... having been breathed out

Donabet Mousekian, for example, an Armenian immigrant from Turkey, was certified in 1905 with “feminism,” being, in his own words, “deprived of male organs.”


This usage of the term “feminism” provides an interesting twist on Nancy Cott’s etiology, which traces the word’s origins to 1880s France and the French suffragist Hubertine Auclert. The first usage of the term that Cott finds in the United States is a reference in 1906 to the social movement. Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 14-15. Medical journals were publishing articles on “feminism” around the same time–in that context, however, the term designated men with female characteristics. In a further demonstration of the blurriness of medical and political discourse, the sexologist Havelock Ellis published an essay about feminism and masculinism in 1916. He used the two terms to refer to social movements for female and male supremacy, respectively.

—Margo Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America

One of the things that Canaday’s book is really helping to remind me, is the simultaneity of any one historical moment. History doesn’t proceed in a strict progression from Point A to Point B to Point C; instead, at any given time, there is often a multiplicity of viewpoints and usages phasing in and out of currency. When you think about this in terms of our own time, it becomes pain fully obvious, but I think it’s easy to forget when thinking back to earlier historical periods.