It remains in use colloquially; for example, as a counterpart to "gentleman," in the phrase "ladies and gentlemen," and is generally interchangeable (in a strictly informal sense) with "woman." (e.g., "The lady at the store said I could return this item in thirty days."). "Ladies" is also the normal text on the signs to any female toilet in a public place in the UK, again paired with "Gentlemen" (or "Gents").
White's anecdote touches on a phenomenon that others have remarked on as well. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in a difference reflected in Nancy Mitford's U vs. non-U distinction, lower class women strongly preferred to be called "ladies" while women from higher backgrounds were content to be identified as "women." Alfred Ayers remarked in 1881 that upper middle class female store clerks in his day were content to be "saleswomen," while lower class female store clerks, for whom their job represented a social advancement, indignantly insisted on being called "salesladies." Something of this sense may also be underneath Kipling's lines:
These social class issues, while no longer on the front burner in the twenty-first century, have imbued the formal use of "lady" with something of an odour of irony (e.g: "my cleaning lady").
In more recent years, usage of the word lady is even more complicated. Remarks made by the journalist William Allen White in his 1946 autobiography indicate part of the difficulties. White relates that a woman who had paid a fine for prostitution came to his newspaper to protest, not that the fact of her conviction was reported, but that the newspaper referred to her as a "woman" rather than a "lady." Since that incident, White assured his readers that his papers referred to human females as "women," with the exception of police court characters, who are all "ladies."
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"Lady" is also the customary title of the wife of a baronet or knight; the proper title, now only used in legal documents or on sepulchral monuments, is "Dame"; in the latter case the usage is to prefix "Dame" to the given name of the wife followed by the surname of the husband, thus Dame Jane Smith, but in the former, "Lady" with the surname of the husband only, Sir John and The Lady Smith. When a wife divorces a knight and he marries again, the new wife will be The Lady Smith while the previous wife becomes Jane, Lady Smith. If he then dies his widow becomes Dowager Lady Smith (no the). During the 15th and 16th centuries princesses or daughters of the blood royal were usually known by their first names with "The Lady" prefixed, e.g. The Lady Elizabeth.
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In the case of sons of a duke or marquess, who by courtesy have "Lord" prefixed to their given and family name, the wife is known by the husband's given and family name with "Lady" prefixed, e.g. The Lady John Smith; the daughters of dukes, marquesses and earls are by courtesy Ladies; here that title is prefixed to the given and family name of the lady, e.g. The Lady Jane Smith, and this is preserved if the lady marries a commoner, e.g. Mr John and The Lady Jane Smith. The predicate 'The' should be used prior to "Lady" or "Lord" in all cases except after a divorce for women who do not hold the courtesy title of "Lady" in their own right, e.g. Heather, Lady McCartney or Jane, Lady Smith as the ex-wife of The Lord John Smith.
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As a title of nobility the uses of "Lady" are mainly paralleled by those of "Lord". It is thus a less formal alternative to the full title giving the specific rank, of marchioness, countess, viscountess or baroness, whether as the title of the husband's rank by right or courtesy, or as the lady's title in her own right. A widow becomes the dowager, e.g. The Dowager Lady Smith.
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The word comes from Old English hlǣfdige; the first part of the word is a mutated form of hlāf, "loaf, bread", also seen in the corresponding hlāford, lord. The second part is usually taken to be from the root dig-, to knead, seen also in dough; the sense development from bread-kneader, or bread-maker, or bread-shaper, to the ordinary meaning, though not clearly to be traced historically, may be illustrated by that of lord.
The primary meaning of "mistress of a household" is now mostly obsolete, save for the occasional use of old-fashioned phrases such as "lady of the house." This meaning is retained, however, in the title First Lady, used for the wife of an elected president or prime minister. In many cultures in Europe the equivalent term serves as a general title of address equivalent to the English Missus (usually seen as Mrs.) (French Madame, Spanish Señora, Italian Signora, German Frau, Polish Pani)
The special use of the word as a title of the Virgin Mary, usually Our Lady, represents the Latin Domina Nostra. In Lady Day and Lady Chapel the word is properly a genitive, representing hlǣfdigan "of the Lady".
The word is also used as a title of the Wiccan Goddess, The Lady.
A lady is a woman who is the counterpart of a lord or, the counterpart of a gentleman. A lady is also a woman who folds, presses, and stretches dough such as bread; in other words, a lady is also known as a bread-kneading woman.[citation needed]
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European fairy tales include some memorable stories about girls, including Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Rapunzel, Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl, The Little Mermaid, and The Princess and the Pea, the Brothers Grimm's Little Red Riding Hood, and others.
Children's books about girls include Little House on the Prairie, Alice in Wonderland, Pippi Longstocking, Dragonsong, and A Wrinkle in Time. Books which have both boy and girl protagonists tend to focus on the boys, but important girl characters appear in Knight's Castle, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Book of Three, and the Harry Potter series.
There have been many American comic books and comic strips featuring a girl as the main character, such as Little Lulu, Little Orphan Annie, Girl Genius, and Amelia Rules. In superhero comic books, an early girl character was Etta Candy, one of Wonder Woman's sidekicks. In the Peanuts series (by Charles Schulz), girl characters include Peppermint Patty, Lucy van Pelt, and Sally Brown.
