Muliebrity

Muliebrity is the quality of being a woman. This word is sometimes used as a counterpart to virility, in an analogy with the counterparts of "feminine" and "masculine".

The word is derived from Latin muliebritas ("womanhood") and mulier ("woman"). The Oxford English Dictionary (1st edition) noted it was "rare". Muliebrity (miuliˌe•brǐti). rare. [ad. L. muliebrit-ās, f. muliebris : see M ULIEBRAL .] Womanhood ; the characteristics or qualities of a woman. The American Heritage Dictionary adds that muliebrity is the "state of womanhood (in contrast with maidenhood)." In this sense, muliebrity is a state achieved by successful relationship with a man.
 * 1592 [?K YD ] Soliman & Pers. IV . ii. The Ladies of Rhodes haue made their petition to Cupid to plague you aboue all..other, as one preiuditiall to their muliebritie.
 * c 1693 Urquhart's Rabelais III . xxxii. 270 Individual Womanishness or Muliebrity.
 * 1858 O. W. H OLMES Aut. Breakf.-t. ix. The second of the ravishing voices..had so much woman in it,— muliebrity, as well as femineity.
 * He exercised his virility and she received her muliebrity.

Some thesauruses supply muliebrity among other approximate synonyms for womanhood and femininity. Vanderbilt University uses it in a slightly different way, offering a Muliebrity Award to recognize the achievements of women. In his book Mother Tongue (1990), author Bill Bryson describes it as meaning "the state of being a woman".

The word came into a wider circulation after the book of Joni Arredia, although its occasional usage may be traced to much earlier times, e.g., in Al Purdy's poem Uncle Fred on Côte des Neiges (in Poems for All the Annettes (Toronto, 1962)).

Sujata Bhatt
Muliebrity is also the name of a poem, written by Sujata Bhatt. She says it is based on a childhood recollection. Muliebrity I have thought so much about the girl who gathered cow-dung in a wide, round basket along the main road passing by our house and the Radhavallabh temple in Maninagar. I have thought so much about the way she moved her hands and her waist and the smell of cow-dung and road-dust and wet canna lilies, the smell of monkey breath and freshly washed clothes and the dust from crows’ wings which smells different – and again the smell of cow-dung as the girl scoops it up, all these smells surrounding me separately and simultaneously – I have thought so much but have been unwilling to use her for a metaphor, for a nice image – but most of all unwilling to forget her or to explain to anyone the greatness and the power glistening through her cheekbones each time she found a particularly promising mound of dung –

Literature

 * Arredia, Joni, Muliebrity: Qualities of a Woman, 1996, ISBN 0-9653203-1-6 (hardcover)