particular experiences of women. The term was coined by taking the noun “history” and splitting it as if it were a compound word into two separate morphemes, “his” and “story” and then by changing the “his” to “her” and placing the two morphemes back together it creates a new compound word meaning history from her perspective. This coinage has led to the broadening and the possible pejoration of the word “history” as it can be viewed as a word associated with androcentrism rather than a term that simple is knowledge of past events.

The term “feminazi” is a term used by the radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh in the 1990s and he credits the term being coined by Tom Hazlett. The term is a portmanteau of the words “feminist” and “Nazi”. This term is obviously a pejorative term used to describe feminists that can or have been perceived to be extreme or radical. Ironically, the Nazis were under the rule of Hitler who was against the feminist movement, so by coining a word which is a portmanteau of “feminist” and “Nazi” can almost be considered an oxymoron although the intention of the coinage was to show how some feminists were just as radical and extreme as the Nazis.

Bibliography

• Wikipedia
• Cambridge Free English Dictionary
• Dictionary.com
• Urban Dictionary