Author: Mags

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A brief history of Ms.

The front cover of Ms Magazine from 1972. It shows a giatn Wonder Woman walking down an American street. The text reads 'A brief history of Ms - how women's titles have changed over the centuries.

It’s over 50 years since the first standalone newsstand edition of Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Magazine was published (1 July 1972). And yet women still have conversations about boring life admin in which they must answer the question “Miss or Mrs?” with “It’s Ms, actually.” So here’s a brief history of the title, for when someone assumes you’re using it to indicate you’re divorced (yes, that really still happens).

What is Ms. short for?

Miss, Mrs. and Ms. are all abbreviations of the same common root title: mistress. Shakespeare uses ‘mistress’ to indicate the businesswoman Nell Quickly who runs the Boar’s Head Tavern in the Henry plays. Quickly also appears with Mistresses Ford and Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, with all three women running their own financial affairs.

In 1767, one Sarah Spooner died in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The stone mason, carving the headstone, gave her the title Ms. It’s debatable if it was an intentional Ms, or more of a space-saving move.

A worn gravestone reading 'Here lies Interr the Body of Ms SARAH SPOONER who deceased January 25th AD 1767.'

Mistress and Master both meant to have power. Either over things, skills and knowledge or people. We use titles to give a clue to participants in social interaction on how to treat the other person.

Samuel Johnson, in compiling his dictionary, gave a long definition of mistress, the first of which was a businesswoman and the last of which was a “whore or concubine”. Mistress was a respectable title, shortened to Mrs, Ms and Miss (and other variations).

Until the eighteenth century Miss was only applied to girls, never to adult women. Upon adulthood, a Miss became a Mrs. A similar age distinction applied to boys (Master) and men (Mister).

Mistress falls out of favour

By the 1740s, literature is strewn with unmarried adult women who are no longer being titled as Mistress. Those in the gentry are called Miss: those in the upper servant class are called Mrs. (and adult women in the lower servant classes get no title at all).

“The mid-century transition in titles can be seen in a single person: Johnson’s contemporary, companion and housekeeper, the writer Anna Williams (1706-83), whom he called Mrs Williams, whereas his younger friends, like Frances Reynolds and James Boswell, referred to her as Miss Williams.”

There’s also the ‘Mrs Man’ period that starts around 1800, in which women’s names – their identities – were entirely subsumed by their husband’s name. Which incidentally makes researching women’s impact on history a lot more work as you have to work out if a brilliant Miss Smart Ideas got married and is now the equally brilliant but totally differently named Mrs Bloke’s Name. The Mrs Man formation may have only formed around 1800 but it was already being challenged by the 1840s at the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls.

Twentieth century revival

In November 1901, a man wrote to a Massachusetts newspaper in America suggested there was “a void in the English language” which could cause embarrassment. How could you address a woman politely if you did not know their marital status?

“What is needed is a more comprehensive term which does homage to the sex without expressing any views to their domestic situation…The abbreviation “Ms” is simple, it is easy to write and the person concerned can translate it properly according to circumstances.”

And there it sat, neglected, until the 1960s when Shelia Michaels saw ‘Ms’ on an envelope of her flatmate and thought it would be a great way to divorce a woman’s title from their marital status. Michaels mentioned the idea in an idle moment in a radio interview: one of Gloria Steinem’s friends heard it and passed it to her. Steinem was a writer and a leading feminist about to launch her own magazine for women.

The New York magazine, when launching Steinem’s Ms. Magazine as an insert in January, was slightly vague on why that was its title, but did say the magazine wanted to see women “not as role players, but as full human beings.”. Ms. Magazine hit the newsstands properly in July 1972.

The cover of Ms Marvel Number 1. Carol Danvers burst through a wall whilst wearing a midriff baring outfit that gives away the level of male gaze happening here. A box out says "This female fights back".

Within a year a bill was proposed in the US Congress in 1973 by Bella Abzug and others to abolish Miss and Mrs in favour of Ms.

Then in 1977, Marvel comics launched the Ms Marvel comic, reinventing a supporting character from the Captain Marvel title as a superhero in her own right. They used Ms to make the point that she was a career woman (a journalist on the fictional Women Magazine) and their male-gaze attempt at a feminist superhero (there’s more about her here). In 1982, there was the Ms Pac-Man game.

