Jacqueline Murray
Earlier this year, the director general of Canada's Integrated Threat Assessment Centre testified before a House of Commons committee that the anti-feminist movement is increasingly relevant to national security. He argued that "anti-feminist ideology can function as an enabling factor along pathways to violent extremism." Similarly, the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women reports that misogynistic views are embedding themselves in governments, political bodies, and education policy debates.
The power of this sexist rhetoric rests on a question medieval scholars debated centuries ago: did the terms "man" and "mankind" include women, or men alone?
This linguistic debate emerged from two distinct creation stories in the Book of Genesis. In the King James Version, Genesis 1:27 states, "God created man in his own image... male and female created he them." Here, the gendered language and plural phrasing are inclusive.
Conversely, Genesis 2:21-23 details a sequential process: God created Adam from dust, then later fashioned Eve from Adam's rib. Within a patriarchal society, this second narrative where women were a separate, secondary creation became the foundation of Western gender roles. It normalised the idea that women, as a copy once removed, should be subordinate.
Over centuries, this narrow definition of "man" became an unexamined, automatic term referring to men alone. The 1776 United States Declaration of Independence unambiguously states that "all men are created equal." No equality was assumed for women there, in the 1787 Constitution or the 1791 Bill of Rights. When Abigail Adams famously urged her husband, John Adams, to "remember the ladies," he dismissed the plea, replying, "We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems."
Canada faced its own linguistic reckoning during the 1927 "Persons Case," which challenged the exclusion of women from the Senate because they were not legally considered "persons." The final ruling rebuked this exclusionary framework, asking, "To those who would ask why the word 'person' should include females, the obvious answer is, why should it not?"
In the 2020s, women’s rights remain vulnerable because the vestiges of structural and linguistic inequality rooted in ancient interpretations of Genesis remain embedded in modern institutions and subcultures. Exclusionary language does not stay confined to old texts. Language constructs reality. The same logic that once decided "man" excluded women resurfaces today whenever anti-feminist movements frame women’s rights as a deviation from the "natural" order, rather than a baseline of human equality.