I was talking with a friend of mine from work, Laura, and we were discussing a lady we worked with in the early ’90s. I suspected that the lady was a man-hater and commented that a woman-hater is commonly known as a misogynist. But there is no apparent or commonly used term for man-hater. Laura is a word lover, writer, editor extraordinare so she posited that the term might be ‘misandrist’ or something.
Today I get this rather delightful e-mail from Laura which said in part, "There is such a word, but girls are afraid to use it ;-)" And then she provides a link to Michael Quinion’s most wonderful World Wide Words which says in part:
[Q] From Douglas Muir Hutton: “Is there an opposite to misogynist?”
[A] If you consider that the opposite of misogynist, woman-hater, is a lover of women, the only one given in any of my books of synonyms and antonyms is feminist, which doesn’t meet the need at all. If you split the Greek word into its constituent parts, you find it is made up of miso-, hate (a prefix that turns up in English in a number of rare or facetious words, including misocapnist for a hater of tobacco smoke), plus gyn meaning woman (as in gynaecologist), plus the -ist ending that indicates an agent noun.
So we can replace the first element with philo-, for love, to get philogynist instead. This is listed in most larger dictionaries, with the abstract noun given as philogyny, love of women. The first citation given in the Oxford English Dictionary is from T H Huxley’s Lay Sermons of 1865, and if it’s good enough for Darwin’s Bulldog, it’s good enough for me.
The Bis Key Chronicles 