Women, Stereotypes of

The historical evolution of the word-field for women has produced an extreme dichotomy or binary opposition between a few terms of praise, such as virgin, maiden, treasure, angel , and goddess , set against a multitude of derogatory terms, of which bitch, fishwife, quean, queen, scold, shrew, virago, witch , and whore have their own expanded entries. This division, often termed the angel/whore dichotomy, is conspicuously apparent from the Middle Ages onward, and the imbalance has attracted much critical attention in recent decades, notably from feminists. In many ways it continues to this day.

A number of scholars have also noted the trend of deterioration or pejoration in terms relating to women, some attributing it to malicious innuendo, possibly misogynistic in origin, others to false delicacy or tactful vagueness. The first was Michel Bréal, the founding father of the modern study of semantics, in 1897: “The so-called pejorative tendency has yet another cause. It is in the nature of human malice to take pleasure in looking for a vice or fault behind a quality…. We remember what a noble signification amant [lover] and maîtresse [mistress] still possessed in Corneille. But they are dethroned” (1900, 101). (Pierre Corneille (1606–1684) was a major French dramatist.) Stephen Ullmann commented on the same trend in English, French, and German: “Thus the notorious deterioration which has affected various words for ‘girl’ or ‘woman,’ such as English hussy, quean , French fille, garce , or German Dirne , was no doubt due to genuine or pseudo-euphemism rather than to any anti-feminine bias” (1964, 90-91). This topic has become part of a broader debate in recent decades in which feminists have argued that the trend derives from language being generated in a “patriarchal” or “phallocratic” dispensation, thus being the product of male prejudices. See especially the cited works by Greer (1970), Sontag, (1973), Schulz (1975), Miller and Swift (1977), Spender (1980), Coates (1986), Cameron (1990), Hughes (1991), and Mills (1991). Most of the definitions in the ensuing discussion are by men.

Resonating behind the angel/whore dichotomy are deeply embedded stereotypes and role models, especially the figures of Eve and Mary, referred to by the medievalist Sheila Delany as “the opposed exemplars of the feminine character” (1974, 68). Significantly, the role of Eve is symbolically continued at the tableaux of the Crucifixion, by the fallen Mary Magdalene, the maudlin prostitute, placed in moral juxtaposition to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the object of Mariolatry , or worship of the Virgin to the point of idolatry. The role of Eve in the Fall became the doctrinal root of a great medieval misogynist tradition, taking the form of collections like the “booke of wykked wives” which Chaucer’s Wife of Bath found so provocative ( Prologue , ll. 669-793). Even the amiable Nun’s Priest indulges in the jeu d’esprit that

Wommennes conseil [advice] broght us first to wo
And made Adam fro Paradys to go.
( Nun’s Priest’s Tale , ll. 3256-66)

Furthermore, the origin of woman , which in fact lies in Anglo-Saxon wifmann , shows a number of prejudicial interventions or folk etymologies. As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, the word was used “in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries frequently with play on pseudo-etymological associations with woe .” The first instance is given from the Chester plays (ca. 1500), where there is a pun on “man’s woe,” followed by the comment of the noted humanist Sir Thomas More in Comfort Against Tribulation (1534): “Man himself that is borne of a woman is indeed a woman, that is full of wo and miserie.” Other similar quotations are recorded up to 1653, including a number of chauvinist proverbs, such as: “Woman, Asse and walnut tree, the More you beat, the better be” (1639, in J. Clarke, Paraemiologia or Proverbs English and Latin , 117).

Whereas medieval romance is largely “gynocentric,” or centered on love and women, Anglo-Saxon literature was predominantly “androcentric” or male-centered, being preoccupied with war and heroism. Consequently, women do not feature significantly: Beowulf’s love life is never touched on, even remotely. By and large, Anglo-Saxon attitudes toward women were feudal: the lower orders are virtually unmentioned, while noblewomen appear principally in the role of queenly consort ( heaslgebedda ), often used as peacemakers in the weaving of diplomatic alliances encapsulated in the terms freodowebbe , literally “peace-weaver,” and fridusibb folca , “peace-pledge of the people.” A misogynist tradition was not obvious, although the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice in King Alfred’s translation of Boethius has an odd monkish gloss whereby Eurydice is interpreted allegorically as symbolizing the hellish sins that man must renounce. The Anglo-Saxon word-field for women has the positive terms lady, darling , and maiden , counterbalanced by two negative terms, whore and witch , although the earliest applications of witch are to males. The Anglo-Saxon evidence seems thus to dispute the common feminist view that the prejudicial imbalance of epithets derives in essence from a phallocratic or male dominated dispensation.

