Whoa, man
Man, in Old English, was gender neutral. A female was a wifman, and a male was a werman. The stem wif is also the origin of the word Wife. From 1000 to 1300, the conventions changed to Woman and Man. Curious as to the cause, I perused events of the 12th and 13th centuries. The most suspect culprit in my opinion was Christianity. It was around this same period that the Europeans started following it, and consequently evolving their language to what would be known as Middle English.
According the the Great Knowledge Collaborative of Planet Earth, also known as Wikipedia.
Simone, yours is the Feminist Movement that will pierce the heavens!
I thought many of the points Simone made are largely irrelevant today. For example, she says that women can't think of themselves without men, and that women never say "we." Today it's common sense that women can be and often are independent; I wouldn't doubt it's possible to bring up a hundred instances of women publicly referring to their gender collectively as "we." It's important to realize that Simone was from a past era where common sense instead detailed the subjugation of women, and while her ideas greatly influenced the face of even today's feminist movement, many of her intolerances have been resolved.
- Max Pittsley
Thanks for looking up the etymology of woman. If you take a look at Daniel Park's blog post you will see that even today "woman" is a collective category. His mother took care of him and his family,that is all she did, her sense of self was built through taking care of others, making even herself a "we". Let's talk about this in class today.
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