feminism

Etymology

From French féminisme circa 1837, ultimately from Latin fēminīnus, from fēmina (“woman”). First recorded in English in 1851, originally meaning "the state of being feminine." Sense of "advocacy of women's rights" is from 1895.

noun

1. (obsolete) The state of being feminine; femininity.
   His hair is delicate and silky, and of a light chesnut[sic]—one of M. Lorrain's signs of feminism. July 24 1875, The Medical Times and Gazette, volume II, page 105
2. A social theory or political movement which argues that legal and social restrictions on women must be removed in order to bring about equality of the sexes in all aspects of public and private life.
   Women are still forbidden to smoke there... Ardent though we are in feminism, we applaud this stand... 1926-11-27, “The Talk of the Town”, in The New Yorker, →ISSN, page 17
   There are by now many feminisms (Tong, 1989; Humm, 1992). Alongside and often overlapping with older-identified distinctions between liberal, socialist, radical and cultural feminisms, for example (important as they are in their different accounts of sexual difference and gender power), are variously named black, third-world ethnic-minority feminisms, themselves far from homogenous. 1996, Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A feminist international politics, page ix-x