>I thought a woman overly dedicated to the female cause was a feminist.

okay (now that we got past the 'malist' tangent <g>), we've arrived at my point. consider our definitions:

chauvinism - 3) an attitude of superiority toward members of the opposite sex

masculinist - an advocate of male superiority or dominance

so, by definition, a male chauvinist is a masculinist.

okay, so we started out with chauvinist having a very narrow definition; over time the definition became broader in that it was applied to various groups and places (see sense #2). And then it shifted to the *narrow* sense of sexist, and (the worst!), because we all know <ahem> that men are more prone to being sexist, we've (again, this may be unique to the US) arrived at chauvinist being used as a synonym for masculinist!

[this is similar to what happened with 'decimate', which started out applying to a narrow ratio (1 in 10) of punishment and the definition was broadened to include "a large part of" (and then it got misused by *narrowing* application to specific ratios other than 1 in 10).]

...and a good weekend to you too, 'brick!