A Dictionary of Epithets and Terms of Address
This is used by a parish priest to his housekeeper throughout Bless me Father, by Neil Boyd, but he does it only when no one else is present and she is well aware that he is being mockingly severe with her.
Modern husbands use the term in a similar way, implying that they are lords and masters and their wives are at servant level. They have to make it very clear that they are joking, for the expression is greatly resented, otherwise, by the woman to whom it is addressed.
A typical comment on its use occurs in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, when Mrs Gale offers a loaf to a guest and is told: ‘Cut it, woman.’ Miss Brontë continues: ‘The “woman” cut it accordingly. Had she followed her inclinations, she would have cut the parson also; her Yorkshire soul revolted absolutely from his manner of command.’
In The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens, Mrs Raddle also objects to the word being applied to her, even though it is not used vocatively. It is Mr Benjamin Allen who ventures to say to her:
Soon after this Mrs Raddle is proclaiming loudly that ‘everybody knows that they may safely insult me in my own ‘ouse while my husband sits sleeping downstairs’.
Sir Clifford Chatterley, in D.H.Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, would have been well aware of the insulting nature of ‘woman’ used baldly as a vocative. It is a measure of his discomposure when he says to his wife: ‘Where have you been, woman?’ when she returns to the house having been absent in a storm.
Speakers sometimes try to soften the expression by expanding it to ‘my dear woman’ or ‘my good woman’. In Memento Mori, by Muriel Spark, a patient addresses the ward-sister as ‘my good woman’. ‘The ward felt at once that Granny Duncan was making a great mistake,’ Miss Spark tells us. They know that the ward-sister will be greatly offended. One also remembers that when Toad of Toad Hall dresses as a washer-woman in order to effect his escape from prison, he is addressed by an old gentleman as ‘my good woman’. Kenneth Grahame remarks of the incident that it ‘angered Toad more than anything that had occurred that evening’.
All this offence is caused by ‘woman’ being virtually synonymous in these contexts with ‘serving-woman, woman of the lowest social rank’, but it goes beyond that. Use of the term usually sounds at best condescending and at worst contemptuous.
A passage in An Indecent Obsession, by Colleen McCullough, is interesting in that woman appears to be used merely to draw attention to the listener’s sexual identity. A male speaker says: ‘I’m the best there is. I really am—oh, woman, I can make you shiver and yell your head off and beg for more!’ The revulsion felt by the woman addressed is due to the overall statement, not the use of the vocative.
In Howard’s End, by E.M.Forster, a husband addresses his new wife affectionately as ‘little woman’, but see also the entry on little for a feminine objection to that term.
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