unsex

Estimated CEFR level: C2 — Proficiency

Estimated from word frequency; not an official CEFR classification.

Definition

From un- + sex.

While English women take an active part in elections, holding meetings and canvassing their districts, here, even the wives of judges, governors, and senators speak with bated breath of political movements, and seem to feel that a knowledge of laws and constitutions would hopelessly unsex them. — Eighty Years and More; Reminiscences 1815-1897, Elizabeth Cady Stanton
She was a clever girl, the best of her year in the High School, and she made a valiant fight for Somerville or Newnham but her father had met and argued with a Somerville girl at a friend’s dinner-table and he thought that sort of thing unsexed a woman. — Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story, H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
We know, or rather we feel, that she who could give a voice to the most direful intent, and call on the spirits that wait on mortal thoughts to "unsex her," and "stop up all access and passage of remorse"--to that remorse would have given nor tongue nor sound; and that rather than have uttered a complaint, she would have held her breath and died. — Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical, and Historical, Mrs. (Anna) Jameson

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