Turns out 2012 isn't really the year of the mansplainer. The only reason we think it so is that the word itself didn't exist until recently.

The commonly cited birthday of the idea is 2008. That year, a portion of an essay by Rebecca Solnit, called "Men Explain Things To Me," appeared in the Los Angeles Times. Solnit didn't use the word "mansplain"; she merely, well, explained it, describing the time a man explained a book to her without acknowledging that she herself wrote it. (This August, she wrote that the men-explaining-things essay has been one of the most reposted pieces she's ever done.) According to Know Your Meme, the word first showed up online about a month after the LA Times piece, in the comments section on a LiveJournal community. Awareness increased slowly but steadily, mostly on feminist blogs, until it was suddenly all over the place: a Google trends graph of searches for the word is mostly a straight line until this past summer, when in August it appeared in a GQ political blog titled "The Mittsplainer" as well as an xoJane.com post critical of the word. There's another even larger jump in October, perhaps linked to the birth of Mansplaining Paul Ryan.

The idea wasn't political in origin, and mansplaining happens in academia and offices and dining rooms. But it makes sense that politics brought it to the general public's attention. When it comes to politics, it seems men have been talking about the female experience since basically forever.

John Adams, whose relationship with Abigail Adams is supposed to be a shining example of spousedom, mansplained the need to make husbands the legal masters of wives. In a March 1776 letter, Abigail told him that men who have absolute control over their wives are bound to use them cruelly, and warns that women might not feel obligated to obey laws made by a body in which they have no representation. He responds:

Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory...We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight.

In other words, he tells his wife, who has expressed worry over the way men treat their wives, that he knows better than she does about the experience of being a wife.

And in a 1980 presidential debate, President Carter brought up the fact that, after four decades of support for the Equal Rights Amendment, the Republican party had removed that language from their platform. Reagan mansplains:

I would like to call the attention of the people to the fact that that so-called simple amendment would be used by mischievous men to destroy discriminations that properly belong, by law, to women respecting the physical differences between the two sexes, labor laws that protect them against things that would be physically harmful to them.

In other words, Ronald Reagan knows best what women can and can't do.