I am "Wom", Hear Me Roar

Thank you for celebrating Women's History Month with me. Tomorrow begins National Poetry Month, and daily poetry postings.

“It is taken for granted that a work reveals the artist's soul as well as his mind" writes Jacques Barzun in From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present (67). Barzun is referring to an unspecified Renaissance artist, to Renaissance artists in a general, abstract sense, yet he uses the masculine third person singular pronoun "his". Were all Renaissance artists men? Are only male Renaissance artists worthy of Barzun's (and the reader's) attention? Are women merely hypersensitive to the use of the male pronouns "he" and "his" to refer to individuals of unspecified gender as suggested by Calvert Watkins, Chair of the Linguistics Department at Harvard Divinity School who coined the phrase "pronoun envy"? (Harvard Crimson, 26 November 1971, 17 qtd. in Livia 3)…
Detailed study of the proposed alternative "womyn" leads me to conclude, regretfully, that it fails to adequately separate "woman" from "man"… There are two possible morphological interpretations of the word "womyn". The first is to consider it a completely new word; a free morpheme that cannot be broken down into smaller units. Yet, can anyone read "womyn" without reading "woman"? I think the more honest and accurate analysis is to treat "wo" as a derivational prefix to "myn" which is merely an alternative spelling of the free morpheme "man". "Womyn", while it does not succeed as a viable alternative to "woman", does serve the valuable purpose of protesting the linguistic inferiority of women and highlighting the need for language reform.
It is no surprise that "womyn", when recognized at all, retains its non-standard, alternative status. "Womyn" was not listed by the on-line dictionaries of American Heritage, Cambridge or Dictionary.com. The effort to separate "woman" from "man" linguistically is, of course, socially symbolic, highly controversial and certain to meet with resistance. It would be extremely difficult to replace "woman" with an entirely new word. Donald Hook in discussing the need for an English epicene pronoun, notes the rejection of "neologisms" and suggests that the "utilization of familiar constructs used in new ways" is a more amenable solution. Can the familiar existing units of "woman" be used in a new way that will disassociate "woman" from "man"?
I propose "wom" as an alternative to "woman" or "womyn". "Wom" unlike "womyn" succeeds in reducing the word for woman to one morpheme and eliminates man completely rather than just altering the spelling of "man". "Wom" as a three letter word beginning with "w" is morphologically closer to "wif" and would return to the original meaning of "wif" of an adult female. Femaleness would be the essence of the word in contrast to "woman" in which the essence is human first and female only secondarily. I would offer "wom" not as an abbreviated form of "woman" but as cognate with the word "womb" to entirely disassociate it from the word "man". "Wom" from "womb" would represent not just women's anatomical reproductive capabilities but would symbolically represent women as a "place of origin, development and growth" ("Womb," def. 1.b.) It is not a strange new word nor is it a deviant spelling. It can be viewed as an abbreviated form of "woman" which makes it both familiar and non-threatening. "Womyn" only distinguishes itself from "woman" in written language but "wom" distinguishes itself in spoken language as well. "Wom" is just the sort of hip linguistic shorthand that might become popular with today's young people, especially in e-mail and instant message exchanges. It flows from the instant message to the spoken language and by the time today's adolescents reach their golden years we will write and speak the word "wom" as naturally and effortlessly as we use "woman" today. "Wom" defines woman independently from man, restores to women the reproductive powers denied them by the creation myths and, finally, gives us a word of one's own.

-Deborah Hauser

Full essay at meowpower.org