And then…Ms kind of stayed. It slowly gained ground in America and the UK and is now a mainstay on official forms. But it is still fraught with symbolism – just to ask for it is to make a statement about yourself. And it still gets criticised.

TV executive Eve Kay wrote in 2007 that women under 30 in her office has never heard of Ms., and summarised some of the contemporary, reactionary criticism of it. I once had to explain to a junior colleague that my use of Ms did not mean I was divorced, but meant my martial status is Nobody Else’s Business. And Helen Zaltzman of the Allusionist podcast recently did a whole episode on titles that starts with her bank struggling to find Ms in their options for her bank card.

Since the arrival of Ms in the early 1970s, there has also been a rising interest in finding a non-gendered title for people to use. Mx is the most well-known of these and you can read an attempt to pin down its first use on the practical androgyny blog. Mx started in 1977 and is now accepted on UK government forms, by banks and in many other places but is still not recognised everywhere. K Chui has written about the need for the Royal College of Surgeons to accept Mx to allow all surgeons to have their title of choice.

The future of Ms.

Ms has taken a long time to become even remotely normalised. It has, over the last 50 years, become formalised as a title. It is on most forms as an option. Yet we are still verbally asked “Miss or Mrs?” and we have to grit our teeth and empathically say “Mzzzz.”

Back in 1973, academic Robin Lakoff wrote:

“The change to Ms will not be generally adopted until women’s status in society changes to assure her an identity based on her own accomplishments.”

Our gender should not relevant when filling in a bank application or talking to our broadband provider. At the very least, the question should change to “what title do you use?” so everyone can pick the one that works best for them. Ms. may become a stepping stone towards an everyday title for everyone that does not convey gender nor marital status.

After all, neither our gender nor our marital status has any bearing on sorting out our broadband supply.

Follow us on Mastodon, BlueSky, Facebook or Instagram to get daily posts about the women who made – and are making – history every day.

Sources

We have drawn heavily on the excellent research by Amy Louise Erickson in her paper Mistresses and marriage: or, a short history of the Mrs.

We also drew on Robin Lakoff’s 1973 article Language and Woman’s Place https://www.jstor.org/stable/4166707  but need to provide a content warning as the paper contains derogatory words for black people as an attempt to illustrate equivalent power imbalances.

We are indebted to Helen Zaltzman’s Allusionist episode ‘No Title’ for many more links, especially around the rise of Mx. If you’re interested in language and power, Helen is podcaster for you.

Other sources include:

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Charlotte E Ray and 143 years of progress

A modern illustration of how Charlotte E Ray might have looked when she graduated. She is a Black woman with a mortar board on a piled up hairdo. Text reads Charlotte E Ray becomes a lawyer 23 April 1872.

The first African-American woman to be Attorney General of the USA, Loretta Lynch, was appointed on 23 April 2015 in Washington DC. The very same day, 143 years earlier in 1872, Charlotte E Ray became the first African-American woman admitted to practice law in the USA.

Sometimes history throws up these little co-incidences. This one gives us the opportunity to look at two very different law careers available to a Black woman in the USA.

Charlotte E Ray – the first Black woman lawyer in the USA

Charlotte E Ray was born in 1850 in New York City. Her father was a clergyman, the editor of an abolitionist newspaper and someone involved in helping people who had escaped slavery through the Underground Railway. One of seven children, Charlotte was one of three girls who survived to adulthood. All three sisters attended college and became teachers.

Howard University is one of the historically Black colleges and universities that provided higher education at a time when Black students were barred from white universities. It had a Normal and Preparatory Department which helped potential undergraduates prepare for university by giving them the minimum level of achievement in reading and writing. Ray became a teacher in the department.

And it was whilst teaching there that Charlotte applied for, and was accepted into, Howard School of Law. It’s popularly suggested that she applied as C E Ray, using only her initials to obscure her sex. However, even the most contemporary records found to date are unclear on if this was a deliberate move or not.

