Lady Macbeth

From the character in William Shakepeare's Macbeth.

Lady Macbeth (plural Lady Macbeths)

1. A determined but ruthless or unscrupulous woman.
   • 1833, [Anna Brownell] Jameson, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical. , 2nd edition, volume II, London: Saunders and Otley, , page 309:

     True it is, that the ambitious women of these civilized times do not murder sleeping kings: but are there, therefore, no Lady Macbeths in the world? no women who, under the influence of a diseased or excited appetite for power or distinction, would sacrifice the happiness of a daughter, the fortunes of a husband, the principles of a son, and peril their own souls?

   • 1961, John Alden Thayer, Italy: The Post-Risorgimento and the "Great War", Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin–Madison, page 246:

     Fear of blood has become the incubus of modern men who are pursued like so many women, little nineteenth century Lady Macbeths, by the spectre of death ... the principle of right to life is utterly without justification.

   • 1987, New Scientist, volume 114, page 82, column 3:

     With the cuts in government expenditure, heads of research councils rage round their castles like demented Lady Macbeths looking for blood with which to stain their hands as evidence of their administrative worthiness, apparently oblivious of the fact that what they cut today can never be recreated as the costs of new building and recruitment escalate with the size of their administrations.

   • 2010, Anne P. Rice, “White Islands of Safety and Engulfing Blackness: Remapping Segregation in Angelina Weld Grimké’s “Blackness” and “Goldie””, in Brian Norman, Piper Kendrix Williams, editors, Representing Segregation: Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, and Other Forms of Racial Division, Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, →ISBN, page 95:

     The silent men, women, and children streaming down the center of Manhattan instead carried signs reading: “Mother, Do Lynchers Go to Heaven?”; “Pray for the Lady Macbeths of East St. Louis”; “Mr. President, Why Not Make America Safe for Democracy?”; and “Give Us a Chance to Live.”

   • 2015, Mark Hollingsworth, Von Kemedi, Against the Odds: President Goodluck Jonathan, the Rise of Nigeria as Africa’s Economic Superpower and the Threat of Boko Haram, Susquehanna Press, →ISBN, page 32:

     The president’s wife, Turai [Yar’Adua], acquired the image of a Lady Macbeth hungry for power and determined to loot the country’s coffers while she still had the chance.