Monday, February 20, 2017

Womanity or TheWoman Question



For many years, both as “an adult female human being,” aka a woman (according to the Oxford English Dictionary [OED]), and an English teacher, I have been interested in gender neutral language. Over the years, I have become accustomed to using “humankind” instead of “mankind” to refer to general groups of people although I still cannot say “personhole cover” with a straight face. When my daughter was a teenager, we dubbed one of our favorite Italian foods “personicotti” as our nod to gender neutral cuisine. At this point, I find it jarring to hear of “manning” instead of “staffing” a position. Sometimes, however, situations call for gender specific language. The recent Women’s Marches around the world advocated for womankind, for women’s rights, as well as for humankind.

Recently, I began reading Miriam Gurko’s The Ladies of Seneca Falls: The Birth of the Women’s Rights Movement. What serendipity to be reading this work at this point in history, when “herstory”--read that as women’s rights--is in grave danger.

In Gurko’s book, I ran across a word referring to “the nature of women,” as Merriam-Webster on-line defines “womanity.” Of course, I know “humanity,” although I have never seen “manity” used, so “womanity” caught my eye. Gurko describes reactions in various newspapers to the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention: “A typical editorial called the convention ‘the most shocking and unnatural incident ever recorded in the history of womanity.’”

Since I never recall seeing “womanity” used, I Googled the word. Of the multiple pages of hits, most of the links for “Womanity” referred to a not inexpensive women’s fragrance. Around page three, I started finding other references to “womanity” that carried their own sweet fragrances.

AWID (Association for Women’s Rights In Development) is an international organization fighting for women’s human rights. It presents the Womanity Award to someone who has worked to prevent domestic violence against women. The Womanity Foundation works to empower girls and women. “Womanity--Women in Unity” is “a weekly programme . . . which celebrates prominent and ordinary African women’s achievements.” I found three different publications entitled “Womanity Magazine,” one in Spanish, one in Greek, and one in Hungarian. Finally, I found a book, The Mysteries in Womanity: An Expository Revelation to the Sacred Divinity of Womanhood, by Apostle Adebayo Adeniyi, dated June 2011, but is out-of-print.

Next, I consulted my OED and was a little surprised to find the word, defined as “the normal disposition or character of womankind,” with a reference found from 1843. It seems, “womanity” was used briefly around the middle of the 19th Century--usually in a derogatory sense--and then it fell into oblivion. Let’s clear the air. I would like to see the word get back into common usage as something other than a somewhat pricey fragrance, a word that women and men—humankind—can use proudly.

LAGNIAPPE:  While researching “womanity” in the OED, I ran a word new to me, ”womanthrope,” meaning “a hater of women,” or misogynist. Oscar Wilde used the word 1891. An author named Coldstreamer used it in 1902. Out of curiosity, I looked up “misanthrope” to find “a hater of mankind, a man-hater.” With womanthrope and misanthrope as companion words, what word would be the companion of misogynist?