Mastodawn

It's international women's day. Lots of articles and toots are being posted about women in various industries, sports etc...

An unfortunately far too common phrasing will be to use the word "females" instead of women, or girls, or women and girls. Now there's a strong grammatical argument that says female is an adjective and should only be used as such. "Female engineer" "female president" "female assassin". But this hides a much darker historical reason why we shouldn't use "females"

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Quixoticgeek Mar 8

The rest of this thread is behind a CW.

Back in the 1800's a surgeon in the US was doing some unethical research that would go on to form the basis of the medical discipline of gynaecology. To do this, he experimented on white women, and black slave women. When publishing his findings, he didn't want to humanise the black women he was using as test subjects. So he described them as "females". This is the origin of the usage.

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Bodhipaksa

@quixoticgeek I thought this to be extremely unlikely as an origin for the use of "females" as a term to refer to women, and a quick search on Google Books found plenty of uses of that term from the 1700's. ("Tender-hearted females" — who were audience members at a play, from 1794, and "females addicted to censoriousness" from 1768, for example).