Carol Orlock

Carol Orlock is the American feminist writer who invented the word femicide. She is among the most consequential uncredited figures in the history of feminist scholarship — the person who coined the term that has since shaped legislation across dozens of countries, mobilized mass movements from Argentina to Mexico to France, and given name to a form of violence that had existed for all of human history without one.

In 1974 or 1975, Orlock was preparing an unpublished anthology in which she used the word femicide to describe the killing of girls and women by men. The anthology was never published. But the word reached Diana Russell — who heard about it through a friend in London in 1974 who told her that an American woman was writing a book called “Femicide.” Russell, then a professor at Mills College in Oakland, California, immediately recognized the political power of the term and adopted it.

When Russell testified at the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women in Brussels in 1976 — the occasion on which the word entered public discourse — she credited Orlock explicitly, stating: “there was no name for it until Carol Orlock invented the word ‘femicide.'” Russell maintained this attribution throughout her decades of campaigning for the term, noting that Orlock had been planning to write a book on the subject but never pursued it, and had welcomed Russell’s adoption of the word.

The global movement built on the word femicide — the legislation, the protests, the scholarship, the United Nations statistical frameworks — traces its origin to an unpublished manuscript by a woman whose name almost no one knows. Carol Orlock invented the word. The world built a movement on it.