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The Two Lineages of Female Domination: Mistress and Domina

This writing is dedicated to my wonderful Domina friends in Madrid. I’ll miss you. xx

The Mistress Lineage is part one of a two-part series on the lineage of Mistress and Domina. The second part—The Domina Lineage—will follow soon.

This is a labour of love. Here I have uploaded the first part (as the work is nearly 5000 words and I felt the need to divide it up into readable sections).

Please note: the original has italics for linguistics; however, Fetlife always deletes them with copy-paste.

Disclosure: I value female-centric Femdom (as opposed to male-centric Femdom). You will see this in my writing. And, actually, this is one of the reasons this writing exists.

The Two Lineages of Female Domination: Mistress and Domina

In contemporary BDSM and Female Domination, titles are not fixed. Many women call themselves Mistress, others prefer Domina, while still others use terms such as Domme or Goddess, Mommy or Queen. It is important to emphasise that no woman should be denied the right to name herself. Identity is lived, personal, and to some degree, always fluid. Yet, if one values culture, heritage, and art, then names and their meanings matter. Words do not emerge out of thin air. They carry lineages, complicated histories, and symbolic weight that both empower and constrain—as Foucault reminds us, discourse does not simply describe power; it enacts it (Foucault 1972, 48–49). To value these discourses is not to impose conformity or authority but to enrich understanding (Foucault 1972, chp. 3-4; Butler 1990, 33; Cixous 1976, 878).

The purpose of this writing is therefore not prescriptive but clarifying. My aim is to present the distinct historical lineages of Mistress and Domina, demonstrating that they do not stem from the same cultural point, and that their divergence illuminates two fundamentally different orientations of Femdom practice. Mistress evolved within the context of sexual commerce, patronage, and property (Lindemann 2012, 200-202; Jones-Rogers 2010, 7-20), developing into the figure of the ProDomme of today, whose power is performed within the framework of patriarchal erotic economies (Marcus 1966, 29 & 255). Domina descends from the domestic and erotic authority of the Roman household, developing into the figure of the lifestyle female dominant whose power is not performed for the male gaze but emerges from female erotic truth and sovereignty (Wyke 2002, 38 & 44-45). To conflate the two is to risk erasing the cultural specificity of both professional and lifestyle Femdom. To distinguish them is to restore depth and clarity, and to recognise that each lineage speaks to a different moral and aesthetic order of Female power.

When we research history and culture, we tend to lean on the writings and art of the time. Thus, historical truth is always partial, fractured, and unevenly preserved. What literature, memoir, pornography, or ethnography provides is often not about direct facts but what Donald Spence terms narrative truth—accounts whose accuracy may be debatable but which nevertheless reveal how people construct meaning in their lives (Spence 1982, 22–24). If we read these materials carefully, not as transparent facts but as cultural artefacts, we can recover the way erotic power was named, performed, and transmitted across eras (Marcus 1966, 205–216; Wyke 2002, 33–38; Lindemann 2012, 200–202). This allows us to discern two enduring grammars of power—commerce and sovereignty—whose interplay defines the history of Female Domination.

However, by recognising these two lineages—Mistress and Domina—it not only offers historical clarity but cultural reflection (Lindemann 2012, 200–202), and restores heritage. To call oneself Mistress is to situate oneself in the lineage of commercial erotic labour. To call oneself Domina is to situate oneself in a lineage of authentic female sovereignty (Wyke 2002, 33–38). Both are valid, but they are not the same. Their distinction restores both depth and dignity to the language of Female power.

The Mistress Lineage

The story of Mistress is the story of how female authority was rewritten for male consumption. In the beginning there was the French maĂźtresse—the dignified feminine of maĂźtre (“master, ruler, teacher”), from Latin magistra/magister (teacher). In its earliest French forms—maistresse, mestresse—the word named a woman who commanded her household or instructed others: femme qui a autoritĂ© sur des serviteurs, sur un mĂ©nage (woman who has authority over servants) (CNRTL 2020a, “maistresse”). For centuries, maĂźtresse carried respect. She was the head of a household, a governess, and a schoolmistress (maĂźtresse d’école), even moral discipline (maĂźtresse de soi-mĂȘme/mistress of oneself) (LittrĂ© 1973, s.v. “maĂźtresse”). However, courtly poetics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries shifted the meaning of maĂźtresse from house to heart. MaĂźtresse became the beloved—dame de cƓur—or queen of the heart, a transition Alain Rey dates to the fifteenth century (Rey 1998, 2313). By the seventeenth century, the meaning turned political with la maĂźtresse du roi (the king’s mistress)—the royal favourite. Even though this title had power, it became bound to male desire, changing from “household governance” to “sexual/state-based favouritism” (TLFi, s.v. “maĂźtresse”). The Enlightenment era completed the semantic drift. Diderot’s quip—Les maĂźtresses sont les reines du monde (mistresses are the queens of the world)—introduces a time in which female influence became purchased through patronage. Nineteenth-century lexicography codifies the semantic shift from 1. Celle qui commande (she who commands) to 2. Celle qu’un homme aime (she whom man loves), and landing on 3. Celle avec laquelle il vit illicitement (she with whom he lives illicitly) (LittrĂ©, s.v. “maĂźtresse”). When maĂźtresse crossed the English Channel as maistresse (c. 1300), English preserved its duality (OED, s.v. “Mistress”). By the seventeenth century, polite address contracted into Mrs. and Miss, leaving the full word mistress to stabilise primarily as “a woman loved by a man, especially illicitly” (Etymonline 2023). The title of authority, respect, and mastery had been transformed into a metaphor of a “kept woman” (Etymonline 2023).

