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.

Where the word woman came from

The spelling ran wīfmann to wīmmann to wumman to woman over roughly a millennium. In Old English the male-specific word was wer, or wǣpnedmann, and 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, while wīf narrowed in the other direction until it meant a married woman, which is modern wife.

The construction is not unusual. West Frisian frommes is built the same way, from frou and minske, literally woman human; Afrikaans vroumens is the same again; Saterland Frisian has Wieuwmoanske. What is unusual is that English kept the compound after the word it was built on had changed meaning underneath it, so that a word meaning female person now looks as though it means female man.

Why woman is not from womb

The connection is a popular misconception and it is worth stating flatly. Womb comes from Old English wamb, belly or uterus, cognate with the colloquial German Wamme from Old High German wamba. The two words are unrelated.

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. In the plural the i won instead, possibly on the model of pairs such as foot and feet, though some New Zealand and South African speakers have kept or re-innovated a rounded plural. 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".

How girl narrowed and then chafed

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.

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.

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; Ouida took it 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. The historian Ruth Bordin wrote that the term "always referred to women who exercised control over their own lives be it 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, and married women's participation in the American labour force rose from under 6 per cent in 1900 to 23.8 per cent in 1923. 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 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.