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When was the term "gender essentialism" coined, and when did first it come into common usage?
I was under the impression that the concept originated though the feminist existentialism work of authors such as Simone de Beauvoir but GoogleBooks Ngram shows the term start to show up in published works in 1987. I did a Google search but could not easily find an authoritative source for the origin and initial spread of this term.
There is a trick for figuring this out. You go to Google Scholar and try out a series of custom ranges.
Doing that, I discovered the following:
I argue that their work, though powerful and brilliant in many ways, relies on what I call gender essentialism-the notion that a unitary, "essential" women's experience can be isolated and described independently of race, class, sexual orientation, and other realities of experience.
Harris, Angela P. "Race and essentialism in feminist legal theory." Stanford law review (1990): 581-616.
and
Essentialism is implicit in analogies between sex and race. Angela Harris explains gender essentialism as "[t]he notion that there is a mono- lithic 'women's experience' that can be described independent of other facets of experience like race, class, and sexual orientation."
Grillo, Trina, and Stephanie M. Wildman. "Obscuring the importance of race: The implication of making comparisons between racism and sexism (or other-isms)." Duke Law Journal (1991): 397-412.
The Harris 1990 article is cited by 2503 other works. Before making a claim in print, of course one would want to do a little more research, but Harris looks very likely!