This is not an innocent linguistic drift. It is the record of patriarchy at work within language. The transformation of maütresse/mistress from “woman who commands” to “kept woman” represents what feminist linguist Dale Spender identifies as semantic degradation—the tendency of female titles to decline in status over time (Spender 1980, 91-94). In this transition, maütresse and mistress collapsed into a meaning of financial dependency, where female power became conditional on male desire. The ideological cost of this linguistic shift has been profound. The mistress became a woman whose authority existed only through the gaze that desires her (Cameron 1992, 25).

However, there have been a few small rebellions to preserve fragments of the original meaning—“Mistress of the house,” and “schoolmistress.” Even today in modern French performance and literature, maütresse can still carry this older resonance of governance and authorship. One of France’s most renown dominatrices and writers, Catherine Robbe-Grillet (pseudonym Jeanne de Berg) reclaims the word specifically in her declaration: “Je me veux femme-sujet, maütresse du jeu”/I want to be a woman-subject, mistress of the game (Robbe-Grillet 2002; Devarrieux 2012). In so doing, she invokes the ancient maütresse de maison/mistress of the house—the woman who rules her space and rituals, whose power is authored rather than rented to commerce.

The Word in English Use

During the early modern centuries in England, women who gained social rank by managing households, estates, or resources were often titled Mistress. However, it was both difficult and dangerous for women to hold property or attempt to become self-made. Legal regimes made a woman’s authority structurally fragile. Under English coverture, a married woman’s legal identity and property rights were absorbed into her husband’s person, leaving her “protected” under his civil status (Staves 1990, 24-36). Even unmarried or independent women and widows faced cultural and legal constraints on their capacity to own, manage, or transmit property (Erickson 45). In such an economy, female autonomy often provoked suspicion. As Robin Briggs reveals, accusations of witchcraft could serve as devices of social control and dispossession, particularly against women, especially mistresses who stood outside male “protection” or held desirable resources (Briggs 1996, 122–24). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) exemplifies this anxiety in its portrait of Mistress Hibbins, based on Ann Hibbins, a wealthy Boston widow executed for witchcraft in 1656. As Carol Karlsen notes, such cases reveal that economic self-sufficiency and property-holding women could be marked as deviant, especially when their estates became desired by others (Karlsen 1987, 118-19). Thus, to avoid such, it was easier and safer for women to become independently wealthy by being slave-holders.

In the American South, where slavery fused domestic management with ownership of human beings, “Mistress” acquired an explicitly transactional meaning. Stephanie Jones-Rogers documents how white women not only benefited from but actively participated in the slave economy, building wealth and authority through the ownership, hiring-out, and sale of enslaved people (Jones-Rogers 2019, 13–15). Under slavery, the title Mistress no longer marked domestic authority but the commodification of life itself—a transformation from household sovereignty to economic possession.

By the Victorian period, the title Mistress in London’s sexual underworld had become synonymous with self-made women selling domination as a service. Both Steven Marcus and Ian Gibson document the rise of flagellant brothels where professional “Mistresses” offered correction and punishment for paying clients (Marcus 205–16; Gibson 96–99). The most famous disciplinarian entrepreneur was Theresa Berkeley, known as “the Queen of her profession” (Marcus 1966, 67). Operating from her Charlotte Street establishment during the 1820s and 1830s, catering to aristocrats, politicians, and judges, Berkley perfected the now-legendary Berkeley Horse, a padded frame to secure flagellants for whipping.

Around her, a small group of disciplinarian madams thrived: Mrs. Theresa Phillips—known as “Old Mother Windsor”—ran a correctional house frequented by elite clients (Marcus 1966, 205–09), while earlier courtesan-celebrity Sarah “Sally” Salisbury lived on as a retrospective symbol of high-class prostitution and “keeping” (Linnane 2009, 117-19; Bloch 1938, 320-360). After Berkley’s death, her successors traded on her legend. Mid-century flagellation texts routinely invoked “Mistress Berkley” less as a person than as a brand of female authority-for-hire. The Victorian Mistress, thus, was not merely a prostitute or brothel-keeper, but a disciplinarian selling authority and punishment as commodities—precisely the fusion of commerce and erotic control that would define the commercial Mistress identity (Linnane 210–13; Gibson 96–99; Marcus 1966, 205–16).

