Lady, phoneticist Henry Higgins is baffled when, after enduring months of his hectoring put-downs, his protégée-cum-victim Eliza Doolittle finally bites back. ‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’ he grumbles. It’s a common complaint – and one for which the common solution is to fix the women. This is unsurprising in a world where what is male is seen as universal and what is female is seen as ‘atypical’.
