The first Female American

Americans are very keen of coining new terms when old ones become outdated, or somehow don't fit the bill anymore.

Especially in the media nowadays, we try to follow an extremely politically-correct decorum, which sometimes goes beyond the call of duty. When “Hispanic” stopped working, we created 'Latino.” Soon will come the day when we'll have “Southern Latino,” “Northern Latino” and “Classic Latino,” to define citizens of South American, Central American and Latin European countries, respectively.

Terms that could otherwise be inoffensive become taboo, and the English language becomes more and more limited.

Or not.

At the same time we exclude some words from our daily media vocabulary, we automatically create new ones to replace them (after all, we still need words to describe persons and events, no matter the medium). Take, for example, the word “black.”

“Black” is, first of all, a color. Before it was used to describe skin color, it was nothing more than a hue among hues, a very common one, by the way. In design, for example, black can be seen as the addition of all colors, while white simply means having no color at all.

And yet there came the politically-motivated used of the term. When “black” somehow became derogatory to define a group of people, we coined the term “African American.”

It's as if saying the name Barack Hussein Obama automatically made a person a lesser political contender than Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton. I'd hope we're passed that point, and the latest polls, primaries and caucuses seem to show that we are indeed.

But, while the term “African American” is still in vogue, I'd like to propose a new term in the English vocabulary: “Female American.” Every time one thinks of mentioning or writing the term “woman” when referring to a segment of the population, the term “Female American” should be used instead. Especially when talking about current politics.

In a country where being patriotic has long been a staple of any candidate running for any level of public, elected office, being called simply a woman may be a downside to a person. When deciding between an African-American (capital letters included) and a woman, the former may have an unfair advantage in being seen as more American than the latter.

If we can't compare “women” to “blacks,” maybe we shouldn't compare “African Americans” to “women.”

It's not as if women haven't suffered their own share. Women were only allowed to vote in the U.S. less than 90 years ago, with the Nineteenth Amendment; the Equal Pay Act, which ordered men and women to be paid equally, dates back only to 1963; and Roe v. Wade – the still debated abortion rights case – was decided ten years after that, in 1973.

During the Vietnam War, women were asked to work in factories to replace their soldier husbands, just to lose their jobs once men returned. Nowadays, women are allowed to fight side by side with African American and Caucasian men in Iraq and Afghanistan, making them as patriotic as anyone else. Who's then to say they don't deserve to be called “Female Americans?”

Since the U.S. is one of the few countries that prides itself of creating such divisions in society, where people are African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans and so on, instead of “just” Americans, it seems just fair that we start calling their minority (which actually represents the majority of the population, with a longer life expectancy, too) by their proper name of “Female American.”

This way, our battle for the democratic nomination would be between an African American and a Female American. It also gives us time to come up with a better term than “Caucasian” for John McCain.