commissionairess

plural commissionairesses

1. A female commissionaire.

   Corps of Commissionairesses.

   1916, “Mr. Punch’s War-time Revue”, in Punch, or The London Charivari, volume CLI, page 22

   5 more examples

   “What if women commissioners should be appointed?” asked the Doubter. “Create the title, ‘commissionairess’,” said the Serious Minded.

   1903 February 22, “Hon. Mr. Commissioner Title for School Man. Brooklyn Experts Take Up the Proposition Affecting Dignity of the Schools. May a Teacher Talk of Board?”, in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, volume 63, number 52, Brooklyn, N.Y., section “Honors Ought to Be Prominent”, page 8, column 1

   […]but when the door was opened for him and he had to an address he remembered that he wanted to go nowhere in particular, unless to see the second commissionairess forty yards further on.

   1915, The Sketch: A Journal of Art and Actuality, volume XCI, page 30, column 3

   The Commissionairess. Have you noticed how the women doorkeepers outside the big stores have already hit off exactly the pose of the old commissionaires? There is something about a doorkeeper unlike any other mortal—a certain Olympian, if polite, contempt of the ordinary shopping person, a congenital distrust of the lap dog. Woman, wonderful creature, has acquired all that in a week. She treads the pavement as though she had just bought it; she glances up at the shop windows, not with a woman’s usual acquisitive glance, but with a “still there, are you?” look. To see her blow her whistle is an education; to see her summon a motor is an event.

   1915 May 25, “Mr. Gossip”, “Echoes of the Town And Round About”, in Daily Sketch, number 1,937, London, page 5, column 2

   The Commissionairess. “My duties? Oh, light enough in a way, though they make you feel rather slow now and then. It doesn’t want much energy to whistle up a taxi, does it? “But the uniform! Just look at it! The skirt! Did you ever see such a cut? Why, it might have been made for my grandmother!” “And the hat! How could any girl with an oval face like mine look nice in a hat without a brim? “No, the work isn’t hard. But the uniform!”

   1915 December 3, conducted by “Egeria”, “Mainly for Women”, in Buenos Aires Herald: Illustrated Weekly Edition, number 594, Buenos Aires, section “Their Brothers’ Jobs”, page 14, columns 2–3

   […]minister-girls, and commissionairesses, who are filling the places of men[…]

   1916, The Homestead, page 3