| 词组 | female |
| 释义 | female The status of female as a noun equivalent in meaning to woman has gone through some remarkable changes over the centuries. The fullest account of its early history is in Lounsbury 1908; Hall 1917 also has a fairly generous treatment. The word came into Middle English from the French femelle originally as a noun. The modern spelling comes from the influence of the word male, to which it is not related; the OED notes that it was spelled female to rhyme with male in a poem as early as 1375. It was applied to humans and lower animals alike, perhaps earliest to women. Lounsbury traces its slow progress in literature. Wycliffe used it at least once, and so did Chaucer; it turns up in a few other early writers. Shakespeare used it only 11 times, compared to some 400 instances of woman. Lounsbury remarks that a couple of Shakespeare's uses suggest that female was considered somewhat of a fancy word at the time—one of what Ben Jon-son called "perfumed phrases." The word also had occasional use by such dramatists as Massinger and Fletcher, but it was not until the 18th century that it became fully established in literary use. Lounsbury notes it was used with some, but not great, frequency by such writers as Addison and Steele; by the middle of the century it appeared frequently in literary use, being common in Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. Although Goldsmith used it in his poem "The Deserted Village"—Lounsbury quotes the line "where the poor houseless shivering female lies" and Hall the line "As some fair female, unadorned and plain" from the poem—the word seems to have been used chiefly in prose. Its use in literary works continued unabated through the end of the 18th century and into the first half ofthe 19th; it is found in such writers as Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Poe, Dickens, Thackeray, Charles Reade, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Lamb, Washington Irving, and Hawthorne. Hall lists a great many others. In the middle of the 19th century, however, a change took place—numerous commentators began to condemn the use as vulgar, a misuse, poor taste, or a perversion of language. Alford 1866 asks, "Why should a woman be degraded from her position as a rational being, and be expressed by a word which might belong to any animal tribe ... ?" Richard Grant White 1870 protests that "this is one of those perversions which are justified by no example, however eminent.... when a woman calls herself a female, she merely shares her sex with all her fellow-females throughout the brute creation." An early objection along the same lines—a letter to the editor of the Manchester Examiner and Times in March 1858—is quoted by Hodgson 1889: "Why should women be confounded with lower animals of the feminine gender?" The same sentiment is expressed by a number of other critics of the mid to late 19th century. The editor of F for the OED, Henry Bradley, adds his comment: "Now commonly avoided by good writers, exc[ept] with contemptuous implication." (Lounsbury censures the OED treatment as misleading since its entry cites no well-known literary figure after Steele in 1713; he assumes—perhaps unfairly—the OED editor must have been aware of the word's use by the literary figures listed above.) There are a few interesting observations to be made about all this late Victorian furor. First, all of the vociferous objectors are men. Not one woman has been allowed to get a word in edgewise, so we really do not know if women found the usage offensive or not. Clearly they had not earlier; Fanny Burney had used female of the Princess Royal, and Jane Austen not only of the characters in her novels but of herself: • I think I may boast myself with all possible vanity to be the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress —letter, 1 Dec. 1815 (in Lounsbury) Perhaps women found the usage unobjectionable even later: • We read only the other day a report of a lecture on the poet Crabbe, in which she who was afterward Mrs. Crabbe was spoken of as "a female to whom he had formed an attachment." To us, indeed, it seems that a man's wife should be spoken of in some way which is not equally applicable to a ewe lamb or a favorite mare. But it was a "female" who delivered the lecture, and we suppose the females know best about their own affairs —William Matthews, Words; their Use and their Abuse, 1880 (cited in Bardeen 1883) Second, the objection is ostensibly based on the word's leveling of women with lower animals, but the gallantry of this argument may well be largely factitious. The real basis for objection to this use offemale is much more likely to have been its regular appearance in the newspapers of the day. Lounsbury elsewhere remarks that during the 19th century, newspapers were