gentlewomen

One of Mary's gentlewomen from the Welsh household, Anne Hussey, found herself imprisoned in 1536 because she referred to Mary, inadvertently, as "my lady Princess" when asking a servant to bring them both a drink.

From Heads of Household to Heads of State: The Preaccession Households of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, 1516-1558 2008

"All three, then, were what might be termed gentlewomen?"

Pathfinder; or, the inland sea James Fenimore Cooper 1820

But the Reverend Hanbury was beset by aggressive and cold-hearted neighbors, among them two strange old "gentlewomen," Mistress Pickering and Mistress Byrd, who malevolently ordered their cattle to be turned loose into his first plantation of twenty thousand young and thrifty trees.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 Various

That lady had found her true place among England's "gentlewomen" (?), though she had utterly failed to do so among Virginia's.

A Dixie School Girl

Jumble sales, vicars, spinsters, and other excellent women who prepare indexes and collect jumble for distressed gentlewomen.

My new secret boyfriend Roger Sutton 2009

It was an outlandish thing for two Victorian gentlewomen to do.

Lessons of a Frontier Letter Writer Dorothy Wickenden 2011

NOTE: When George I imported his seraglio of impoverished gentlewomen from Germany, he provided the Jacobite songwriters with material for some of their most ribald verses.

Great Scots 2009

NOTE: When George I imported his seraglio of impoverished gentlewomen from Germany, he provided the Jacobite songwriters with material for some of their most ribald verses.

Archive 2009-08-01 2009

Ladies began to carve out a separate, independent life of their own by the late 1890s, and there came to London a proliferation of clubs catering specifically to gentlewomen of rank and means.

London’s Ladies’ Clubs | Edwardian Promenade 2010

For nothing but the most commonplace of commonplaces; a table of gentlewomen and gentlemen—soft-spoken, sweet-tempered, full of human sympathy, who made me, a stranger, one of them.

DARKWATER W.E.B. DU BOIS 2004