16 Facts About Womyn’s Land, The All-Female Communes that Offered a Safe Haven for Abused Women and Feminism

16 Facts About Womyn’s Land, The All-Female Communes that Offered a Safe Haven for Abused Women and Feminism

Shannon Quinn - October 31, 2018

16 Facts About Womyn’s Land, The All-Female Communes that Offered a Safe Haven for Abused Women and Feminism
The Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970’s. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

8. There Is No “Man” In “Womyn’s Land”

When you read “womyn’s land” you may have thought it was a typo. Nope. It’s done on purpose by feminists who are offended by the fact that the word “woman” is just the word “man” with two letters added onto it. Same with “female” being two letters added to “male”. If you think about it, not all languages are like this, and the words for the genders are totally different from one another. In French, woman is “femme” and man is “homme”. In Chinese, the characters of “Nan” and “Njui” are spelled totally differently, making them separate, but equal.

The English etymology comes from way back in the Anglo-Saxon days. “Man” is meant to refer to all humans, but the Old English word “wifman”, meaning very literally “wife of man”. The word “Wife” also has a lot of connotations to being a man’s property, since many of the laws were actually written that way. For radical feminists, they reject the word “woman”, and they want to change it to “womyn”.

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