Wikipedia defines misandry, similar to androphobia, as "the hatred of men, for being men."
It is a word that has quietly entered modern English in reaction to social protests and warnings against evils of misangyny, or hatred of women for their femininity. However, as a political ideology like racism and antisemitism, misogyny justifies and maintains the subordination of women to men. By contrast, men are not an oppressed class, so misandry, would seem to me to be more of a reaction that some women have to the experience of being victimized by a society dominated by men. Both phenomena exist, but their etiology differs.
On this subject, by seeming coincidence, this morning an unrelated pair of articles popped up on my RSS reader:
Pure Sex, Pure Love: The Misery of Misandry: Are men inferior to women?
New York-based social historian Christine B. Whelan, author of Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women (before asking readers of her blog Pure Sex, Pure Love to comment on whether men are men are inferior to women), opines, "It's time to stop joking about men's subservience to their wives—and for this generation of strong, accomplished women to be secure enough not perpetuate this misandry in our own relationships."The second item mentioned above was published back on January 16th, when The New York Times boldly reported, "For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without husbands than with them" (abstract).
This Times article demonstrates the importance of being a critical reader. On Valentine's Day, a month later, the Times published a small correction, to the aforesaid front page article and chart: "about the rising number of women in the United States living without spouses referred imprecisely to ages of the women included in the Census Bureau survey that was the basis of the finding. The women were 15 and older, not over 15" (emphasis added).
This correction came after Public Editor of the same newspaper, Byron Calame, admitted that the methodology of the report was suspect, asking in a February 11th headline, Can a 15-Year-Old Be a ‘Woman Without a Spouse’? Calame suggested that the inclusion of adolescent girls still living at home with their parents, and aged women such as those in assisted-living facilities, skewed the results.
Unfortunately, many national media outlets failed to note the correction. The International Herald-Tribune (see link above), for example, reported: "Among the more than 117 million women over the age of 15, according to the marital status category in the Census Bureau's latest American Community Survey, 63 million are married" (emphasis added).
Anthropologist Ashley Montague raised the question in his 1952 seminal work The Natural Superiority of Women (review). At the dawn of the modern feminist era and actually part of the movement's impetus, Montague's book stirred important debate, but perhaps missed the fact that humanity is one species, not two.