Download Gender and Literature - Horarios de los centros asociados de la uned

Género y Literatura en los Países de Habla Inglesa
GLOSSARY UNIT 1
Sources:
Baym, Nina (ed.). The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol C. New York
& London: W. W. Norton, 2003.
Beasley, Christine. Gender and Sexuality. Critical Theories, Critical Thinkers.
London: SAGE Publications, 2005.
Dictionary of Literary Characters. Edinburgh: Harraps, 2005.
Drabble, Margaret (ed.). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford:
O.U.P., 2000.
Encarta World English Dictionary. London: Bloomsbury, 1999.
Goodman, Lizbeth (ed.). Literature and Gender. London: The Open University,
1996.
Pearsal, Judy (ed.). The New Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1998.
A “feminine sentence”: In the Times Literary Supplement (1923), Virginia Woolf
decided that her contemporary Dorothy Richardson had found a sentence that we might
call the ‘psychological sentence’ of the feminine gender. It was a woman’s sentence, but
only in the sense that it is used to describe a woman’s mind by a writer who is neither
proud nor afraid of anything that she may discover in the psychology of her sex.
[Goodman]
Androcentric: A view of theory that is male-centred. Focused or centred on men.
[Beasley, Encarta]
Anon: Anonymous. In a famous quotation, Virginia Woolf emphasizes that many
women wrote in previous generations, but that social factors to do with gender kept
many writers “anonymous,” hidden, silenced or otherwise excluded from the “canon.”
[Goodman]
“An Obstacle”: A poem by Charlotte Perkins Gilman that can be read as a piece about
the “obstacles” of gender stereotypes and prejudices which blocked the progress of
women writers for so long. The narrator and author of the poem has experienced a lack
of cooperation and support from the social world, characterized by “Prejudice.” Gilman
shows women striving to move ahead, patriarchal attitudes standing in the way.
“Prejudice” faces all writers who do not conform to some “norm” of acceptability or
importance. The author recognizes the joy of moving beyond an obstacle, whether
personal or general. [Goodman]
Bachelor: positive masculine category set against feminine equivalents like “spinster.”
“Buddy” from brother is also a good thing in opposition to “sissy” derived from sister.
[ Beasley]
Domestic fiction: The term alludes to traditional representations of women’s roles in
the home, and then with reference to the feminist writing which challenged and
continues to challenge such traditions. [Goodman]
“Female writing” (“écriture feminine”): A term coined by Hélène Cixous to refer to
women’s writing, which derives from women’s unique experience. [Goodman]
Feminism: A recognition of the historical and cultural subordination of women and a
resolve to do something about it. The advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the
equality of the sexes. It is a critical theory that refuses what it describes as the masculine
bias of mainstream Western thinking on the basis that this bias renders women
invisible/marginal to understanding of humanity and distorts understandings of men.
Feminism is a critical stance that decentres the assumptions of the mainstream in terms
of centre (men)/periphery (women). For the Feminists the notion of woman is placed
centre stage.
The issue of rights for women first became prominent during the French and
American revolutions in the late eighteenth century. [Goodman, Drabble, Beasley,
Oxford]
Feminist literary criticism: An academic approach to the study of literature which
applies feminist thought to the analysis of literary texts and the contexts of their
production and reception. A modern tradition of literary commentary and controversy
devoted to the defence of women’s writing or of fictional female characters against the
condescensions of a predominantly male literary establishment.
The growth of feminist literary criticism has helped us to study gender as it is
represented in literature and other art forms. The beginnings of this movement are to be
found in the journalism of Rebecca West from about 1910. Early European feminist
writings began with the work of Simone de Beauvoir, while Anglo-American writing is
often associated with Virginia Woolf. Feminist criticism has become a varied field of
debate rather than an agreed position. Its substantial achievements are seen in the
readmission of temporarily forgotten women authors to the literary canon in modern
reprints and newly commissioned studies by feminist publishing houses such as Virago
(1977) and the Women’s Press (1978), in anthologies and academic courses. [Goodman,
Drabble]
Feminist literature: The literary corpus written by contemporary women within the
context of “second wave” or even “third wave” (that is, current) feminist awareness.
Feminist authors have a political and ideological agenda in the writing of their work.
