gunneress

English

Etymology

From gunner +‎ -ess.

Noun

gunneress (plural gunneresses)

1. (nonstandard, rare) A female gunner.
   • 1837, Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Chapman and Hall, →OCLC, (please specify the book or page number):

     Away, then, away ! The seized cannon are yoked with seized cart-horses : brown-locked Demoiselle Theroigne, with pike and helmet, sits there as gunneress, "with haughty eye and serene fair countenance;" comparable, some think, to the Maid of Orleans.

   • 1909, Anatole France, The Life of Joan of Arc:

     ... France, the patroness of officers, the inimitable model of the pupils of Saint-Cyr, and the romantic Druidess, the inspired woman-soldier of the national guard, the patriot gunneress of the Republicans, ...

   • 1922, Winifred Stephens Whale, Women of the French Revolution, page 185:

     At Jemappes there were at least two other Amazons, Catherine Pochelat and Duliere, both artillery women. At Lille, a widow, Mary Guillot, was gunneress; and when she came to Paris the Jacobin Club invited her to sit on the President's right hand.

   • 1992, Angela Moorjani, Aesthetics Of Loss And Lessness, Springer (→ISBN), page 65:

     Most strikingly, too, Bellmer's 1937 sculpture, Mitrailleuse en état de grâce (Machine-Gunneress), replaces phallic weapon associations by a voluptuous construct of buttock-head, breasts, and petal-like claws (reproduced in Rubin, Dada 151).

   • 2011, Donald O'Donovan, Tarantula Woman (→ISBN):

     It was a huge house and several other refugees were also camping with Dr. Umberto, most of them, like me, victims of genitourinary calamities. The retired Israeli machine gunneress with the prolapsed uterus, for example: she dropped her intestines in the toilet one morning.

Further reading

• “gunneress”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.