femaleist

English

Etymology

From female +‎ -ist coined in 1999 by Barbara Ehrenreich.

Noun

femaleist (plural femaleists)

1. One who acknowledges and celebrates the ways in which women are different from men (in addition to the obvious difference in reproductive organs).
   • 1999 March 1, Barbara Ehrenreich, “The Real Truth About The Female Body”, in Time:

     The femaleist premise could be summarized as: Yes, we are different—wanna make something of it?

   • 1999 April 4, Joan Ryan, “Men, Women, Apples and Oranges”, in The San Francisco Chronicle:

     “What my book does, I think, is say, Let’s look at ourselves and not feel defensive,”’ says Mill Valley writer Dianne Hale, author of “Just Like a Woman: How Gender Science Is Redefining What Makes Us Female” (Bantam), published last month. Hale and the authors of the two similar books have been described as “femaleists” rather than feminists.

   • 2000, Diane Passno, Feminism: Mystique Or Mistake?, →ISBN:

     The ad industry portrayed the role reversal that feminists have coveted for the past twenty years . . . the femaleist party line that women are more "manly" than men could ever hope to be!

   • 2003, Roger N. Lancaster, The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture, →ISBN:

     Even in her critique of evolutionary psychology — a book heralded by Barbara Ehrenreich as the "chief manifesto of the new 'femaleist' thinking" — Natalie Angier expresses just this sort of impatience with perspectives from the usual critics of bioreductivism (feminists, progressives, and perhaps especially social scientists).

   • 2006, Christopher Mark O'Brien, Fermenting Revolution: How to Drink Beer and Save the World, →ISBN:

     I am a “femaleist.”I think that beer, when at its best, empowers women.

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