Thus, some knowledge of the author’s intentions is necessary. Literature may have a
feminist impact even if its authors do not identify themselves as feminist. [Goodman]
Feminist and Masculinity Studies: they tend to line up together and focus on the
significance of gender (sexed identities). [Beasley]
“Firing the canon”: The phrase means a revaluation of the standards by which authors
and texts have been singled out and “canonized”, followed by an active search for other
authors and texts for inclusion. [Goodman]
“First-wave feminism”: The syntagm often refers to the Suffragists who believed in
fighting for women’s rights rallied around one central cause: women’s right to vote. In
Britain it was not until the emergence of the suffragette movement in the late nineteenth
century that there was a significant political change. It was marked by its critique of
dominant Western thinking of the time, that is, its critique of Liberalism. However,
eighteenth and nineteenth-century Liberalism, though using the gender neutral language
of “humanity,” “individual,” and “reason,” rested in practice upon a notional man and
was indeed confined to men. Early Liberal feminists proposed women’s inclusion in the
Liberal universal conception of a human common nature as well as a common action
political agenda. [Goodman, Encarta, Beasley]
Gender: Social or cultural category based on the ways of seeing and representing
people and situations influenced by sex difference. Typically refers to the social process
of dividing up people and social practices along the lines of sexed identities. Frequently
involves creating hierarchies between divisions. In modern Western societies, it usually
refers to the categories of men and women and the social practices which associate men
with public life and women and domestic life. Some commentators see it more in terms
of social interactions and institutions that from groups, thus, as a structuring process.
Although it is commonly linked to notions of reproduction, some analysts reject its
connection to social interpretation of reproductive biological distinctions. [Goodman,
Beasley]
Gender and creative work: In the nineteenth century, women and girls in fiction are
occupied with certain kinds of creative work. Weaving, sewing and needlework
represent those forms of work and a metaphor for female expression which operates on
many levels simultaneously. However, some other women use writing as a way to
express creative freedom. That is the case of Charlotte Perkins Gilman who, both in her
story “The Yellow Newspaper” and in her own life, writes as a process of healing and
emotional release. She values creative freedom and intellectual stimulation over the
domestic. [Goodman]
Gender and language: All writing is gendered so far as all authors use language.
Language is created in so far as all authors use language, and language is created,
spoken and written in culture, where each of us has a sex and a gender.
A way of texting the “gender-relevance” of a text is deciding what relationships
of power and authority are conveying through the language and characterization of a
text. Feminist commentators note that in Western thought to speak of men is taken as
speaking universally. [Goodman, Beasley]
Gender/Sexual Difference thinking: Writers such as Nancy Chodorow, Mary Daly,
Carol Gilligan, and Luce Irigaray speak for an alternative worldview which recognizes
and highlights difference. Like the Emancipatory feminists, they argue that universal
presumptions are in fact not neutral but derived from men or notions of the masculine
and constitutes women as outsiders. The aim of Gender Difference feminists is to
acknowledge difference positively by revaluing the marginal, by revaluing the feminine.
Sexual Difference theorists do not assume that women have any particular qualities that
can be contrasted with those of men, but revalue the Feminine as representing in
cultural terms “difference” from the (masculine) norm. By revaluing the Feminine, they
envisage plurality in society.
Gender/Sexual Difference approaches share with Feminist Identity Politics the
common theme of the incommensurability of the sexes and the importance of
celebrating rather than suppressing difference in social life. [Beasley]
Gender, language and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865): Alice is ahead of its
time because it is an example of children’s fiction with a female protagonist. Unlike the
other children’s stories written in the previous generation, the central character is active,
inquisitive, intelligent and engaging. Most of the fantastic creatures encountered by
Alice are gendered male and they are male for a reason: they serve a function to do with
language and power in a male-dominated world. The language of the piece and the
gendering of the other characters in the story reveal that Alice is at odds in a maledominated, male-controlled world. Most of the creatures encountered by the fictional
Alice are male or endowed with masculine power and authority, often expressed
through their “mastery” of, and experimentation with language. [Goodman]
Gender, language and Pygmalion (1916): Professor Higgins undertakes his task in
order to win a bet and to prove his own points about English speech and the class
system: he teaches Eliza Doolittle to speak standard English and introduces her to a
successfully social life. Eliza Doolittle is a woman constructed, imagistically and
linguistically, by a man. The male playwright –G. B. Shaw– shows the brutality of the
patriarchal system of language and power which entraps her. For Eliza Doolittle
language is inextricably tied to gender and class issues. The knowledge she has acquired
of language and social relations makes her enter a new culture, a new language. Her
previous ways of using language, and of seeing herself, are no longer open to her. The
political and social views of G. B. Shaw are expressed through the mouths of his
characters. [Goodman, Drabble]
Gender, language and “The Lady of Shalott” (1832): In this Victorian poem of
Arthurian echoes, the Lady of the title is disempowered by language itself. She is not
the subject of active verbs but a passive presence in contrast with an active man and an
active landscape. The word “bold” is used in the poem in relation to Sir Lancelot. It is
only used in relation to the Lady by way of analogy to a seer, gendered male.
