Women

Adult human females. This common definition, however, is insufficient for feminist analysis.

So...

Women

• A class of people created by gender divisions, which gendered ideology necessarily conflates with the biological fact of being female.

• The people who belong to that category:
  • Female people, automatically enlisted in the gender class because of their biological characteristics.
  • Particularly, adult female people (as opposed to girls).
  • Transgendered people, who choose to enter into the gender category.

• Sub-human females, for those who equate "man" with all of humanity ("Mankind"), and therefore only define male people as human. Lamentably common, if often only implicit definition, in sexist ideology.

• "Woman" can be an idealist and ideological construct of the gendered image of how female people should be.

• Etc.

Women in SF

In a SFnal context, it is useful to specify that women are human female people, because the definition of people may extend to non-humans.

But there is an extraordinarily prevalent confusion between the application of the term women to human female people and non-human female people in many works of SF.

Thus there are alien women, and mythological women, and monster women, and many, many kinds of women, and many definitions of women indeed.

References

• Are Women Human? essay by Dorothy L. Sayers