the true lady is in theory either a virgin or a lawful wife.

Every discussion of the status of woman is complicated by the existence of the lady. She overshadows the rest of her sex.

As the gentleman decays, the lady survives as the strongest evidence of his former predominance.

the lady is almost the only picturesque survival in a social order which tends less and less to tolerate the exceptional. ... In the age-long war between men and women, she is a hostage in the enemy's camp. Her fortunes do not rise and fall with those of women but with those of men.

The lady ... is an anomaly to which the western nations of this planet have grown accustomed but which would require a great deal of explanation before a Martian could understand her.

Until changing economic conditions made the thing actually happen, struggling early society would hardly have guessed that woman's road to gentility would lie through doing nothing at all.

In contemporary society [the typical lady] is an archaism, and can't hardly understand herself unless she knows her own history.