[Goodman]
Gender, language and “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892): male power determines
meaning by assuming the right to designate “correct” uses of language and rules for
female behaviour. The female narrator describes her feelings of frustration at being told
not to write, and implicit in that frustration is a desire to be the one who writes her own
story, who uses language to represent her own self. Gilman is critical of Doctor John,
the female narrator’s husband, but her criticism is not expressed in any direct terms
within the text but through our sympathy with the confined woman. The entire narrative
becomes the expression of a stifled creative voice in the form of a secret journal.
Gilman uses language to create a picture of reality: to show what is presented as
“reason” by men. [Goodman]
“Gender on the agenda”: The process of reading with a concern for gender issues that
affects the writing or reading of texts. It means paying attention to factors such as
women’s relative lack of access to higher education, women lower economic status,
women’s domestic responsibilities, and the conflict between nurturing roles such as
motherhood and domestic work. It involves the reader in an active process of
imagination and interpretation. [Goodman, Drabble]
Gender/Sexuality Theories: includes a full range of major subfields of
gender/sexuality theory―that is, Feminist, Masculinity, and Sexuality Studies. These
subfields tend to focus on only two sexes, but recently have begun to allow for more
plural sexual identities. All the subfields are characterized by an inclination to challenge
the notion of a proper, appropriate, natural “norm” in relation to gender and sexuality.
Gender/Sexuality theories and all its subfields are committed to social reform, or at least
social destabilisation. The subfields show a concern with some level of social change
that resists the existing hierarchy of sex and power. Beasley outlines five main
directions spreading across the Modernist-Postmodern continuum that focus on the
Human –Modernist (Emancipatory/Liberationsit) feminisms–, (Singular) Difference –
Identity Politics to “Sexual Difference” feminisms–, (Multiple) Differences –race,
ethnicity, imperialism and feminism–, Relational Social Power –Feminist Social
Constructionism–, and Fluidity/Instability –Postmodern feminism. Some critics have
distinguished two major groupings or standards within the field of Feminist Studies,
such as “relational” and “individualist” feminisms and “equality” and “difference”
feminisms. [Beasley]
Gender Studies: A concern with the representation, rights and status of women and
men. Academic courses in sociology, history, literature, and psychology which focus on
the roles, experiences, and achievements of women in society. Teaching programmes
centrally focused on Masculinity under the rubric of gender studies also pay attention to
sexuality, while Sexuality Studies programmes discuss writers who, at the very least,
debate gender matters. [Goodman, Encarta, Beasley]
Genre: Term used to distinguish between distinct types of writing, art or thought. The
three major literary genres are poetry, prose fiction, and drama. [Goodman]
“Gestalt” view of literature and gender: It analyses the patterns involved in reading
and interpreting literature. [Goodman]
Gynocentric: centred on or concerned exclusively with women; taking a female (or
specifically a feminist) point of view. [Encarta]
Hegemonic masculinity: refers to the most valuable and most rewarded form of
masculinity, which provides a widely accepted model legitimizing masculine social
dominance. [Beasley]
Identity politics: reflects the idea that characteristics derived from gender, race or
sexuality produce a shared experience and a related commonality. [Beasley]
Literature: Body of writing that aims to be creative. It includes poetry, prose fiction,
and drama. [Goodman]
“Literary canon”: It is the body of writings generally recognized as “great” by some
“authority.” A body of approved works, comprising either writings genuinely
considered to be those of a given author, or writings considered to represent the best
standards of a given literary tradition. [Goodman, Drabble]
Madness in literature: From a gendered perspective, this topic often relates to the
conflict between artistic and domestic sensibilities. In some occasions madness is a
means of escape, of liberation for women. For Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar the
frequency with which women have written about madness is to be seen as one of the
most revealing symptoms of their own feelings of entrapment and oppression.
