The word feminism first appeared around 1830 and since then was used in many very important and successful movements aimed at establishing equal rights for women.
At that time, in a world where the standard was chauvinism and male sexism, feminism as an opposite was a good choice as a name of the movement to establish equal rights.
In the early 1900s, as a result, women all over the world finally received their right to vote, take child custody and other significant sexual, reproductive, and economic rights.
Since then, many things happened and we came to a point where we can say that in the western world we are very close to equality of opportunity for all genders.
While I believe that we are very close, I also believe that 100% equality is impossible. There will always be certain advantages of having a certain gender. Nevertheless, the goal should be to offer equal opportunity to any gender by law.
Nevertheless, since then, the movement also took over other issues and recently achieved to get many things "gendered".
While this mostly appears in the English language in the replacement of "ladies and gentlemen" to the gender-neutral version "customers" for example, this has an essentially bigger impact in languages where nouns are typically conjugated by gender.
Many specific pronouns were since then changed for independent ones aiming at avoiding discrimination based on gender.
Where previously the male version was the default version to be used if all genders were being addressed, this has been replaced with a version which addresses all genders equally.
While I see this as progress, one important term is missing in my opinion.
And that one is feminism. Feminism is closely related to the term "feminine" which relates to the female gender.
And I believe that if a war for equality is fought, this has to be fought on all levels.
For a while already, I was unable to identify with the word "feminist" because, while I strongly believe that men and women deserve equal rights and opportunities on any level (political, economical, private, etc), a small but very loud minority took hold of the word feminism to propagate sexism and hate against men labeling them obsolete and worse, which makes it difficult for many people (as myself) to identify with the existing term.
For that reason, I believe that we as a society should come up with a better name which reflects the wish for equality of all genders without favorizing any of them and any gender can easily identify with.
An incredible low hanging fruit would be equalism, but I doubt anyone would be happy with that one.
Picture from Pixabay
