Why is liberty a woman?

[oneday]

The representation of it in statues and such. Why?

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

It's traced back to Libertas, the Roman Goddess of liberty. She's basically the inspiration for all of female embodiments of liberty and freedom.

[Faust Arp]

They were all modeled after Libertas, the Roman godess of liberty, who started off as one of the personifications of Roman virtues before being "promoted".

Personifications of virtues are always portrayed as women in classical art. Why is that? I'm not sure, but I'd take a wager that it's probably due to patriarchal societies tending to mystify the female gender and, in the pre-modern era, usually associating women with various mystical qualities.

[RedWorker]

Perhaps she is a damsel in distress.

[Aurorus Ruber]

They were all modeled after Libertas, the Roman godess of liberty, who started off as one of the personifications of Roman virtues before being "promoted".

Personifications of virtues are always portrayed as women in classical art. Why is that? I'm not sure, but I'd take a wager that it's probably due to patriarchal societies tending to mystify the female gender and, in the pre-modern era, usually associating women with various mystical qualities.

Also, nouns for abstract qualities, including libertas were generally grammatically feminine in Latin from what I understand. Although that in turn raises the question of why they assigned the feminine gender to abstractions in the first place.

[Luís Henrique]

Personifications of virtues are always portrayed as women in classical art. Why is that? I'm not sure, but I'd take a wager that it's probably due to patriarchal societies tending to mystify the female gender and, in the pre-modern era, usually associating women with various mystical qualities.

As Aurorus Ruber says, bstract nouns are usually feminine in Latin (and its offspring). So Liberty, Justice, Equality, Courage, and so on, if personified, would tend to be imagined as females by the Roman, the French, etc. And Romans and French have been historically important as sources of imagery regarding liberty.

Why were those nouns feminine in Latin is a more complicated issue, which I am far from sure can be related to patriarchy.

Lots of mystical (or easily mistifiable) things have masculine nouns in Romance languages. Love, fire, sky, sun, zeal, are all masculine, and when "iconified", are usually male.

It is funny to see Death personified as a male in German or Swedish films. To us Death is obviously a lady, though admittedly not as gorgeous as Liberty:

http://spf.fotolog.com/photo/63/3/114/mauk/1200141895_f.jpg

http://s3-sa-east-1.amazonaws.com/vworks-kombigode/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/deusa-da-morte.jpg

[Faust Arp]

Hmmmm, I don't know. It's still interesting how, on the contrary, in Slavic languages abstract nouns, or those related to "mystical" things, are almost exclusively either feminine or neutral (masculine nouns related to those things, such as "usud", as opposed to the more modern "sudbina" - both meaning "destiny" - are extremely dated and archaic). But I'm not an anthropologist, nor a linguist, nor an ethnologist.

[PhoenixAsh]

Only a minority of the world's languages use the M/F or M/F/N distinction. Most make other distinctions. How and why that developed is right now anybodies guess but there are some indications that it has to do with whether or not you are adressing a man or a woman or talking about a man or a woman and therefore allows for more complex communication without losing meaning and that it is not entirely dependend on patriarchy because in some languages uniquely male descriptors are considered feminine words and neither do neighboring M/F languages always use the same distinction for the same word.

On the other hand how language shapes our cognition and perception of a word does hold genderized views. So in German a key is masculine and psychological tests have shows that this is because generally people see it as an object that is strong, durable and useful but the word in Spanish is female and people describe a key as small, intricate and dainty.