Feminist words in 1868

[Joel S. Berson]

Some on this list may be amused by the 1868 play in which I found 
"alderwoman".  (Not an antedating, though; I'll send those in a 
separate message.)  It's "The Spirit of Seventy-Six, or, the Coming 
Woman, a Prophetic Drama," by Ariana Wormeley Curtis (Boston: Little, 
Brown, 1868); full view at http://tinyurl.com/k2p8ufm .

The play starts off with comments on gender-related words read in an 
1876 Boston newspaper by a man trying to return there via a train 
that has broken down at Newton Corner.  (1876, of course, being the 
centenary of the Declaration of Independence.  The play is humorously 
feminist ... whether pro- or anti- I am unable to decide.)  The 
newspaper-reader finds women in all sorts of contexts where only 
males would have appeared previously, such as a want add for a 
porter, a "good, stout ... Widow-woman"; a female Freemason who's 
given away secrets; "parasol-bayonets" for militia members.  A woman 
enters what he took for "the gentlemen's waiting-room" and asks for a 
cigar.  In the alderwoman's speech before the primary convention that 
nominated a woman for Governess, she says "Woman now stands on the 
apex of the social Pyramid. Man is a mummy."

Joel 

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