Distaff

1. n. Used as a symbol of the holder of a distaff; hence, a woman; women, collectively.
2. n. The staff for holding a bunch of flax, tow, or wool, from which the thread is drawn in spinning by hand.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.