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When did "woman" become an adjective?

The field of SF is still male-dominated. But there don't seem to have been more than a couple notable female SF authors that went by male pseudonyms (James Tiptree, Jr. and Andre Norton). And the practice seems to have been abandoned after that first generation of female SF authors. In my lifetime, the number of female SF authors writing under own name greatly outnumbers the ones writing under a male pseudonym.
 
Elagabalus said:
I believe EC said in that other thread that she found the use of female insulting.
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As a noun, yes. As an adjective, that's it's proper usage. It's the general situation of referring to someone as "a female" that is insulting. The appropriate noun for an adult human female is "woman".

Unfortunately, I now find myself in a position where I end up referring to myself as "a female", regardless of how much I dislike the term... because it's the only way to avoid getting myself confused with the subset of women who have penises...
 
It seems to hold common use when some person goes against long held stereotypes.

Long ago men were secretary types more than women. That changed and now a man as secretary is odd.
Women were nurses and men doctors up to WWII, after that it was accepted more as anyone could be either.

Many more examples above in earlier posts.

Emily'scat, where I live in central Mexico gender role stereotypes are enforced by the women more than any man, genderfluid rights have not taken hold in regular society. Laws have been passed but that still doesn't mean the public hasn't learned how to get around them, quite legally on many things.

Its not easy to be non binary here, unless one can make their own opportunity in most things in life.

Right or wrong its what it is.
 
It's the other way around, from what the OP imagines. The world's getting younger. They used to have woman friends and lady visitors and gentlemen friends at 221B Baker Street. Now we only have girlfriends and boyfriends, never mind the actual age of said girls and boys.
 
FWIW, while I am generally in favour of terms becoming more gender-neutral, I will feel a little bit sad if Lollipop Ladies are no longer called Lollipop Ladies. Lollipop Man doesn't have quite the same ring to it, but it's fine. Lollipop Person would be less fun, but infinitely better than the unbelievably dull term Crossing Guard.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
FWIW, while I am generally in favour of terms becoming more gender-neutral, I will feel a little bit sad if Lollipop Ladies are no longer called Lollipop Ladies. Lollipop Man doesn't have quite the same ring to it, but it's fine. Lollipop Person would be less fun, but infinitely better than the unbelievably dull term Crossing Guard.
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When I was in elementary school the crossing guards were chosen from the ranks of the sixth graders. Boys and girls, although usually boys, I admit.

They were called a number of things by the other kids. Mostly unflattering.

After that there were no crossing guards. Not even at the junior high (seventh through ninth grades), which was right in the middle of downtown, at the intersection of two main streets.

There was a very little bit of traffic control at the high school, but that was to make sure that a departing school bus didn't cut off one of the ones coming in to try and line up in the pick-up zone.
 
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Are there any fields where we'd call out males as exceptional? Male schoolteacher? Male nurse?
 
You find gigolos in books that are pretty old. I actually haven't heard that word used ever, only seen it in books from mid last century or earlier. So while that word's probably obsolete, male prostitutes have been a thing for a very long time, with a label of their own.
 
"Rent boy". I don't see how the term could retain its meaning clearly if the "boy" were dropped, or changed to "individual" or "person". And no, it's not quite synonymous with "gigolo" or "prostitute" or "whore", there is a difference in connotation that would be lost.

eta: the oldfashioned term "call girl" would be the female equivalent, I think.
 
Chanakya said:
You find gigolos in books that are pretty old. I actually haven't heard that word used ever, only seen it in books from mid last century or earlier.
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Sent me down a YouTube rabbit hole, looking for a version of this song to share:



Sent from my SM-T560NU using Tapatalk
 
Darat said:
It seems the answer to the opening post is "at least 120 years ago".
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Farther than that!

I had time to do a little more searching on Google Books and I can now confirm that the use of woman as an adjective (specifically in the phrase woman doctor) goes back at least as far as the 1890s and 1880s.

It now looks to me like 1880s are when the term woman doctor became a recognizable part of the US and British vocabulary. Partly that's because I did not turn up any examples of the phrase in books from the 1870s, 1860s or 1850s but did turn up a good number of uses of the phrase in books from the 1890s and 1880s.

That doesn't mean people weren't using the phrase earlier than the 1880s, since I'm only able to search book text rather than what people were saying to each other in conversations back then, and I'm only able to search book text of books which have been scanned into the Google Books archive. There are probably many older books which aren't in their collection.

But there's another reason why I think the 1880s are when the phrase woman doctor became part of the common vocabulary. While the history of doctors who were women goes back a good bit farther, the 1880s were when enough women in the US and the UK were allowed to study medicine, receive medical degrees, be licensed as doctors and establish medical practices for people in the US and the UK to have occasions to talk about this fairly new social development.

There were a number of interesting-looking listings of books and medical journals published in the 1890s using that phrase which my search turned up, and I hope to transcribe and share some of those passages in a future post. But that takes more time than I have free at the moment, so for now I'm simply going to share some content from two 1880s books. The first is from a novel in which the subject of women doctors comes up; the second is from a non-fiction book about the many new roles (including doctor) which women were able to take in the literary and business world of the time.
 
Here's an extract from page 38 of the novel Phillipia, a Woman's Question, by Hannah Maria Tracy Cutler, which was published in 1886.

After noticing the sudden effect produced on the patient by the doctor's entrance, Mrs. Turner called the young man out and asked him if he would be so kind as to step up stairs and bestow his company on the Rev. Mr. Walworth till she called him down. To this he assented, and the two held a pleasant chat together till tea time, when they descended, looked into the sick room for a moment and took their tea. They were bright and cheerful and the sufferer was glad that her dear husband could be so pleasantly entertained.

Mrs. Turner, meanwhile, carefully noticed the effect of the doctor's presence. “It's a burnin shame that we haint no woman doctor here, Sister Walworth, that is safe to trust with such poor young things as you are, but somehow the good chances mostly come to men. Now, I've had lots of experience, but I never had no eddication, and so maybe you'd rather trust that little tow headed whippersnapper with his whisker-ends all waxt like a shoe thread, than me. I expected the old doctor who would have seemed like a sort of father, but it seem he's had to go way out on the peraer, and won't be home till midnight."​

[NOTE: yes, peraer is the actual word in the printed book and not a typo on my part. My guess is it's Mrs. Turner's pronunciation of prairie.]

This book is in the public domain, so it should be possible to read the entire text online. And it was recently reprinted in paperback and hardcover which are available for anyone who would like to buy a copy for themself (or request that their library buy a copy).
 
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