The word sexism was probably coined at a college forum in November 1965
According to legal scholar Fred Shapiro, Pauline Leet most likely invented the word sexism on 18 November 1965 at a student-faculty forum at Franklin and Marshall College. She built it by analogy: excluding all women from poetry because fewer write well, she argued, mirrors the logic of a racist.
Leet's point was that both prejudices judge a person's worth by irrelevant factors and ignore history. The Oxford English Dictionary, however, credits the first printed use to Caroline Bird's speech On Being Born Female, an address to Episcopal Church leaders in Greenwich, Connecticut, which appeared in print in 1968. Earlier sociologists, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ida B. Wells and Harriet Martineau, had described gender inequality without having the word.
Definitions multiplied. Psychologists Mary Crawford and Rhoda Unger framed it as individual prejudice involving negative attitudes toward women as a group. Peter Glick and Susan Fiske introduced ambivalent sexism, in which stereotypes split into hostile and seemingly benevolent forms. bell hooks called it a system of oppression disadvantaging women, and philosopher Kate Manne distinguishes sexism, which justifies patriarchal norms and makes them seem natural, from misogyny, which enforces them. Sociologist Richard Schaefer argues that all major social institutions perpetuate it.
Its roots may be ancient. Evidence does not show that pre-agricultural women enjoyed higher status than women today, but historians are fairly confident many such societies gave women roughly equal social power. The idea of one sex being inferior took hold with farming and settled life. Ancient Egyptian women depended on fathers or husbands yet could own property and bring cases to court, while Roman women could neither vote nor hold office.
Sexism may have fuelled Europe's witch trials between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, including in North American colonies, where witches were portrayed as a threat to Christendom. Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum, influential in the hunts, argued that women were more prone to witchcraft than men. Today sexism is defined as prejudice or discrimination based on sex or gender, affecting anyone but falling mainly on women and girls.
Source: Sexism
