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As in,

Emily Dickinson was a great woman poet

or

Emily Dickinson was a great women poet

in order to mean

Emily Dickinson was a great female poet

Think I may have seen this adjectival usage of "women/woman" in a feminist art criticism paper, wondering if there's an accepted spelling...

brendan
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    In the context of a feminist art criticism paper, why do you feel the need to stress the gender of the poet? "Emily Dickinson was a great poet". Finally, "women" is plural and "woman" is singular. – Elliott Frisch Apr 04 '14 at 03:18
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    One might guess this (woman/female) is a bit redundant since "Emily" is pretty gender specific, and she is very well known (great). So... Emily Dickinson was a great poet. "Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it." - Emily Dickinson – anongoodnurse Apr 04 '14 at 03:25
  • Perhaps, if the author is introducing the context of the paper, the term 'woman' would be appropriate to focus the audience towards the gender of the poet. If Emily's gender is relevant to the theme of the paper, this makes sense. – badpanda Apr 04 '14 at 03:29
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    @badpanda Perhaps, but I'd prefer to hear OP's intent. I would never turn in a paper with "Robert Frost was a great man poet". So I don't believe that "Emily Dickinson was a great woman poet" is a good turn of phrase. – Elliott Frisch Apr 04 '14 at 03:42
  • Yeah, if you are committed to specifying her gender in this sentence, you should use female. You could say she wrote from a woman's perspective. But a woman poet is awkward, I'm trying to think of an example where you might use woman or women as an adjective and I cannot do so at present. – Mike Apr 04 '14 at 03:56
  • Please visit [ell.se] – Kris Apr 04 '14 at 06:00
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    It's woman poet, using the singular. For more, you need to ask on the above SE site. – Kris Apr 04 '14 at 06:01
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    Suggested migration to [ell.se] – Kris Apr 04 '14 at 06:02
  • Here's the paper. Linda Nochlin uses "women" as the adjective. http://faculty.winthrop.edu/stockk/contemporary%20art/Nochlin%20great%20women%20artists.pdf – brendan Apr 05 '14 at 21:09
  • to be clear, the example sentence is not a sentence I'm trying to write. it's just there to look at the adjective usage – brendan Apr 05 '14 at 21:11

4 Answers4

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If you must specify the sex of Emily Dickinson, I'd suggest that you switch the order of words

A great woman poet was Emily Dickinson
One of the greatest women poets was Emily Dickinson

Note that woman poet is singular, whereas women poets is plural.

You could replace woman poet with poetess but as Wiktionary points out

'Poetess' is rare in contemporary usage according to which both sexes are known normally as 'poets'.

Consequently, placing the noun woman or women in front of occupations that are (or were) typically associated with men may be considered sexist or politically incorrect, but consider the following professions:

Despite this usage, if I had to introduce a friend called Emily I would never say:
"This is Emily, she's a woman scientist." But simply "This is Emily, she's a scientist".

Mari-Lou A
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I concur with the comments. Emily is so common that an average user can recognize its gender from the name itself. However, there might be instances where you need to specify a person's gender. For example, the person you are trying to describe comes from a culture that's foreign to your target readers. In that case, it would be good to say something along these lines:

ABC is a great writer(ABC is she not he). Or

ABC is a female writer. This sounds a bit strange, but would serve the purpose in your case.

As a modifier you can say,

A woman doctor.

Community
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Noah
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    A woman doctor is certainly not a gynaecologist. It's a female doctor. In this case the attributive noun woman directly describes doctor, not the work of the doctor. Note that with agent nouns formed from simple verbs which take a direct object like painter or cutter, the woman could describe the patient of the agent's action (but although that does hold for house painter, it probably doesn't hold where it could be describing the main noun: we would need a hyphen as in woman-painter). – Andrew Leach Apr 04 '14 at 07:11
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Firstly, as Mari-Lou says in her answer, forming compound nouns or at least proto-collocations from 'woman' + [profession] is fairly rare, and contentious.

Secondly, when nouns are used attributively, it is very rare that the plural form (of the attributive noun) is used for singulars (of the whole string):

manhole // particle board / particle-board / particleboard // weekday // wrongdoing // toothpaste // whistle-blower // priest-king // child care // football manager // cow barn // woman scientist /// [sports centre] // [dogs home]

Thirdly, when nouns are used attributively, it is almost as rare that the plural form is used for plurals:

manholes // particle boards / particle-boards / particleboards // weekdays // wrongdoings // toothpastes // whistle-blowers // priest-kings // {child care} (non-count) // football managers // cow barns // women scientists /// [sports centres] // [dogs homes]

As you see, 'woman' + [occupation] is an exception (though there are some instances of say 'woman scientists' on the internet).

Edwin Ashworth
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  • My question is about your Thirdly. Why do you commonly see "women scientists" used, but never "teethpastes" nor "carrots sticks" nor "apples carts"? That seems wrong to me. – beroe Mar 18 '20 at 06:12
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"Woman" is a noun, not an adjective*. You can join nouns together in this way, but take care of retaining meaning.

For instance, if you write "woman poet" it could imply that Emily Dickinson only wrote poems about women. What you should write is "woman-poet", indicating she is a woman and a poet.

On a side note, you could also use a solidus "woman/poet" to indicate she was both a great woman AND a great poet, not just a great poet who happened to be a woman.

*In some instances Woman is used as an adjective, such as in Woman activist, but let's be honest - it's usage is not that common, and when I looked it up in Oxford, it definitely said noun, so until they change it, stick to "female poet" or "woman-poet"

binderbound
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  • I've just come upon this, binderbound. Have you an authority to back up your implied 'using a hyphenated {noun A + noun B} compound noun indicates that the referent is both an A and a B'? Water-bottle / water bottle, ice-axe / ice axe, and paper-clip / paper clip / paperclip are all accepted spellings. – Edwin Ashworth May 19 '14 at 22:46
  • The hyphenation applies to words that are not commonly seen together. Where the two words are often placed together, you don't need a hyphen. I will briefly point out that your examples don't really apply here though - "water-bottle" means a bottle for water, not "a bottle that is also water", which is the meaning you would get for hyphenated compound nouns. Similar for "ice-axe" and "paper-clip". A brief article on hypens covers this usage: [link]http://grammarist.com/grammar/hyphens/ (3rd dotpoint) – binderbound May 20 '14 at 00:42
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    <<3. Hyphens are occasionally used in compound nouns, although this practice varies, and specific conventions govern each case. Invented compound nouns are usually good candidates for hyphenation; poets often do this with whimsical coinages ...>> This does not even suggest that 'using a hyphenated {noun A + noun B} compound noun indicates that the referent is both an A and a B', but only that a compound noun usage is intended and being signalled. A fire-fly is not composed of fire, nor a wire-worm of wire. I've never seen 'woman teacher' with a hyphen, unlike 'woman-hater'. – Edwin Ashworth May 20 '14 at 08:29