In my days as a feminist, back in the 70's, I remember some proposal for taking all references to men out of words. "Women" would become "womyn", "they" would become "tey" (to remove the reference to "he"), and so forth.
Glad I got over the looney phase.
He he. I remember that too, I was the editor for the newsletter for the South Jersey Chapter of NOW when I was 19 and always forgot to spell women w-o-m-y-n. And it was always brought to my attention!
I remember when the youth group at my church in college decided to make all hymns "gender neutral" or inclusive or whatever the phrase was at the time. The women, primarily, went merrily through the hymns, making "men" into "people" or whatever, disregarding any rhythm, rhyme, poetry or meter. Anyway, the PC brigade rolled on until they got to a hymn with the line "when wicked men insult and hate you, all because of me" and then they suddenly fell silent. It was left to one of the men in the group to point out that maybe wickedness really ought to be gender neutral too, in the interest of fairness.
I had a friend of mine in the 80's actually trace the origin of "woman" and she found out it is NOT derivative of "man" but rather descends down from "womb" and "menos" (monthly) [big time summary there -- her research paper was 20 pages]. It is one of those oddities of language that "man" and "woman" landed in Emglish as they did.
She LOVED to throw that in the faces of the feminists and make them look as stupid as they were.