What is Feminism?

I just came from my sociology class, where we had a somewhat disturbing conversation about feminism. Our professor asked us to get out a sheet of paper and write "What is feminism?" at the top. Then underneath the question, he asked us to write whatever came to mind about feminism and to indicate on the back of the sheet whether we were male or female. He collected these papers and showed them to us on the overhead projector so that we could see our peers’ comments/opinions about the meaning of feminism.

Out of 120 students in the class, there were only about 15 of us who would even dare to raise our hands and identify ourselves as feminists or who, on our comment sheets, even knew what feminism was. One male student wrote on his sheet that feminism is "petty," and when his comment was shown to the rest of the class, quite a few people were upset. He attempted to explain himself by saying that he thought women who want to change the language are just being petty and that they should focus on larger problems. The example he used was the word "mankind." He could not begin to understand why a feminist would be upset by a word that describes the species (his exact words) and he thinks it is dumb that women focus their attention on such "stupid" things.

When he said this, it even got my professor (who is a male) riled. The student obviously has not been paying attention in class this semester if he couldn’t understand why words and the structure of our language could cause such a problem. One of the first things we learned about in the class was the Sapir-Whorf principle, which explains that language shapes how we think about and perceive everything in society. He couldn’t grasp that words like "mankind" or the pronoun "he" are the basis of male superiority and gender inequality in our society. These generalizations fail to recognize that something else exists and it creates a sense of otherness to those it excludes (like we talked about yesterday in class).

A female in the class suggested to this confused student that we use "womankind" to describe the species. I’m sure you can only guess what his reaction to that was…