[Goodman]
Madness in Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë: Both Sense and Sensibility (1811)
and Jane Eyre (1847) resists romanticizing mental breakdown, insisting on the degree to
which the literary fashion for ornamental female insanity debilitated and degraded
women. The novels resist the depiction of madness as the product of a naturally
unstable femininity.
Brontë manipulates Bertha Mason’s character and depicts her as different from
the sentimental madwomen usually found in preceding novels. Jane Eyre is antithetical
to Victorian ideals of femininity in a way which can be interpreted as feminist.
[Goodman]
Madness in Moods: In her novels, the American writer Louisa May Alcott wrote about
depressions connected with the struggle to balance artistic creativity with domesticity.
[Goodman]
Madness in The Female Malady: In her influential study, Elaine Showalter notes that
madness is the price women artists have to pay for the exercise of their creativity in a
male-dominated culture. [Goodman]
Madness in “The Yellow Wallpaper”: In this representative story what drives the
narrator mad is the confinement of her creative imagination. Madness could be an
escape from one kind of cage into another. [Goodman]
Masculinity Studies: offers a critical stance on sex and power but, rather than focusing
on the marginalized, attends to those that are traditionally central to Western
thinking―that is, men and masculinity. Indeed, while this subfield has become more
attentive to diversity, it still primarily attends to white middle-class heterosexual men.
[Beasley]
Patriarchy: In Feminism, systemic and trans-historical male domination over women.
A system or society of government in which the father or eldest male is head of the
family and descent is reckoned through the male line. System or society of government
in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it. Along with
“compulsory heterosexuality,” the term “patriarchy” indicate the negative nature of
power, its quality of repression. [Oxford, Beasley]
Postmodern feminism: offers the multiplication of difference that appears in the group
difference(s) approaches. There is an expansion of difference towards differences,
towards a plurality that resists any set identities. Post-modern feminists intent to
destabilize the very conception of identity (human or group) and the binary identities
(such as men and women). They assert that there is no “truth” behind identity. For them,
gender is a masquerade and there is nothing behind or before this “mask.” Postmodern
views are even more strongly but have had limited impact on Masculinity Studies.
[Beasley]
“Pro-feminist”: Still debated by feminist criticism, it is a term sometimes used for men
sympathetic to feminist concerns. Such literary works as Jane Eyre and Pygmalion can
be defined as pro-feminist. The story of Jane Eyre exhibits the bright independent
heroine, a woman who struggles with learning, work and desire. Eliza Doolittle in
Pygmalion escapes her creator and becomes a character with more integrity and
humanity than Professor Higgins, her male counterpart. [Goodman]
Queer theory: typically focused upon the question of individual identity, and upon
cultural/symbolic and literary/textual issues, aims to destabilize identity through the
construction of a supposedly “inclusive,” non-normative (almost invariably nonheterosexual) sexuality and a simultaneous dismantling of gender roles. [Beasley]
Race/ethnicity/imperialism feminists: they wish to revalue and affirm group
difference and identities. For them, categories of men and women cannot be seen as
self-evident identities that are always the same and bear the same social consequences
everywhere.
“Second-wave feminism”: “movement” focused particularly on women’s rights with
an emphasis on unity and sisterhood. It began during the political upheaval in England,
Europe and America in the 1960s and 1970s, and attempted to combat social and
cultural inequalities. Seminal figures included Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer.
