misandry/misogyny

Ever since I learned the word for hatred of men (misandry), I've wanted to know when it was entered into the English lexicon, and how it compared, historically, to misogyny. Today, thanks to dictionary.com, I found the answer:

Misogyny, the word for hatred of women, was entered into the lexicon sometime around 1650-1660.

Misandry, the word for hatred of men, was entered into the lexicon ~1945-1950. 300 years later, and (I think significantly) the same time the Rosies of WWII were displaced by men returning from the war.

What does this mean? Does it mean, as Carl Sagan and Ann Druyun suggest in Contact that the "male lexographers" couldn't imagine a use for the word, or does it mean that hatred of men is historically more likely to be ignored? There are at least a dozen other explanations I can think of off the top of my head, but first I'd like to know what you think. What accounts for the 300 year gap?

What Kids Can Teach Us

Yesterday, I came across this article via metafilter, and it is easily one of the most interesting pieces I've read in a very long time. In it, two teachers describe how their elementary school-aged after school kids went from playing with legos to deconstructing capitalism over the course of a school year.

Certainly, the ethics of teaching social justice in an elementary school classroom are up for debate, but I'd rather not focus on that here. Instead, what I found striking was the amount that these 8-year-olds were already a product of their environment. I think elementary school interactions socialize kids in broader ways than merely helping them form interpersonal relationships. These kids were clearly savvy to their societal environment. By the age of 8, many were already products of capitalism, completely accultured to the socioeconomic system in which they were growing up. Moreover, as I read further into the article, I realized that they were speaking in terms that were already defined by that system. For American schoolchildren, inequality is a natural way of life.

Back to the ethics of teaching social justice. In college I took a class on the Cold War in which we read a number of texts relating to propaganda. One of the texts discussed how social values are promulgated in small children. One of the most striking examples was how math texts are used to surreptitiously convey values to children. Look at an American high school or grade school math textbook. Look at the word problems. They almost always talk about buying things. Even when people buy them together, they rarely split the cost evenly. This isn't the case everywhere, and it certainly wasn't the case in Soviet Russia, where most math texts involved sharing or producing. So regardless of what teachers do in the classroom, children are constantly being instilled with social values in the classroom.