Mary Ann Shadd Carey claimed to have studied law at Howard before Ray but to have been denied a graduation. Some historians suggest Ray used her initials to bypass similar discrimination. Ray studied law in the evenings, whilst still teaching by day, for three years. It seems unlikely she could have done so without someone noticing that the C E Ray law student was also Miss Charlotte E Ray from the prep department.

Whatever the reason for the use of initials, Ray was the first Black woman to graduate from Howard University’s School of Law in February 1872. She immediately applied to the bar in the District of Columbia.

Ray raises the bar

The bar is the line that separates spectators at a law court from those involved in the case. It comes from medieval Europe where it was literally a wooden bar across the space. Being “called to the bar” means being allowed to practise law in court.

In England and Wales, lawyers who wish to become barristers – that is to practice law in the courtroom – must belong to and study at one of the four Inns of Court. Women were only admitted to the Inns after the Sex Disqualification Removal Act in 1919. So no women were called to the bar in England and Wales until 1922.

In the USA, the bars are administered at a state level, with a bar association for each one. In the state of DC, back in 1872, the word ‘male’ had just been removed from the legal code so that women could be admitted.

Ray’s admission to the bar, whilst receiving press coverage, went through without debate. She opened her practice, advertised her services in Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, and…struggled. She could not drum up enough business to keep going. A near-contemporary lawyer, Kate Kane Rossi, put this down to prejudice. By 1879, she had returned to New York City and to teaching. She died in 1911.

Loretta Lynch – Attorney General of the USA

Loretta Lynch was born just over a century after Ray, in 1959, in North Carolina. Like Ray, her father was in the clergy. She graduated from Harvard, having studied English and American Literature, in 1981 before taking her law doctorate at Harvard Law School in 1984. Harvard Law School started admitting Black students in the 1870s but did not admit women until the 1950s.

After some time in private practice, Lynch joined the US Attorney’s office in 1990 and rose to became US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. She was appointed as the Attorney General of the United States in 2015.

The Attorney General heads up the US Department of Justice. They’re also the chief law enforcement officer of the federal government and the principal advisor to the President. Whereas Ray’s admittance to the bar in 1872 passed with no record of contention, Lynch’s confirmation process took 166 days. She was quizzed on her involvement in high profile cases and on immigration policy. Her appointment ended when Donald Trump became US President on 20 January 2017.

What do these parallel stories, separated by over 140 years, tell us?

This year, 2024, Loretta Lynch delivered the Charlotte E Ray keynote speech on corporate law at Howard University and reflected on the parallels.

“[Ray] is the perfect inspiration, not just for this conference but for these times. And were she to be here today, I know she would rejoice at the many advancements in equality and opportunity that we have today, but there is so much within our world that she would still have recognized.”

Watch the whole keynote speech online.

Loretta Lynch providing the Charlotte E Ray keynote speech at Howard Law School on 7 February 2024

Ray’s admission to the DC bar was used by other women to make their case for admission across the United States. So whilst Ray’s career as a lawyer may have stalled in the economic downturn of the 1870s, her legacy is everywhere.

A photo of Charlotte E Ray

A note on the art used here. No photo of Charlotte E Ray exists. There’s a commonly used photo, which is actually of opera singer Marian Anderson. My doubts over the commonly used photo were that it showed a young woman with a shingle haircut. That’s a cut, similar to a bob, which only became common in the 1920s. Ten years after Ray’s death. Had she been alive, she’d have been in her 70s. It would be like using a photo of Clara Bow whilst saying it is Millicent Fawcett.

There’s a great piece debunking the misattributed photos (there are several others that people use) on fake history hunter’s blog. They highlight that using other Black women’s’ photos is not recognising them for their own achievements. We’ve followed their suggestion to use Baba Adelana’s recent artwork, along with the illustration that is of unknown origin.

Follow us on Mastodon, BlueSky, Facebook or Instagram to get daily posts about the women who made – and are making – history every day.

Sources

Charlotte E Ray: A Black Woman Lawyer by Tonya Michelle Osborne (2001). https://wlh-static.law.stanford.edu/papers/RayC-Osborne01.pdf

https://ndaajustice.medium.com/a-trailblazer-in-justice-the-pioneering-journey-of-charlotte-e-ray-381ba97f931c

https://www.justice.gov/ag/bio/attorney-general-loretta-e-lynch

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b05spk32

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Gaura Devi and other women fighting deforestation

Photo of four women in saris encircling a large tree trunk. Text reads "Gaura Devi leads the women of Rini in a stand against loggers"

In March 1974, a group of women in a Himalayan village stood in front of armed men who come to chop down the forest. Led by Gaura Devi, the women encircled the trees.

