Definition of "ladyhood" [la•dy•hood]

• The quality or state of being a lady or ladylike. (noun)

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• "Burney: but for some time before, in the days of Sarah Fielding, it was only possible in the ways of Afra and of Mrs. Haywood, who, without any unjust stigma on them, can hardly be said to fulfil the idea of ladyhood, as no doubt Miss Fielding did."
• "Fierce jests about the Scotch who came to make their fortune off their richer neighbors, about their clannishness and their canniness, and their poverty and their pride, and still lower and coarser jibes about other supposed peculiarities were then still as current as the popular crows of triumph over the French and other similar antipathies; and Kirsteen's advent was attended by many comments of the kind from the sharp young Londoners to whom her accent and her slower speech, and her red hair and her ladyhood were all objects of derision."
• "Nan Enstad writes of the same flamboyance that working women were challenging the dominant meaning of "ladyhood," creating their own distinctive style that implicitly denied that labor made them masculine, degraded, or alien. ""