The feminist origins of ‘political correctness’: PC terms in JSTOR

Abstract

When ‘political correctness’ became a public concern in the USA in the early 1990s, it was almost immediately suggested that the term had long been something of a self-ironic slur in left-wing circles. While a number of people testified to this, the evidence advanced was almost entirely anecdotal, and to date no systematic attempt to gauge the reliability of these testimonies has been made. The present article seeks to rectify this. On the basis of a statistical account of politically correct (PC) terms – ‘politically correct’, ‘politically incorrect’, ‘political correctness’, ‘political incorrectness’ – in the Stockholm University version of the JSTOR database up to 1990, it challenges the received view that the term originated as a left-wing in-group marker which was used self-ironically. The evidence suggests, on the contrary, that the modern understanding of political correctness as a form of censorship first emerged in debates internal to the North American women's liberation movement. The article tables all uses of PC terms in JSTOR up to 1990. Before 1980, PC terms are used very sparingly and practically always non-ironically, with the possible exception of the one area in which the term gains ground in the 1970s: feminism. In JSTOR, prior to 1990, PC terms appear most frequently in feminist activist journal Off Our Backs (OOB). Usage in OOB makes evident that the notion of political correctness in the feminist context at the time was tied to a theoretical discussion concerning female sexuality. Climaxing at an academic conference arranged at Barnard College in 1982, this debate was pivotal for establishing the ironic understanding of political correctness we live with today, including the modern understanding of the concept as a means for the ‘closing of debate’. In sum, evidence suggests that the received view of the origins of the term ‘political correctness’ must be reconsidered.