widely blamed for the degeneracy of the language. The correspondent to the Manchester Examiner and Times in 1858 states it baldly: "Newspapers, I grieve to say it, are the great corruptors of our language, if not of every other." Richard Grant White too draws most of his objectionable uses from newspapers. The transparency of the stated basis for objection is clear from our earliest evidence, the Manchester letter writer. The passage to which he objects read "a female had been found dead at a road-side." He purports to be anxious to discover whether it had been a "a cow, or a mare, or a she ass." Had it been a cow, mare, or she ass, of course, it wouldn't have made the newspapers, even in 1858. On such a flimsy pretext more than one linguistic prejudice is based. Third, we are not given much evidence of how female was actually used. Of the objectors, only Hodgson gives quotations, and both Lounsbury and Hall list far more authors than they quote. So our knowledge of genuine usage is somewhat sketchy. Still, we can trace a few distinct uses. Female as a term correlative to male seems not to have been objected to, except by a few commentators such as Bache 1869 and Ayres 1881 who disliked both male and female. A typical example of this use Hall quotes from Macaulay: • Though in families the number of males and females differs widely, yet in great collections of human beings the disparity almost disappears. This sort of use is specifically approved by some commentators as scientific or statistical. The use as a simple synonym of woman we have seen from Goldsmith and Jane Austen earlier. A couple of examples more: • ... attention paid by the females of quality, who so regularly visited David Ramsay's shop —Sir Walter Scott, The Fortunes of Nigel, 1822 • The alarmed female shrieked as she recovered her feet —James Fenimore Cooper, The Pilot, 1823 Mark Twain, writing after the mid-Victorian assault, made fun of Cooper's penchant for using it. The "woman" use seems to have led in two directions. First, and perhaps most handily, female was used in the singular when the age of the person referred to was unknown or uncertain, and in the plural to indicate a group of mixed or undetermined ages: • ... the females of the family —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813 • ... the small party of females were pretty well composed —Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 1814 • In short, there was not a female within ten miles of them that was in possession of a gold watch, a pearl necklace, or a piece of Mechlin lace, but they examined her title to it —Joseph Addison, The Guardian (cited by Hall) • ... all naked pictures, which may be a reason they don't show it [a picture gallery] to females —Charles Lamb, letter, 9 Aug. 1810 • It opened into the house, where the females were already astir —Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 1847 Second, a humorous or facetious use: • ... I sometimes add my vocal powers to her execution of • "Thou, thou reign'st in this bosom," — not, however, unless her mother or some other discreet female is present, to prevent misinterpretation —Oliver Wendell Holmes d. 1894, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858 The frequent statements of the 19th century on the opprobrium attached to the use of female is overstated. The most opprobrious citation produced to back up the assertion is from an 1889 daily newspaper by an anonymous author who says it is a term of opprobrium. There is, however, a faintly or mildly pejorative use. Hodgson says the "contemptuous sense is justified by ample precedents" and produces this example: • He did not bid him go and sell himself to the first female he could find possessed of wealth —Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thome, 1858 Trollope's contempt here does not seem especially strong. Holmes uses the word another time in making a distinction of social class: • When a young female wears a flat circular side-curl, gummed on each temple,—when she walks with a male, not arm in arm, but his arm against the back of hers,—and she says "Yes?" with a note of interrogation, you are generally safe in asking her what wages she gets, and who the "feller" was —The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858 All of this brings us up to the turn of the 20th century, just after which Hall and Lounsbury were writing. How has the noun female fared in this century? The mid-19th century strictures seem to have driven the neutral use of Austen, Scott, Cooper, et al. pretty much out of currency. It is but rarely attested: • She was above average height, with a Roman nose, firm chin, dark eyes, heavy brows—a commanding female, in brief —Dictionary of American Biography, 1936 • I'm strictly a female female —Oscar Hammerstein II, "I