A London newspaper first used the term suffragette. British women in the suffrage movement adopted the term for themselves, though earlier the term they used was "suffragist."
In America, the activists working for women's voting preferred the term "suffragist" or "suffrage worker." "Suffragette" was considered a disparaging term in America, much as "women's lib" (short for "women's liberation") was considered a disparaging and belittling term in the 1960s and 1970s.
"Suffragette" in America also carried more of a radical or militant connotation that many American woman suffrage activists did not want to be associated with, at least until Alice Paul and Harriot Stanton Blatch began to bring some of the British militancy to the America struggle.
