Girl entered English as gerle around 1250–1300
English picked up girl between 1250 and 1300 from the Anglo-Saxon gerle, also spelled girle or gurle. For two centuries it could mean a child of either sex, and only from about the late 1400s did it settle on a young female, the sense that still dominates today.
A separate Anglo-Saxon word, gerela, meant a dress or piece of clothing and seems to have served as a metonym in some way. Today girl can also mean a daughter, a girlfriend or a young woman whatever her age. Applied to adult women in professional settings it can sound belittling, much as boy does for grown men, and phrases like you're just a girl use it to put children down. Yet showgirl and model titles are not usually heard as insults, and pop songs such as Nelly Furtado's Promiscuous Girl and Martina McBride's This One's for the Girls use it playfully or to unite women of every age.
How girls are treated generally mirrors women's standing. Where women hold low status, parents may not want daughters and societies may spend less on them. Formal schooling for girls long lagged behind boys'. Elizabeth I was a rare exception: after her mother Anne Boleyn's execution her education was largely neglected, but Catherine Parr backed rigorous tutoring from age 9 in Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, philosophy, history, mathematics and music.
Enlightenment France brought female literacy to perhaps a third of women by the Revolution, against about half of men. French girls could not enter secondary schools until the late nineteenth century or earn the Baccalaureate until Léon Bérard's 1924 reforms, and schools stayed segregated until the end of World War II. In many Eastern European countries girls' access to higher education remained restricted until the 1970s.
Rites mark girlhood's milestones. Japan's Shichi-Go-San, held each November 15, blesses girls aged three and seven in kimono at a temple. The Apache Sunrise Ceremony spans four days of clay and pollen paint, dancing and strength trials; long banned by the US government, it revived after being decriminalised in 1978.
Source: Girl
