Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The state or time of being a woman.
  • noun The composite of qualities thought to be appropriate to or representative of women.
  • noun Women considered as a group.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Womanly state, character, or qualities; the state of being a woman.
  • noun Women collectively; womankind.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The state of being a woman; the distinguishing character or qualities of a woman, or of womankind.
  • noun Women, collectively; womankind.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The state of being a woman.
  • noun All the qualities typical of women.
  • noun Women considered as a group.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun women as a class
  • noun the status of a woman
  • noun the state of being an adult woman

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

woman +‎ -hood

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Examples

  • Not to woman's skillful hands; not to her ready brain; not to the things of her womanhood upon which the world into which she goes alone to labor puts a price has the Master of Life committed this supreme thing; but to her _womanhood_ -- her sex.

    Their Yesterdays Harold Bell Wright 1908

  • Her church and creed might waver and sink, but that undefinable innocence which we call womanhood, would lead her, a Dian, through the fires of hell.

    The Complete Works of Brann the Iconoclast, Volume 10 1905

  • But marriage, and particularly motherhood, weigh the heaviest in our definition of womanhood.

    Melanie Notkin: Unnatural Women: Childless in America Melanie Notkin 2011

  • There's also the racist Sharron Angle campaign ad that contrasts scary Hispanic gangsters with pure and innocent white children in much the same way that Bible Belt politicians used to speak of protecting the flower of young Southern womanhood from the "colored."

    Richard (RJ) Eskow: Our Historic Stand Against the Bank Cabal's Coalition of Darkness RJ 2010

  • You can't suck manhood from the dugs of a creature whose only claim to womanhood is her petticoats.

    SIWASH 2010

  • Refreshingly, director Lauren Montgomery and writers Gail Simone and Michael Jelenic do not simply toss the Wonder Woman character in a story where her womanhood is irrelevant.

    Current Movie Reviews, Independent Movies - Film Threat 2009

  • There's also the racist Sharron Angle campaign ad that contrasts scary Hispanic gangsters with pure and innocent white children in much the same way that Bible Belt politicians used to speak of protecting the flower of young Southern womanhood from the "colored."

    Richard (RJ) Eskow: Our Historic Stand Against the Bank Cabal's Coalition of Darkness RJ 2010

  • There's also the racist Sharron Angle campaign ad that contrasts scary Hispanic gangsters with pure and innocent white children in much the same way that Bible Belt politicians used to speak of protecting the flower of young Southern womanhood from the "colored."

    Richard (RJ) Eskow: Our Historic Stand Against the Bank Cabal's Coalition of Darkness RJ 2010

  • I wonder if she gets a different kind of magic in exchange for the betrayal of the little ones, or whether a normal womanhood is it for her now.

    Rites of Passage « A Fly in Amber 2009

  • Any woman who falls outside the boundaries of a family pattern of expectation may feel she has failed or that her expression of womanhood is not valued, and when a woman believes she has failed at womanhood itself, she often abandons her root, the place of her failure.

    Wild Feminine Tami Lynn Kent 2011

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