Helen wrote:
Jenny objected:
But think about it. "My woman." Not "Sarah," or "Becky," or "Jill"; not "someone I cared for" or "a woman who meant a lot to me." Very cavemannish really; it doesn't give her a name or a face or even suggest that there was anything at all between them.
It's normal. I say "my husband" instead of "Allan", if I don't expect people to know who he is from the name, in relationship to me. If I wasn't married to him, I'm not sure what I would call him: "my guy" would be less juvenile than boyfriend, less explicit than lover and less of a mouthful than anything else.
1/ If someone's husband/partner/etc. is dead though, they don't generally go around saying "my man's dead" except in a certain sort of novel; 2/ If your husband suddenly started calling you "my woman," I'm not sure it conveys the right message...
What is he trying to convey by having Gan say "my woman"?
Laws that did not allow certain people to marry? We know of married lawyers and scientists, but was marriage recognised in the working classes? Or that someone had forgotten whether it had been established that the marriage contract existed in the future and used the same terms?
But if he was trying to convey a class divide of this sort, you'd expect to see it elsewhere. One (arguably) working-class character (we don't actually have any proof that he *was* working-class, come to that) uses that phrase, but we don't see it elsewhere, or any sort of reference that this divide exists.
When other characters call women "woman" in the B7 universe, they are generally people who are brutish and more than a little contemptuous of women-- Shrinker aside, Jarvik calls Servalan "woman," and he is the archetypical B7 sexist pig.
Jenny
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