WIMMIN

plural noun Also written womyn (Politics) (People and Society) In writing by or about feminists: women. Etymology: A respelling of women which is meant to reflect its pronunciation and is expressly intended to remove from it the 'word' men. The spelling womyn is an attempt to preserve the historical continuity of the word to some extent, in answer to criticism of the purely phonetic wimmin. History and Usage: The first examples of wimmin used in print date from the late seventies. According to a feminist dictionary, in August 1979 a feminist magazine 'for, about, and by young wimmin' explained the motivation for the new spelling: We have spelt it this way because we are not women neither are we female...You may find it trivial--it's just another part of the deep, very deep rooted sexist attitudes. By the mid eighties, the spelling had come to be particularly associated, in the UK at least, with militant feminism and with the peace wimmin or Greenham wimmin, feminist peace campaigners who from 1981 picketed the US airbase at Greenham Common in Berkshire to protest about the deployment of nuclear weapons at this and other bases. The spelling womyn, which developed in the second half of the eighties, offers the possibility of a singular form (much rarer than the plural). Wimmin rewrite Manglish herstory. headline in Sunday Telegraph 3 Nov. 1985, p. 13 According to Jane's Defence Weekly, the authoritative British defence journal, women members of the Spetsnaz forces have been mingling with the Greenham 'wimmin'...The Greenham 'wimmin' laugh at this suggestion. Daily Telegraph 23 Jan. 1986, p. 18 Why are these (ignorant) gay men (and sadly sometimes wimmin) stereotyping gayness?...Next time you see a feminine looking womyn...don't show hostility toward her. Pink Paper 17 Nov. 1990, p. 19