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From: scholl@uvmark.uucp (Kathryn Scholl)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: response to question about "womyn"
Message-ID: <1991Mar13.233822.36802@uvmark.uucp>
Date: 13 Mar 91 23:38:22 GMT
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In article schoi@teri.bio.uci.edu (Sam "Lord Byron" Choi) writes:

    >you wouldn't think it unusual if the professor said in introducing
    >the lecture on one of her books, "Stein was an important woman
    >writer of the modernist movement who..."

    >The point of this is that you would think it weird if that same professor,
    >in introducing a lecture on William Butler Yeats said, "Yeats was an
    >important man poet of the early twentieth century who..."

Agreed.  This is an on-going, probably-will-not-change attitude which
prevails in our media, school system, etc.

    >connotation seems to be that a woman is something different from a man.
    >"I, a man, am the norm.  A woman, is that which deviates from the norm."
    >The spelling "womyn" eliminates the possible entomological and
    >linguistic connection to "man," and thus, so the claim goes, liberates
    >the womyn from the androcentric language structures of our
    >language, placing womyn on an equal level as men linguistically
    >as an alternative rather than a derivative, and thus empowers her
    >to define herself in her own discourse.

My only question here is that, given a new lingo, won't society just
simply *replace* that word when describing Stein, and still use *no*
word when describing Yeats?

I understand how the word itself defines an alternative of the being
rather than a "subset" of the being.  But I think the problem lies
with the fact that, at least in verbal description, a word is used
AT ALL.  In this particular case, I don't think the word "womyn" will
help anything, just replace the old usage with the new, therefore putting
the woman in the "I, the woman, am the deviant of the norm." situation
once again.

    >If you don't buy this form of argument think about the example above.
    >Yeats is a poet.  Is Stein a poet?  Poetess?  A woman poet?

And using the "womyn" scenario, Yeats is a poet.  Stein is a womyn poet.
I just don't understand how it helps here.  Please elaborate.

Thanks,
Kathryn

-- 
Kathryn Scholl
...uunet!merk!uvmark!scholl