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[–]lestratege 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Simone de Beauvoir's landmark book first published in 1949 and a perennial bestseller around the world from then was called The Second Sex.

That's because in French, the word gender "genre" has only the grammatical meaning, at least until the last few years. Or it means "kind" as in "my kind"

Arguing that the word "sex" was still used in 1972 or even after does not invalidate the claim that someone started using "gender" in its place in 1972. The word "gender" does increase in its use in the 1970s, probably because it starts to be used as more than "grammatical gender".

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gender%2Csex&year_start=1900&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=1&case_insensitive=true