Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

Look at what happened with the word suffragette: We no longer think of this term as an insult, but originally, it was invented as a demeaning version of the word suffragist (a Latin-derived term meaning a person of any gender who aims to extend voting rights). When suffragette was first coined, it was intended as a diminutive smear for women’s liberation activists in the early twentieth century: suffragettes were husbandless hags who dared to want the vote. The women’s lib movement was obviously far from perfect (it pretty much only benefited rich white ladies), but what was cool linguistically was that those women immediately stole the word suffragette, put it up on posters, shouted it through the streets, named their political magazine after it, and now most English speakers have entirely forgotten that it was ever meant as a slur.