Enjoy Being a Girl" (song), 1958 The application to lower animals continues to flourish, although writers on zoological subjects tend often to prefer more specialized terms, such as mare, cow, bitch, queen, and hen. • The leopards will stay at rest until the light fades and evening shadows deepen. Then the female will hide her young in a safe place —National Geographic World, June 1986 The scientific or statistical use is still common: • Of the membership, females are in the majority in the ratio of three to one —Macum Phelan, Handbook of All Denominations, 3d ed., 1924 • The distribution represented about 42.7 million males and about 17.3 females —Collier's Year Book, 1949 • The claim that males can be transformed, by means of hormones and surgery, into females, and vice versa, is, of course, a lie —Thomas S. Szasz, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 10 June 1979 The humorous use has also continued, though examples are not many in our files: • I will read her a wholesome lecture, for her soul's good, on the proper treatment a self-respecting female should apply to the modern young man — William J. Locke, Simon the Jester, 1910 • Such prominent females as Helen Wills, Gertrude Ederle, Amelia Earhart, and Babe Didrikson left him cold. In his opinion, there hadn't been an athletic gal worth looking at since Annette Kellerman —James Thurber, New Yorker, 5 Jan. 1952 The more-or-less mildly pejorative use likewise persists: • He's just about on a par with this bone-pounding chiropractor female, Mrs. Mattie Gooch —Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, 1920 • Henry Adams said that the magazine-made female has not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam —Agnes Repplier, Under Dispute, 1924 • What a poisonous female she was! Bob could have her —Russell Thacher, The Tender Age, 1952 • Once at a party he met a name-dropping female who kept asking him "Do you know So-and-so?" —T. S. Matthews, The Selected Letters of Charles Lamb, 1956 Bolinger 1980 maintains that female in ordinary conversation is always derogatory. We can neither prove nor disprove the assertion. Convenient in this function, female has continued to be used in reference to a group of women and girls or to those whose age is not readily apparent or is irrelevant—in short, in rather indefinite instances. This use can still be found, even in literature. Our earliest citation reads almost as if it had come from Jane Austen: • Refinement is a characteristic of the females of our family, Dorothea —Margaret Deland, Old Chester Tales, 1898 • If you do that, then the fellow, or female, you are trying to tell the truth to thinks you are feeling sorry for yourself —Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men, 1946 • And from that hour to this, the Gazette has referred to all females as women except that police-court characters were always to be designated as "ladies" —The Autobiography of William Allen White, 1946 • ... the tombstone shop opposite ... in which the Christian emblems and the white marble specters of weeping females —Osbert Sitwell, Noble Essences, 1950 • When she was a few days old, she became, upon the death of her mother, whose entire dowry she inherited, the richest female in France —William Maxwell, New Yorker, 7 Jan. 1956 • ... just as small children call all females mother, so sailors ... should call all barmaids Beatrice — Thomas Pynchon, V., 1963 • Terms like "pioneer," "farmer," and "settler" should clearly include females as well as males — Harper 1985 • The female who had laughed behind the lights, he saw, was the producer, a leggy girl pale as untinted oleo —John Updike, Bech Is Back, 1982 To sum up: the noun female had slow growth in literary use from the 14th to the 18th centuries; from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century it was commonly used in literature. In the middle ofthe 19th century it began to be disparaged, most likely because it was a popular word in newspapers, and not chiefly for the reason usually given—that it demeaned women by equating them with cows, sows, and mares. The censure continued well into the 20th century and has undoubtedly curtailed the word's use in written English, especially in the simple neutral use by which Jane Austen could refer to herself as a female or Fanny Burney could refer to the Princess Royal as "the second female in the kingdom." The facetious use is apparently still alive, as is the mildly pejorative use—this latter especially in ordinary conversation, according to Dwight Bolinger. The indefinite or indeterminate use—where age is unknown or irrelevant or where groups consist of mixed ages— appears to be the most common current use in writing, and it still is in good standing in literature. |
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