Popular renderings of Feminism often presuppose the politics of Liberal feminism
during this second wave. However, in feminist writings the second wave refers to at
least four main directions: (reworked versions of) Liberal, Marxist, Socialist feminisms
and additionally Radical feminism. Like first-wave feminism, it has an “emancipatory”
orientation or Modernist approach which consists of assimilating women into society, a
fact they would necessarily transform that society. Its aim is to throw off macro
structures of power that oppress women and other subordinated groups as far as to
propound a particular notion of the self less tied to a particular account of competitive
masculinity. Women must be assimilated into an enhanced view of the social world,
participating in social tasks as men do. During the second wave of feminism gender
difference was increasingly promoted: the focus was more upon women’s difference
than from men, upon affirming women as a group and gynocentrism. [Oxford, Beasley]
Sex: Biological category that distinguishes between male and female. Sex is ineluctably
a matter of human organization―that is, it is political, associated with social dominance
and subordination, as well as capable of change. [Goodman, Beasley]
Sexed regimes: identities and practices typically involving categories such as men and
women. [Beasley]
Sexual difference: coverall term for the field of study of sexed identities. [Beasley]
Sexual embodiment: attends to critical analyses of gender and sexual relations.
[Beasley]
Sexuality Studies: focus upon the organization of desire (not on having or doing sex
per se, but upon sexualities). Sexuality Studies is mostly (like Feminism) concerned
with marginalized identities and practices (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex)
and/or Queer Studies. Nevertheless, more recently there has been a growing body of
work in Sexuality Studies concerned with heterosexuality, with “mainstream” sexuality.
[Beasley]
Sexuality: The realm of sexual experience and desire. Sometimes it refers to a person’s
sexual orientation as heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual. [Goodman]
Social Constructionist Feminists: they argue that “difference” does not adhere in the
self/identity, is not an inherent essence, but is created by relations of power. They
describe truth and power in universal macro terms and power is largely perceived as
negative domination. Social Constructionism, along with Postmodernism, offers a
critique of both Emancipatory and Gender Difference approaches in that both of the
latter accounts stress relatively fixed notions of identity. [Beasley]
“The domestication of insanity”: With this phrase, Elaine Showalter suggests how she
connects domestic confinement and oppression with “madness.” [Goodman]
“The female malady”: Elaine Showalter has used this phrase to refer to both the
female experience of domestic confinement and to the identification of mental and
emotional disturbances in women which could be called “female disorders.” [Goodman]
“The Lady of Shallot”: A poem by Tennyson published in 1832, much revised for the
1842 Poems. The Lady was one of the several enchanted or imprisoned maidens to
capture the Victorian imagination, and was the subject of many illustrations, including
the notable ones by Waterhouse, Millais, Rossetti and Holman Hunt. The lovely victim
of an evil curse, she is bound to stick to her enchanted weaving task night and day,
without looking out of the window, a window that shows her the outside world to which
she cannot access directly. When Sir Lancelot rides past on his way to Camelot, the
mysterious lady’s self-discipline snaps and she resigns herself to her doom. [Drabble]
The “New Woman:” Goodman suggests that this phrase might have come into the
minds of members of the first audience of A Doll’s House by the end of the scene
between Nora and Mrs Linde in Act I. It suggests a new, more independent kind of
woman who can act with self-determining, progressive views and conduct. “New”
signified ‘good’, the opening out of a new world order.
The poster of the performance of Sydney Grundy’s play The New Woman,
performed at the Comedy Theatre in London in 1894, shows a young woman in black in
a cabinet with a large latchkey and a smouldering cigarette, which became the infamous
tokens of her “advanced” nature.
Both plays demonstrate an underlying hostility to the whole notion of the New
Woman because of the fact that these women could work or deal with money, which
was a way of transgression of the social boundaries that require middle-class women to
be dependent on either father, husband of brother.
Ibsen influenced G. B. Shaw in Pygmalion (1913) and Mrs. Warren’s Profession
(1931), the first contributions to the new age of “New Women” in the theatre. The
Norwegian playwright’s work was instrumental in a developing trend for strong women
on the stage, which later developed in the plays of the suffrage movement. [Goodman]
“The woman’s masculine language”: Juliet Mitchell points out that there is not a
female writing or a woman’s voice but the hysteric’s voice who speaks “masculinely” in
a phallocentric world talking about feminine experience. [Goodman]
“The Yellow Wallpaper”: A short story written by Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman,
and published in May 1892 in the New England Magazine. It is the first person
narration of a young mother isolated in a country colonial mansion, under the
supervision of a nurse. Supervised and compelled by the authority of her physician
husband John, she is largely confined to a room with paper of a “smouldering unclean
yellow,” in which she discerns sinister patterns and, eventually, the movements of
imprisoned women. The story chronicles the female character’s descend into madness,
and may be read as a simple ghost story or as a feminist text.
Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” after a severe nervous
breakdown. A specialist in mental diseases advised her to have two hours’ intellectual
life a day but she cast his advice to the winds and went to work again as she was so near
the border line of utter mental ruin. Perkins Gilman stated that the little book saved one
woman from a similar fate. She also added that it was not intended to drive people
crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked [Drabble, Norton]
“Third-wave feminism”: It started approximately in 1980, and lasted up to the early
1990s. It included renewed campaigning for women’s greater influence on politics. This
movement suggests the idea that the goals of second wave feminism have been achieved
and/or that his older form of feminism is now outmoded because it is overly focused on
women’s victimized status. It often positions itself in antagonism to more established
feminist projects and displays doubts about the concept of women as a broad social
grouping, arguing that this category is unhelpful. Sometimes it refers to recent feminist
thinkers who are attuned to differences between women and are dubious about
collective political action. [Drabble, Beasley]
Trans politics: showing a similar path to Queer Theory, increasingly critiquing and
rejecting notions of fixed identity, represents the specific avowal of gender and sexual
ambiguity (the avowal of a positioning as, for example, neither a man nor woman).
Queer theorists, in particular, dismiss any assertions that gender and sexuality are
inevitably joined, and tend to ignore or reject gender. [Beasley]
Windows, doors and mirrors: In women’s fiction, they separate public and private
spheres, real and imaginary spaces where they are allowed to enter and to exit. Cracked
mirrors often represent fractured identities or horror of recognition. In “The Lady of
Shalott” the mirror shows her the outside world to which she can’t have access. In “The
Yellow Newspaper” the narrator of the story sees herself reflected in a symbolic mirror
because the figures she sees moving behind the wallpaper are all versions of herself, of
other trapped women. [Goodman]
Writer/reader relationship: A relationship between author and reader can be
established in the way that a text and its context bridge the gap between one person, an
author, and other people, who come to the text at different times, in different cultural
contexts and for different reasons.
As an example, in Pygmalion the political and social views of G. B. Shaw are
expressed through the mouths of his characters. Also, the female perspective of Jane
Eyre brings readers inside Jane’s world and encourages them to see things from Jane’s
point of view. She offers an insight into the class and gender divisions of the previous
era and the continuing inequalities of society. [Goodman]
Wolf, Naomi: the author of The Beauty Myth (1990) and Misconceptions (2001)
devotes considerable attention to the social obstacles women face, urging social reform
to these obstacles. Her political programme is about individuals and criticizes what she
calls “victim feminism” for saddling women with an “identity and powerlessness.” She
encourages women to form “power groups” to pool their resources in the way men do
and seeks to incorporate women and Feminism into a North American style of
capitalism. Wolf celebrates gun ownership among women as a sign of progress beyond
victimhood. [Beasley]
“Women’s Liberation”: Also known as the Women's Movement, Women's
Liberation, or Women's Lib, the term refers to a series of campaigns for reforms on
issues such as reproductive rights, domestic violence, maternity leave, equal pay, voting
rights, sexual harassment, and sexual violence. On the whole, it means the liberation of
women from inequalities and subservient status in relation to men, and from attitudes
causing these. Unlike Gay Liberation thinkers, these feminist perceived sexuality as
intimately tied to normative power. [Encarta, Beasley]
Women’s Literature: Literature concerning women. Some women’s literature conveys
feminist ideas and affects readers in a “consciousness raising” style. Most contemporary
authors have been influenced to some degree by the “feminist literary critical
revolution”. [Goodman]
Women’s Studies: They show a concern with the representation, rights and status of
women. A course of study examining the historical, economic, and cultural roles and
achievements of women. Gender is sometimes associated with attempts to excise the
radical critique of Women’s Studies and with prescriptive demands that they must be
accompanied by a matched emphasis on men. [Goodman, Encarta, Beasley]
Womyn: non-standard spelling of “women” adopted by some feminists in order to
avoid the word ending –men. [Encarta]