Mannishness

See also Boyishness.

Amazon

female warrior. [Gk. Myth.: Parrinder, 18]

Boadicea

(Boudicca) British queen and warrior; slew 80,000 Romans. [Br. Hist.: Walsh, Classical, 58]

Bradamant

female knight-errant. [Ital. Lit.: Orlando Furioso]

Brass, Sally

couldn’t tell her apart from brother Sampson. [Br. Lit.: The Old Curiosity Shop]

Omphale

Lydian queen; wore Hercules’ lion skin. [Gk. Myth.: Wheeler, 269]

Rosie the Riveter

popular WWII song romanticizing women workers. [Am. Hist.: Flexner, 395]

Mentioned in

References in periodicals archive

It is likewise surprising that a woman who was renowned for her mannishness should have appointed her niece as sole executrix and not her kinsman Abraham Robinson.

Mary Frith, Alias Moll Cutpurse, in Life and Literature

If female fashion was exercised by the New Woman's alleged mannishness, was there a perceptible reaction in male dress (and stage performance) to the spectre of effeminacy foregrounded by Wilde's delinquencies but a matter of mounting anxiety over several decades?

Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes

Now her mannishness denoted an oddness in her lifestyle and an unnatural erotic desire; for instance, Miss Barnevelt, "a lady of masculine features," in Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54) was comically coded as desiring women because of her masculinity, and the gun-toting and cross-dressing Harriet Freke in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) was explicitly lesbian.

Thinking gender with sexuality in 1790s' feminist thought

Cahn, "From the 'Muscle Moll' to the 'Butch' Ballplayer: Mannishness, Lesbianism, and Homophobia in U.S.

"Nothing Else Matters But Sex": Cold war narratives of deviance and the search for lesbian teachers in Florida, 1959-1963

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