| Where do “feminism” and “puerism” come from? | ||
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Words in -ism are created when it is felt that there is a need to designate tendencies, ideological, medical or other. In fact, ‘Isms’ only really became something in their own right in the late seventeenth century (the dictionaries record the first known use of the term in 1680), but once identified, the general term soon caught on, particularly as a way of being rude about certain groups of people. By the middle of the nineteenth century, lots of new derogatory uses had become popular in the United States, convenient ways of summing up supposedly ‘do-gooder movements’ such as feminism, prohibitionism (those trying to prohibit things, especially alcohol) and above all, socialism. Most Americans hate socialism, and the word lends itself very well to a long drawn out snarl of disapproval once the letters ‘ism’ have been added. In 1856, one newspaper, the Richmond Examiner, summed it all up by running a series of fiery editorials headed: ‘Our Enemies, the Isms and their purposes’. So what to make of feminism and puerism then? The roots femin-, and puer-, denote, respectively, the woman and the child. Each of those words initially responded to quite different needs. “Feminism”, contrary to a belief amongst some feminists, was not created in 1870 by the feminist and socialist thinker Fourier (it would have been one of his last words before expiring, since he also died in 1870), but by the novelist Alexandre Dumas the son, who was a conservative and strongly antifeminist. Dumas created this word to designate an -ism that was against nature. In fact the word was uttered for the very first time in 1871 by a medical doctor, Ferdinand-Valère Faneau de la Cour, in his “Du féminisme et de l’infantilisme chez les tuberculeux” (Concerning feminism and infantilism amongst tuberculosis patients), to describe two pathological tendencies. A year later, Dumas created the adjective “feminist” in, “l'Homme-femme", a vigorously conservative pamphlet, about infidelity and divorce. Only ten years later was the term used in a sense closer to the one in use today. “Puerism” has similar, but even darker, origins. “Puerism” occurred infrequently as a synonym of “infantilism”, a regressive, pathological tendency. However, recently, puerism began to appear in texts and manifests associated, loosely or closely, to pedophilia: puerism, the ideal ideology of pedophiles. It is also encountered in discourses that oppose a postulated legal domination of the interests of the mother and the child, to the detriment of fathers: patriarchy in reverse. Still, “feminism” freed itself from its dark origins, and became a neutral term: a theory based on the idea that society is dominated by men. The strict meaning of “puerism”, however is still unheard of: a theory based on the idea that society is dominated by adults. |
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