Femininity is a set of qualities and behaviours culturally associated with women. Feminism is a political movement for the equality of the sexes. One describes a social expectation; the other advocates a change in rights and power. They are unrelated concepts that share a root.
The core difference
- femininity — the traits, appearance and behaviours a culture associates with women.
- feminism — the advocacy of political, economic and social equality of the sexes.
Descriptive versus political
Femininity describes a norm. What it contains varies enormously across cultures and eras — pink was considered a boy's colour in early twentieth-century Western convention, and high heels, wigs and elaborate dress were male aristocratic markers long before they were feminine ones. The variability is itself the evidence that the content is cultural rather than fixed.
Feminism makes a claim about how things should be. It is a movement with a history, internal disagreements and a body of writing, not a description of anyone's manner.
Why they get treated as opposites
A persistent framing sets them against each other — the idea that being feminist means rejecting femininity. Feminist writing itself contains disagreement here: some strands critique femininity as a set of expectations imposed on women, while others argue that devaluing traditionally feminine things is itself a form of sexism. Neither position is the settled definition of the word.
The neighbouring terms
- Female — biological sex.
- Feminine — the adjective for the cultural qualities, and also a grammatical gender in many languages, where it applies to tables and chairs with no implication whatsoever.
- Effeminate — describing a man as displaying those qualities, and pejorative in nearly all uses.
- Womanism — a term coined by Alice Walker, centring the experience of Black women.
Where the words come from
Both descend from Latin femina, woman. Feminism is the newer of the two: it enters English in the late nineteenth century, from French féminisme, and was originally used in a medical sense before acquiring its political meaning.
Female is unrelated in origin to male. It comes from Latin femella, a diminutive of femina, and its spelling was reshaped in English by analogy with male — a false pairing that later looked deliberate.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between femininity and feminism?
Femininity is a set of qualities a culture associates with women. Feminism is a political movement for equality of the sexes. One describes, the other advocates.
Are femininity and feminism opposites?
No. Feminist writing disagrees internally about femininity — some strands critique it as imposed, others argue that devaluing it is itself sexist.
Is female related to male?
Not originally. Female comes from Latin femella, and its English spelling was reshaped by analogy with male, creating a pairing that was never etymological.