Looked up 'womyn' as that was one usage in the 70s onwards:
Womyn is one of several alternative political spellings of the English word women, used by some feminists.[1] There are other spellings, including womban (a reference to the womb or uterus) or womon (singular), and wombyn or wimmin (plural). Some writers who use such alternative spellings, avoiding the suffix "-man" or "-men", see them as an expression of female independence and a repudiation of traditions that define women by reference to a male norm.[2] Recently, the term womxn has been used by intersectional feminists to indicate the same ideas while foregrounding or more explicitly including transgender women and women of color.[3][4]
Historically, "womyn" and other spelling variants were associated with regional dialects (e.g. Scots) and eye dialect (e.g. African American Vernacular English).
Old English
Old English had a system of grammatical gender, whereby every noun was treated as either masculine, feminine or neuter, similar to modern German. In Old English sources, the word man was grammatically masculine but gender-neutral in meaning. One of its meanings was similar to the modern English usage of "one" as a gender-neutral indefinite pronoun (compare with mankind (man + kind), which means the human race, and German man, which has retained the indefinite pronoun meaning to the modern day).[5] The words wer and wyf were used, when necessary, to specify a man or woman, respectively. Combining them into wer-man or wyf-man expressed the concept of "any man" or "any woman".[6][7] Some feminist writers have suggested that this more symmetrical usage reflected more egalitarian notions of gender at the time.[2]
Interesting!