In 2025 the National World War 2 Museum declared on their website that “The concept of genocide has fundamentally altered international law, history, and global geopolitics forever, transforming the way we understand mass violence in the modern world.”
The word, coined by a Polish Jewish Lawyer in response to the Holocaust, referred to a historic practice as it relates to post war actions. Derived from the ancient Greek word meaning race or tribe and the Latin word for killing, as in homicide, infanticide, and femicide, the lawyer added that “genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation. It signifies a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”
After the Department of Education declared women-dominated professions like nursing, teaching, social work, and other careers did not align with their definition of a “professional degree,” which “distinguishes programs that qualify for higher loan limits, not a value judgement about the importance of programs.” Tell that to any healthcare professional worthy of recognition, respect, benefits, and professional pride.
Take nursing for example. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, “nursing is the nation's largest healthcare profession, with nearly 4.7 million registered nurses (RNs) nationwide. Of all licensed RNs, 89% are employed in nursing.”
Here’s a Facebook post by one of them. “Can you imagine obtaining three college degrees, three national certificates, obtaining thousands of hours in clinical practice before even entering the work force, and then holding people’s lives in your hands, caring for them during the hardest moments in their lives, diagnosing and prescribing for them. And then being told that you aren’t a professional.”
The president’s recent verbal attacks aimed at women journalists reveals another disrespected sector where females often prevail. His rants against them are staggering. They include telling a reporter to be “quiet, Piggy,” followed by calling another reporter ugly, and third one a "terrible person."
It seems the perfect time to coin another new word: Gendercide. By that I mean the disappearing of women from professions, public squares, politics, pulpits and tables of decision-making. It’s pure Handmaids Tale, and it’s designed to send women back to the suburbs of post WWII where, as Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote in her 1898 book, Women and Economics, “Women were going mad all for the good of the gold ring” in her era. Or as Betty Friedan said after WWII, they were dying from “the problem that had no name.”
The reason for disappearing women isn’t just born of ridiculous politics. It’s noteworthy that several healthcare professionals are mandated to report sexual abuse, and female reporters ask tough questions.
The problem of female oppression and dismissal or removal is even bigger. It resides in sex assault and trafficking of women and girls, because its survivors courageously share their stories.
It’s part of the tragedy of domestic violence. The United Nations reported in 2024 that 50,000 women were killed that year because of the violence perpetrated by someone they lived with or knew. The report noted that’s one death every ten minutes.
Child marriage is still legal in 34 states in America with some exceptions like judicial or parental approval, and the disappearance and murder of indigenous women and girls remains a silent crisis that includes homicide, sexual assault, and trafficking. On some reservations murder rates are more than ten times the national average.
The discrimination against and silencing of women have a long history and continuity that includes abuse and violence. It goes back to ancient history. Philosophers in ancient Greece and Rome believed women had no place in politics or public discourse. Pilgrim puritanism treated women and girls harshly, demanding obedience. In colonial times girls were married by age 14 and those who weren’t wed by 25 were socially humiliated. (Even as late as the 1960s women were pitied if not married in their early 20s). How about the Salem witch trials of the 17th century. And Joan d’Arc who was burned alive because men were fiercely afraid of her.
In Victorian times married women were the legal property of their husbands and had no control of their finances whether by owning land or inheritance. They couldn’t vote or appear in court as a witness. At the turn of the century Edith Wharton’s novels about the Gilden Age reveal these conventions for a fin de siècle generation. Later, suffragists were beaten and force-fed in filthy prisons for wanting women to vote.
Today, women who face the fear of dying or imprisonment if they have an abortion, miscarriage, or high-risk pregnancy are disposable. Some male legislators have suggested that women who have abortions be executed. That’s how far we’ve fallen into the legacy of patriarchy and its desperate hatred and fear of women. Whether affluent or poor, single or married, white or black/brown, we are all at risk of Gendercide - the killing of women professionally, economically, emotionally, spiritually, and physically.
In these times, we must realize the context and connection throughout women’s history and understand how it relates to our lives and our place in the world now. It only takes one nurse’s, one teacher’s, one social worker’s, one victim’s testimony to see that we need a new word: Gendercide.
We must say it, explain it, and refuse it.