WOMEN V. LADIES.

Anglo-Maori Warder, Volume 1, Issue 14, 27 July 1848, Page 3

WOMEN V. LADIES.

I address you in behalf of the proprietors of language—hoping that you will take pity upon affectation and pinch it. The women and the females are all gone—and the feminine terminations are following them iery fast. To supply their places we have ladies, —always ladies. There are no ou* thoreßEes—inly lady authors; and there are ladyfriends, lady-cousins, lady-readers, &c. Do the women know that lady* is derived from laidet It either is so—jr will anive at that. ItulUbeone of the ugliest words in the language, if it continue to be so fearfully abu-ed. This effectation was at its height some fifteen or twenty years ego. It is a fact that to an action brought in which plaintiff set forth that he had h'red the whole of defendant's roach, but that when it was about to start, a woman was inside without his consent, defendant pleaded amongst other things, that the person described as a u ovian was in fact a lady, At that time, and for years afterwards; shocking to relate, there were no wives in the country. Look at any old newspaper, and you will see,** On the —th instant, in ——street, the lady of ■ ■-■ Est]., of a daughter." It ought to have been lady-son, not daughter— and any gentleman ought to have called any other gentleman out if that other gentleman dared to speak of his tady-broiher by the style and title of bis sister. Bat matters have mended a good deal:— men own their wives now in the new spapers. An honest OtaheiUwt (or Tahitian, as we call it now, I believe) who came over here at the time I speak of, told his countrymen thai the English, whenever one of their children was horn, cut off the fourth finger of their wives' left hands as si offering to a goddess called Fashion, —but that the fingor grew again in a little while. This was the only rendering his language would yield ; which is veiy creditable to the Tahitian tongue, and shows that it puts things in their tine light. I am, myself, of the ancient schooli which believes and maintains the true faith to be that all adult human creatures not being men arewomeu; which declares openly that all women, he tbey ladies or not, are females —and all married females, wives. The same old-fashioned community asserts that our langanee has no adjective which can be substituted for female, and that womanly and feminine are adjectives having men to whom they are applicable, and women to whom they are not. It was one of the former—probably Fribble himself—who invented the term ladyfnend~saft it would have been a good thing for the langnage if the first woman who heard it had been of the latter, aid had kicked him for his pains. As to authors (meaning authoresses), I on re got a book from one marked *• from the author;" I wondered to myself whether she meant to stand up fur the old song— Adam was the first man, Eve was the t'other. I wish the women would send the word lady back to its proper sphere. Something will be sure to happen if they do not. Cuitleman was abuse i until it was shortened into gait;— end what a strait the gents ate in just now I Woman is a term of high honour—it is a great pity it may not be used in respect to any female whatever* were it from a beggar to a princess. Its corresponding Greek teim, guiie, is that by which slaves often address their mistresses in the Greek tragedy. With our notions, the address of Christ to his toother, be« ginning with the word woman, appears disrespectful—in the original it is <?Kictly|the reverse. Let women not ire that with the term lady in our language, as used to supplant woman, arose the school of men which sneered at Icaiahs of cultivated mind under the n me of ** blue stock : ngs." Search antiquity through time end space, from age to age, and from country to country, and it will be found that respect for knowledge in females is always co-existent with their designation under homely names. The word lady, generically used, ought to be odious as the product of a time [m which women are taken to be necessarily frivolous. But when women were women, wc have the account of an Apollonius, who wrote a biography filled with no names but female philosophers. Ni.y, Suidas himself has preserved the name of a historian who has preserved the names of a large number of female Pythagoreans. Madame to have reminded her husband to mention this (which I cannot find that he has done,) in his life of Pythagoras:— for it shows that, in spite of all he says to the contrary, annals bookful of women endured the silent system to which the followers of that sect weie subjected. Nor are the accounts of these works at all unlikely; for Mem-ge has collected the names of sixty-four women who had distinguished themselves in the schools i of [philosophy,—with as much information about' ihem as gives to one with another more than an , octavo page a-piecc. Plutarch dedicated more than one work to women. Three empresses (and an empress was then only a woman) have distinguished the name of Eudocia by their literary acquirements. The last has left us (and in the dark eleventh century) the historical dictionary, which is frequently quoted 1h support of or in opposition to Suidas. Agreat deal more might be stid to the same effect; but it would lake up too much room. I hope all good women will leave lady to appear where it is properly wanted, and not continue to degrade their sex by speaking of it as a whole under a term which merely signifies a conventional distinction. If they will not, we must have a new translation of Genesis j and i; must appear " Gentleman and lady created he them.*"— Athentevn,

* It is derived from the Anglo-Saxon hlafig —the dispenser of bread.—Ed.