In Japanese animated cartoons and comic books, girls are often protagonists. Most of the animated films of Hayao Miyazaki feature a young girl as the hero, as in Majo no takkyūbin (Kiki's Delivery Service). There are many other stories with girls as protagonists in the Shōjo style of manga, which is targeted to girls as an audience. Examples include The Wallflower, Ceres, Celestial Legend, Tokyo Mew Mew and Full Moon o Sagashite. Other genres of Japanese cartoons often feature sexualized and objectified portrayals of girls.
Sexualization of young girls in art and entertainment is a common theme across all eras and mediums. However it is especially prominent, or at least more explicitly visible, in modern cinema and television. Some famous examples of this include Taxi Driver, The Blue Lagoon, Léon: The Professional, and Pretty Baby - films dealing with young girls in adult situations, typically under extraordinary circumstances. An older, and perhaps most notorious example is a book by Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955) , that centers around a complex romantic relationship between a scholar and a young girl as they travel across the United States.
Portrayals of girls may reflect their standing in the artists' culture, and a brief overview of different views of girls in different art periods gives a sense of girls' roles in societies around the world and at different points in time.
Egyptian murals included sympathetic portraits of young girls of royal descent.
Ancient Greek classical art and literature paid scant attention to female children, though there are many poems about boys. Only Sappho's poetry includes love poems addressed to girls.
In European art, some early paintings to feature girls are Petrus Christus' Portrait of a Young Girl, circa 1460, Juan de Flandes' Portrait of a Young Girl, circa 1500–1510 (shown at left); Frans Hals' Die Amme mit dem Kind in 1620; Diego Velázquez' Las Meninas in 1656; Jan Steen's The Feast of St. Nicolas, circa 1660; and Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring and Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. Later paintings of girls include Albert Anker's portrait of a Girl with a Domino Tower and Camille Pissarro's 1883 Portrait of a Felix Daughter.
In American art, paintings that feature girls include Mary Cassatt's 1884 Children on the Beach and Whistler's Harmony in Gray and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander and The White Girl (shown at right).
As in art, portrayals of girls in literature can reflect the social norms of the time at which they were written. Many novels begin with the childhood of their heroine. Examples include the titular protagonist of Jane Eyre, who suffers ill treatment; and Natasha in War and Peace, who is sentimentalized. Other novels include Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, which has a young girl as protagonist; and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, a controversial book about the relationship between a girl and a grown man. Memoirs of a Geisha was written by Caucasian American Arthur Golden. However, it has been deemed an accurate representation of geisha life in the early 20th century Japan. The book starts as the female main character and her sister are dropped into the pleasure district after being separated from their family.
Most early children's stories focused on boys, with the notable exception of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, whose photographs of little girls are part of the history of photographic art.
By the 18th century, there was a difference in some uses of the word between England and the Americas. In England, a girl was often a serving girl, while in the United States a girl was often a sweetheart or girlfriend, for example, in the lyrics of the popular song "The Girl I Left Behind Me". In England, the word girl was also used as a euphemism for prostitute, as for example by Richard Steele in The Spectator.
In the United States today, the word girl is often used as an intended compliment or used humorously. A woman of a certain age might be called a girl to suggest that she looks younger than she is, or a group of women might speak of themselves as "us girls", though all are well over the age of maidenhood. Adult women will sometimes refer to themselves as "girls", as in "We're having a girls' night out" or "It's a girl thing". But social shifts generally permit only the female gender group themselves to use such terminology without giving offense.
Some feminists consider the use of girl applied to any adult female to be offensive. They claim that the word is used to insinuate a lower social status compared to adult males. Others feel the word is used to indicate low morals, weakness, or homosexuality. Other women consider the word as merely a courtesy term, similar to the way that lady is used to indicate females, even those which are not the wife of a Lord. There is a parallel objection to use of the word boy to describe a male over the age of puberty.
Using the word girl to refer to a male is usually meant to be insulting, such as "You throw like a girl". The more insulting girly-boy, which originated in 1589 as girle-boy, is used to indicate a weak or "sissy" male. Calling a male a girl often serves as a provocation to fight (see fighting words). While outsiders might use girl or girly as a pejorative to refer to a gay male, within the gay community it is used as a term of endearment.
The word girl has many synonyms, including belle, chick, doll, girly, gal, lass or lassie, maiden, and miss. The slang word gal, as in "Buffalo gals won't you come out tonight", is a variant pronunciation of girl.
The word "girl" first appears during the Middle Ages. The Anglo-Saxon word gyrela = "ornament" may have given rise to the modern pronunciation of "girl", if the change in meaning can be explained. Alternatively, it could have come from the Old Low German word kerl, which would have been consistent with its original meaning. While there is no general agreement about the etymology of "girl", it is found in manuscripts dating from 1290 with the meaning "a child" (of either sex). A female child was called a "gay girl"; a male child was called a "knave girl". Like many other words that originally were not gender-specific, "girl" gradually came to be used primarily and then exclusively for one sex. There are manuscripts dating from 1530 in which the word "girl" is used to mean "maiden" (also originally applied to both sexes), or any unmarried female. Within little more than a century, however, the word began to take on implications of social class. In 1668, in his Diary, Samuel Pepys uses the word to mean a female servant of any age: "girl" = "serving girl". Note the parallel shift in the meaning of the word "maid".
