When did "woman" become an adjective?

rockysmith76 said:
Its just a bunch of "Woke" nonsense. Ignore it...
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Lol Everything is a salvo in the culture war.

Getting older I notice more and people using language and pronunciation wrongly differently to the culture I was indoctrinated into since birth, a process going on since the birth of language and accelerated by today’s connectivity. Conservative reactionary behaviour is based on the illusion that your worldview is preeternal and essential.
 
Elagabalus said:
I believe EC said in that other thread that she found the use of female insulting.
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I think, though I could be wrong, that it was only the noun form that she disliked. (I don't remember the exact words.) In other words, being called "a female" was unpleasant, but "a female truck driver" would not be so bad.


I find "female truck driver" somehow jarring, and would generally say "woman truck driver". I don't think it's insulting, but it doesn't sound quite right, either. However, that does seem to be more common today than in times past. I looked up references to the 1936 Olympics, expecting to find news stories about "woman athletes", but instead found news stories about "female athletes".
 
alfaniner said:
It's odd that there are few equivalent references for "man" vs "male", except maybe for "man cave".
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Person, male, female, camera, TV doesn't really work, does it?


ETA: Man Purse although today it would be called a Tablet Bag, Man Tote or just shameful.
 
Women-owned is a compound adjective. Women itself is not an adjective, but the individual words in a compound adjective don't have to be adjectives themselves. For example, in "a smartly-dressed woman" the word smartly is an adverb, but smartly-dressed is an adjective.
 
Puppycow said:
I wonder if there was once a word like "doctress" or "doctrix"?

I.e. If a female actor is an actress, wouldn't a female doctor be a "doctress"?
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Some interesting google hits on the word, but no apparent use of it in American English to apply to our sort of doctors.

I have seen Amelia Earhart referred to as an "Aviatrix", but more often as a "female aviator", or "woman Aviator".
 
alfaniner said:
When did "woman" become an adjective?

I've noticed this usage a lot lately. Usually used in the context of "a woman politician", "a woman athlete", etc, or as below in the picture.
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I can't tell you when that usage began, but I can tell you from personal experience that it was quite common back at least as far back as the mid-20th century. I remember frequently reading and hearing phrases such as woman doctor and woman lawyer.

And a quick search of Google Books shows the phrase was in common use quite a bit farther back than my memory goes. For example, in 1916 Caroline Twigge Matthews wrote a book titled Experiences of a Woman Doctor in Serbia (and the phrase woman doctor appears in the text as well as the title.). In 1931 Isabel Whittier wrote a book titled Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the First Woman Doctor (and again the phrase appears in the text as well as the title). There are a number of other books with the phrase woman doctor in their titles, as well as numerous books where the phrase appears in the text.

And in 1910 the phrase was used several times in a hearing before the Committee on Woman Suffrage of the US senate. (Here's a link to the hearing transcript; the phrase appears on pages 12 and 13.) I can't copy the text from the page so here's my transcript of part of the testimony of Dr. Anna Blount from page 12 of the hearing:

... In my city there are 500 women doctors. In my State there are 750 women doctors. In the United States in 1900 there were 7,399 women doctors. I have talked with many of these women doctors, and they know the womanhood of the country perhaps more intimately, in a way, than any other class of women know the women of the United States. I have talked with many of these women doctors, who spoke not only for themselves, but for the womanhood of the country, and I have yet to find a single woman doctor in the United States who does not believe in woman suffrage. I did find one once who said she did not know what use she had for the ballot, but a few weeks later, after she had been thinking it over, she came to me and said she now knew the use she had for the ballot, and so signed the petition.
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PS: And, looking at my Google search results page, the phrase woman doctor also appears in the 1929 Mary Roberts Rinehart mystery novel The Street of Seven Stars. Looks to me like even back then it was a commonly used phrase which no one blinked at when they saw or heard it used.
 
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It recently came to my attention that there's a whole series or genre of children's books called "You Can Be a Woman X" where X= professions like Astronomer, Engineer, Chemist, and so on. Recent Nobel Prize recipient Andrea M. Ghez is a co-author of one of these books. Another one. Almost seems quaint.
 
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