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There are several variations of the meaning of Grass Widow. The oldest explanation I found is associated with the Sir Thomas More book Dialogue of 1528. "Grass Widow meant an abandoned mistress or an unmarried woman who had cohabited with several men. It might have expressed the idea that the abandoned lover had been "put out to grass". Could the grass in Grass Widow refer to surreptitious love-making in the fields rather than indoors, or the straw in a barn used for an illicit tryst?" The more modern explanation that has long been used in the USA is quite different: "A woman who is separated, divorced, or lives apart from her husband", as the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary has it. |