In the mid-twentieth century, the American BDSM scene embraced the title Mistress within a lexicon already structured by male hierarchies. The gay leather community from the 1950s—born from motorcycle culture, military discipline, and homoerotic fraternity—had codified its erotic hierarchies through the idiom of Master and slave (Rubin 1991; Mains 1984, 33). Postwar veterans returned from Europe with an appetite for uniforms, boots, and ritualised obedience. Their subculture, as Peter Hennen observes, re-signified military command and fascist aesthetics into a queer language of brotherhood and discipline (Hennen 2008, 150). What emerged was a male-coded system of titles—Sir, Master, boy, slave—that structured power through masculine archetypes. Thus, the cultural infrastructure that spread BDSM language—magazines like Drummer (founded 1975) and Skin Two (1984)—was overwhelmingly male-edited, male-authored, and visually male-oriented. Gay leather culture and two of its editors—Jack Fritscher and Mark Thompson—created the modern public language of power framed through the lens of homomasculine identity, and heterosexual publications borrowed it wholesale. When dominant women finally appeared in publications, they did so under a male editorial gaze and a vocabulary born of masculine hierarchies. “Master” became “Mistress,” not through historical lineage, but a structure that supported linguistic symmetry of the pre-existing grammar of male command.

It is therefore no surprise that when professional dominatrices emerged in the mid-twentieth century, they adopted the word Mistress already circulating in the male-coded lexicon of power. As Danielle J. Lindemann notes, the ProDomme figure we have today did not appear until the 1960s, consolidating through the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of the Internet (Lindemann 2012, 63). The Oxford English Dictionary records dominatrix in its modern sexual sense from 1967, while dungeon, meaning a BDSM studio, is first mentioned in 1974 (Lindemann 218; OED, s.v. “Dominatrix”; OED, s.v. “Dungeon”).

However, the professional female dominant did not only inherit the masculine linguistic grammar, but also absorbed its imagery. This new Mistress entered a world already encoded by the language and visual tropes of male power with militarism, hierarchical discipline, and fascist aesthetics. As Peter Hennen notes, the leather culture from which much of this iconography is derived ritualised erotic emblems of masculine control (Hennen 2008, 136-38). The modern ProDomme borrowed these visual and structural cues, modelling a theatrical counterpart from the male Master: a woman whose authority, however genuine, was still expressed through male-coded symbols of power and authority.

In this mirroring, power became a performance. The dungeon Mistress embodied a male-coded fetish aesthetic of authority and melding the image of the scarlet woman—where black became the new red—into a fusion of eroticism and command that re-staged fascist imagery as sexual spectacle (Steel 1996, 294 & 314). The new Mistress’s uniform, her boots, her ritual of control, each signified not female authorship but the adoption of masculine codes. The result was a figure who, while powerful, was still narrated through male mastery.

By the late twentieth century, the so-called “feminine” vocabulary of dominance that emerged in the BDSM scene was thus not born of lineage but out of imitation. The masculine shorthand Dom—a contraction of Dominant, which was long familiar in the leather community became the linguistic root for which the feminised Domme was later derived. In other words, rather than repairing masculine-coded female dominance, the new terminology actually reinforced it—the feminine form is simply a masculine word with a cosmetic ending. Early online forums and chatrooms, and the primitive ancestors of Fetlife, became the first meeting grounds for Dominants and submissives. Within these spaces, language became the battleground for visibility. Women who led relationships or practised dominance needed to distinguish themselves from men; the word Dom was confusing everyone. Out of this necessity emerged Domme—a pseudo-French feminisation whose double “m” and terminal “e” lent a visual distinction without grammatical legitimacy. Merriam-Webster records its first use only in 1999, confirming that the term is a child of the Internet age, not of any living linguistic lineage (Merriam-Webster Online, s.v. “Domme”). Such described a role, not a title; however, over the years, it has also become used as an identity.

The creation of Domme was politically necessary but philologically hollow. It provided women with orthographic visibility in a lexicon that presumed all authority to be male. Yet the form itself—borrowed, awkward, and unanchored—betrayed the conditions of its birth. Domme designates what a woman does, not what she is. It marks function rather than identity, behaviour rather than being. It is a BDSM scene label, not a title (Crystal 2001, 17). Thus, Mistress transformed into a commodity; Dominatrix was the invention of a male market; Domme, the invention of a male vocabulary. Domina, by contrast, was never born of this system. She belongs to an older and unbroken genealogy of domestic, literary, and erotic sovereignty.

From the precarious property-holding widow through to the Victorian disciplinarian madam and the flagellant entrepreneurs, to the twentieth-century ProDomme working within a male-authored culture, Mistress consistently binds female erotic authority to transaction, performance, and commerce. This does not delegitimise the role or the labour—commerce itself is not dishonourable—but it situates the title firmly within a lineage distinct from Domina. If Mistress belongs to the world of trade, then Domina belongs to the world of life.

Part Two —The Domina Lineage â€” is on it’s way.

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