Woman

The category holds Cisgender and transgender women together. A trans woman was assigned male at birth; some women are Intersex, with sex characteristics such as trisomy X or vaginal atresia that were not typical at the point of assignment. Neither fact places anyone outside the word. There is no first attestation for a word this old, and no source on file offers one.

Where the word woman came from

The spelling ran wīfmann to wīmmann to wumman to woman over roughly a millennium, by way of Middle English womman and the earlier forms wimman and wifman. Wiktionary traces the two halves back separately: wīf through Proto-West Germanic and Proto-Germanic reconstructions, and mann through Proto-Germanic to a Proto-Indo-European root. The consonants in the middle of wīfmann ran together, and what survived is a word that no longer looks like a compound at all.

In Old English the male-specific words were wer and wǣpnedmann, the second built on wǣpn, weapon, while mann on its own meant a human being. After the Norman Conquest man took over the male sense and had replaced wer by the late thirteenth century, and wīf narrowed in the other direction until it meant a married woman, which is modern wife. English kept the compound after both of its parts had shifted underneath it, so a word that meant female person now looks as though it means female Man.

The construction itself is not unusual. Several neighbouring languages built the same thing out of their own material, and in those the seam is still visible.

Scots kept the word without rebuilding it, in the forms woman and weman.

Why woman is not from womb

The connection is a popular misconception. Womb comes from Old English wamb, belly or uterus, cognate with the colloquial German Wamme from Old High German wamba, belly, paunch or lap. The two words are unrelated, and the resemblance is an accident of a thousand years of sound change.

Why woman and women are pronounced apart

The rounded vowel in the singular appeared in western England in the thirteenth century, under the rounding influence of the w, and the older pronunciation with an i stayed in use into the fifteenth century. The plural was sometimes rounded too, from the fourteenth century, but the i won there instead, possibly on the model of pairs such as foot and feet. The modern plural spelling women is attested from the fifteenth century and was borrowed back from the singular, which is why the spelling and the pronunciation now disagree.

For a stretch of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the two drifted further apart still, the singular towards a longer back vowel and the plural forwards, which produced the old comparisons of the words to “woe man” and “we men”.

The regional variation left behind is still audible. Wiktionary gives one vowel for Received Pronunciation, General American, Australian and New Zealand English, another for Scotland and Northern Ireland, and a third as a United States dialect form; Merriam-Webster marks two further singular pronunciations as especially Southern. Some New Zealand and South African speakers have either kept or re-innovated a rounded plural, which makes woman and women homophones for them.

What the dictionaries list under woman

Merriam-Webster runs six numbered senses and only the first is the one people expect. An adult female person comes first. Then a woman belonging to a particular category by birth, residence, membership or occupation, which is the sense that produces councilwoman. Then womankind; then a distinctively feminine nature, glossed as womanliness; then a servant or personal attendant; then, marked chiefly dialectal, wife, with mistress and girlfriend beside it. The last sense is the liveliest: a woman extremely fond of or devoted to something specified, illustrated by a writer calling herself a chocolate woman through and through.

Wiktionary separates the collective sense the same way and dates it deep. Thomas Paine's The American Crisis, dated December 1776, uses it, saying that the man who stands by his country in a crisis deserves the love and thanks of man and woman; Helen Reddy's I Am Woman of 1972 uses the identical bare noun two centuries later. The dictionary also carries a sense that does not require a human being at all, defining a woman as a generally adult female sentient being, whether human, supernatural, elf or alien, with citations reaching from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to fantasy novels. Compounds ending in -woman run through the entry from councilwoman to the devotee sense.

How girl narrowed and then chafed

Wikipedia records that woman does two jobs: generally, any female human, and specifically, an adult female human as against a girl. The second job depends on where the boundary sits, and the boundary has moved.

Girl originally meant a young person of either sex, and only around the start of the sixteenth century did it settle on a female child. The colloquial use for a young or unmarried woman was challenged by feminists in the early 1970s, on the ground that applying it to a grown woman may cause offence, and office girl and its relatives dropped out of general use as a result. In cultures that tie family honour to virginity the equivalent word is still used for a woman who has never married, in a sense close to the obsolete English maid or maiden.

The alternative spellings womyn and wimmin have been used in feminist writing, particularly since the 1970s.

How the definition itself moved

Social science accounts of what it means to be a woman have changed substantially since the early twentieth century, as women gained rights and a larger share of the workforce, and the 1970s are the hinge: that is when the scholarship turned towards the distinction between sex and gender and towards gender as socially constructed.

The legal and biographical markers run on their own schedules and never quite line up with the word. Eighteen is a common age of majority, menarche arrives on average at twelve or thirteen, and the rites that mark the passage range from bat mitzvah to the quinceañera, most of them set somewhere between twelve and twenty-one.

The workplace record shows a similar lag between the category and the conditions attached to it. Married women's participation in the American labour force rose from under 6 per cent in 1900 to 23.8 per cent in 1923, as available employment shifted from long-hour factory work towards office work that demanded more education. Until the early twentieth century women's colleges in the United States required their women faculty to remain single, on the grounds that nobody could carry two full-time professions at once. In the 1970s many female academics, scientists among them, avoided having children, and through the 1980s institutions worked at equalising workplace conditions. Schiebinger's summary of what remained is that being a scientist and a wife and a mother is a burden in a society that expects women more often than men to put family ahead of career.

What the New Woman demanded

The phrase names a feminist ideal of the late nineteenth century, and unlike most of this vocabulary it has a datable coinage. Sarah Grand, who lived from 1854 to 1943, used new woman in an influential article in 1894 for independent women seeking radical change; the English writer Ouida, born Maria Louisa Ramé, took the phrase as the title of a reply; Henry James popularised it for the growing number of educated, independent career women in Europe and the United States, and wrote the figure into heroines including the title character of Daisy Miller, serialised in 1878, and Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, serialised in 1880 and the year after. The historian Ruth Bordin wrote that the term always referred to women who exercised control over their own lives, whether personal, social or economic.

The numbers behind it are modest and real. Women in the professions were 6.4 per cent of the United States' non-agricultural workforce in 1870, 10 per cent by 1910 and 13.3 per cent by 1920. Some were becoming lawyers, doctors, journalists and professors, often through the Seven Sisters colleges: Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar and Wellesley. Divorce law changes late in the century meant a woman could come out of a marriage with her economic independence intact, and the number of divorced women who remarried rose.

The bicycle did as much as the arguments. The craze of the 1890s gave women social mobility and drove the rational dress movement, Annie Londonderry rode around the world in that decade, and Elizabeth Robins Pennell pioneered bicycle touring with travelogues around England and Europe. The theatre kept pace, and Ibsen's A Doll's House of 1879 and Hedda Gabler of 1890, Henry Arthur Jones's The Case of Rebellious Susan of 1894, and Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession of 1893 and Candida of 1898 were all read as New Woman plays.

The ideal had a class shape and contemporaries said so. University education was still a badge of affluence, fewer than a tenth of people in the United States had any post-secondary education at the time, and the model was attainable mostly by white middle-class women. Writers from working-class, immigrant and racially marginalised communities acknowledged the independence and pointed out that the standard had been set where they could not reach it.