sexism and ageism

If we have learned one lesson this century, it is that ideology can do harm. Two of the leading twentieth century ideologies, fascism and communism, caused untold misery for untold millions in the middle of the century. By the end of the century, we were beginning to recognize that other -isms could also cause more harm than good. We no longer felt comfortable with our prejudices.

Racism was the most prominent of these. In the early 1900s, racialism (1907) and then racism (1936) were used in a neutral or even positive sense to describe widely held beliefs that certain races were superior to others. Conveniently, the proponents of racism always found that the race to which they belonged was the superior one. Racism justified maltreatment of other races, as with the Jim Crow (1829) laws of the South. The horrors that were produced by racism both at home and as carried to its logical extreme by Nazi Germany finally led to its disfavor.

As we considered policies of Affirmative Action (1965) to counter the effects of racism, we began to take official action against other prejudicial beliefs, calling them -isms too. By 1969 both sexism and ageism were well-known terms. We have attestations for both in the previous year, including this declaration: "The parallels between sexism and racism are sharp and clear. Each embodies false assumption in a myth." And from an article in the 1970s: "A few years ago the great intellectual enemy of the movement was called gerontophobia--fear of aging, loathing of the aged. Today...the target has shifted from gerontophobia to ageism--a new word for a new thought. The term probably appeared in print in 1968, when Carl Bernstein wrote a piece in The Washington Post on a housing controversy where the word was used by Dr. Robert Butler."

Since then, other more debatable -isms have been coined by those who are sometimes labeled PC (1990): heightism (1971, favoring tall people), speciesism (1975, favoring humans over other species), and lookism (favoring good-looking people), for example.