From the medieval period onward the profundity of the stereotypical dichotomy becomes very apparent. In the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales the only two developed portraits of women are binary opposites: the virginal, precious, ladylike Prioress (ll. 118-62) and the much-married, aggressive, heretical, and sexually predatory Wife of Bath, a potent combination of Venus and Mars (ll. 445-76). Furthermore, these opposing stereotypes are also immediately apparent in the heroines of the first two tales, the idealized angelic, virginal Emily of the Knight’s Tale , and Alison, the vibrantly physical, sly, eager adulteress of the Miller’s Tale . Within Shakespeare’s gallery of women the two antitypes are also clearly apparent: the virginal or purely innocent, exemplified by Hero in Much Ado About Nothing , Ophelia in Hamlet , Desdemona in Othello , Isabella in Measure for Measure , and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale . Contrasted with them are the sexually corrupt Cressida, Goneril and Regan and the various madams, such as Mistress Quickly and Overdone, in the comedies. There are also the ruthless viragos: Tamora in Titus Andronicus , Margaret in Richard III , Volumnia in Coriolanus , and the unmanageable, therefore unmarriageable Katharina the Shrew. In Cleopatra alone, Shakespeare counterpoints two extreme languages, the mythic paean and the insult of the street. The queen who wears the regalia of the goddess Isis (and Antony’s “sword Philippic”) and who is praised as surpassing both Nature and fancy, is also degraded as a quean, as strumpet, a dish, a right gypsy [playing] at fast and loose> (Antony and Cleopatra I i 13; III vi 67; IV xii 13; IV xii 28). In places Shakespeare daringly juxtaposes the two idioms, creating oxymorons like “royal wench” and “my serpent of old Nile” (II ii 235 and I v 25).

The emphasis on promiscuity and its semantic correlatives are covered in the entries for promiscuity and prostitutes, which detail numerous terms of abuse. Their antitype is the superhuman spiritual creature of salvation, found in terms like angel, goddess , and madonna . The woman castigated in animal terms is defined in bitch, vixen, cow , and sow , alternatively patronised as mouse, pet , and lamb .

A potent stereotype emerging from these words might be called “the feminization of the monstrous”: woman is categorized as alien, the recipient or agent of diabolical or unnatural powers, a field that overlaps with the unnaturally aggressive or “manlike” woman, in the terms amazon, shrew, virago , and battle-ax . In this area credibility is strongly governed by superstition, myth, prejudice, and old wives’ tales. Ania Loomba makes the point that “Amazonian homelands always moved to occupy a space just beyond a European horizon, a fantastic or actual locale that symbolized uncharted territory” (2002, 29). The key words in this group are witch, hag, termagant, tartar, dragon, harpy , and siren .

Witch , the most virulent of these terms, has its own entry. Hag is first recorded in the contemporary sense of “a repulsive old woman” in the fourteenth century (William Langland, Piers Plowman B Text, V, l. 191) before the appearance of the meaning “an evil spirit, dæmon or infernal being in female form” recorded from 1552: “Hegges, or nyght furyes, or witches like unto old women … whyche do sucke the bloude of children in the night.” Another contemporary sense is more explicitly infernal: “The hateful hellish hagge of ugly hue” (1587, The Mirror for Magistrates, Forrex iii,“How King Forrex was slayne by his brother King Porrex”). Macbeth clearly uses this sense in addressing the “secret black and midnight hags” (IV i 48), but by 1712, Richard Steele is using the modern idiom: “One of those Hags of Hell whom we call Bawds” ( Spectator 266). Dragon , a formidable creature with mythical potency, was applied to Satan from the fourteenth century, then humanized generally before taking on its feminine specialization: “a fiercely or aggressively watchful woman,” first recorded in Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary (1755).

