woman [OE] In Old English the spelling of woman was wīfmon or wīfman, a combination of *wife (which then meant simply ‘woman’) and *man (which meant ‘person’), so a woman was a ‘female person’. A woman’s work is never done and a woman’s place is in the home reflect the traditional view of the sexes. The former was first recorded in 1570, as ‘Some respite to husbands the weather doth send, but housewives’ affairs have never no end’, the latter is early 19th century. In response to such ideas, during the 1970s and 1980s some feminists decided that the usual plural of woman, women, had to be changed, because it contained men. They used womyn or wimmin, neither of which really caught on. The saying ‘A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle’ is sometimes credited to the American feminist Gloria Steinem but was probably just an anonymous piece of graffiti.