Termagant , also covered in the entry for Mahomet, is a major witness word for various kinds of enemy. Its first meaning was xenophobic, being “the name of an imaginary deity held [believed] in medieval Christendom to be worshipped by Mohammedans: in the [medieval] mystery plays represented as a violent and overbearing personage.” It is first applied to what the OED calls “a virago, shrew or vixen” in 1659, subsequently “a violent, overbearing, turbulent, brawling, quarrelsome woman.” Similarly, tartar , derived from the name of the savage people of the steppes of Central Asia, was applied to vagabonds and thieves, then to a “rough, violent, irritable or intractable person, especially a woman,” first recorded in John Dryden’s play The Wild Gallant (1663): “I never knew your grandmother was a Scotchwoman: is she not a Tartar too?” (II i). Harpy epitomizes in a concentrated form certain misogynist views of woman: “a fabulous monster, rapacious and filthy, having a woman’s face and a bird’s wings and claws.” Although the word has association with the legal profession, and Dr. Johnson referred in 1775 to “the harpies of taxation” in Taxation no Tyranny (5), the general use is found in William Makepeace Thackeray in 1859: “Was it my mother-in-law, the grasping odious, abandoned, brazen, harpy?” ( The Virginians , xviii). Siren , dating from about 1340, has a strange semantic history, being initially “an imaginary species of serpent,” derived from glossarial explanations of Latin sirenes in the Vulgate text of Isaiah 8:22. By Chaucer’s time it had evolved into a variety of fabulous, seductive monster, part woman and part bird (sometimes confused with the mermaid), but had developed associations leading to the modern meaning of “a dangerously fascinating woman or temptress.”

A number of powerful words show a combination of moral deterioration and sexual specialization: they are harlot, bawd, gipsy , and tramp . All of these originally referred to immoral males before becoming applied to women. More specifically, harlot, gipsy , and tramp originally had the senses of “vagabond, rogue, beggar, or rascal” before changing their meanings to that of “sexually promiscuous woman.” The previously accepted derivation of harlot from Arlette, the mother of the illegitimate William the Conqueror, is now dismissed as a “random conjecture” of William Lambarde in the sixteenth century. Male harlots are recorded from the thirteenth century, while the first use in the sense of “whore” comes from Ranulph Higden (1432–1450) in a fascinating footnote: “The harlottes at Rome were called nonariœ ” (I l. 249), which explains the ironic Elizabethan sense of nunnery to mean “brothel,” as used by Hamlet of Ophelia (III i 122-42). (The wordplay also has a typical anti-Catholic sting.) The sense of “prostitute” became dominant until the word became obsolescent from Victorian times. Bawd , of uncertain origin, first found (ca. 1362) in Piers Plowman (A text III l. 42), originally meant a procurer before acquiring the sense defined by Edward Phillips in his dictionary of 1706: “A lewd woman who makes it her Business to debauch others for Gain.” Both harridan and jade originate as contemptuous names for inferior horses before becoming insulting terms for a loose woman. The earlier sense of jade is first found in Chaucer; the second in this interesting reference from 1560 combining the vices of prostitution and swearing:

Such a jade she is, and so curst a quean [prostitute],
She would out-scold the devil’s dame I ween [reckon].
( The Nice Wanton, Dodsley II, 179)

By the eighteenth century the word was widely current as a term of contempt: Joseph Addison gossiped in the Spectator (no. 343 of 1712) of one “married to an expensive Jade of a wife.” Harridan is an underground term first defined in a slang dictionary (ca. 1700) as “half whore, half bawd.” Dr. Johnson (1755) preferred the higher register of “a decayed strumpet.” Sexual innuendoes associating horses and whores were prevalent in earlier times; they have been superseded by the modern use of bicycle as a symbolic referent for “a loose woman.” In the analysis of college student speech by Timothy Jay (1992), whore was used more frequently by males, but slut was more commonly used by women (143).

Generally speaking, the imbalance between favorable and negative terms continues, despite the insights and condemnation of feminists.