This month, we look at some of the women fighting deforestation.

The Chipko Movement and Gaura Devi

Gaura Devi (1925-1991) was born into a Marchaya family in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand in northern India. When she married, she moved to her in-laws’ village of Rini (also Anglicized as Reni or Raini). She was widowed by 22, when she had a small child.

By the early 1970s, when deforestation caused the Alaknanda river floods in the Himalayas in Uttarakhand, Devi was active in the village council and headed the village’s women’s welfare group. The 1970 flood increased attention on the increasing scale of deforestation in the area. The loss of trees causes soil erosion which in turn causes floods. The loss of forests also had a disproportionate impact on village women, as they would have to travel further to find firewood making life in the villages harder to sustain. A protest movement developed, introducing a form of direct action, Chipko, where protestors put themselves between the loggers and the trees to be felled. Chipko can be translated as “embrace”.

In January 1974, the government announced an auction for 2,500 trees above Rini. Activists and villagers spread word of the impact of the contract on lives in the area. On 24 March, the activists and the men of the village travelled away to a meeting with the government about compensation.

Then a young girl in the village saw the loggers starting to arrive. She ran to tell Gaura Devi.

Gaura Devi. She is a middle-aged South Asian woman wearing a headscarf.
Guara Devi in the 1970s

Gaura Devi gathered the women of the village, and they agreed they would block the loggers’ way. She led the women to the trees. They encircled them and Gaura Devi spoke to the loggers, saying: “Brothers! This forest is a source of our livelihood. If you destroy it the mountains will come tumbling down onto our villages.”

The women stayed guarding the trees all night, despite threats of violence. Gaura Devi, when threatened, said: “Shoot us. Only then will you be able to cut down the forest.”

Word spread, and more protestors arrived. After a four-day standoff, the loggers retreated. The Uttarakhand state set up a committee to investigate, which found in favour of the villagers. By 1980, the national Indian government issued a ban on felling trees in the region for fifteen years.

Gaura Devi’s leadership in 1974 gave the movement momentum and an international profile.

A group of 13 South Asian women in traditional clothing and headdresses.
Some of the village women who had protected the trees at a reunion

Three more women working to stop deforestation

Wangarĩ Muta Maathai in 2001. She is a black woman with thin braids held back by a large white headdress
Wangarĩ Muta Maathai in 2001

The concern about deforestation in the 1970s was not limited to India.

In Africa in the 1970s, Wangarĩ Muta Maathai was a Kenyan professor of veterinary anatomy in Nairobi who was involved in United Nations Environment Programme and the National Council of Women of Kenya. She became convinced environmental degradation was a common root cause for many of Kenya’s problems. After an initial attempt to run a non-government organisation where unemployed people worked on restoration, she founded the Green Belt Movement which spread across Africa. Women are paid for planting trees, which reverses the deforestation and reduces soil erosion. Wangarĩ Muta Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in 2004.

Marina Silva in the 1990s, holding her Goldman Prize. She is a black woman with dark hair.

In the early 1970s in rural Brazil, Marina Silva was an illiterate rubber tapper, born and raised on a plantation. Aged 16, she moved to the state capital of Rio Branco, learnt to read and gained a degree. By the early 1980s she had teamed up with environmentalist Chico Mendes to form an independent trade union for rubber tappers. They also developed the idea of empates – peaceful demonstrations against deforestation and the expulsion of forest communities from their traditional lands. Silva continued to push for sustainable reserves in the rainforest managed by traditional communities after Mendes was assassinated. She won the Goldman Environmental prize in 1996 and is currently Brazil’s Minister of the Environment and Climate Change.

Sophia Rabliauskas in 2007. She is a First Nation woman with dark hair, standing with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background.
Sophia Rabliauskas in 2007

Coming right up to date, Indigenous activist Sophia Rabliauskas is a member of the Poplar River First Nation in Manitoba. She has helped to secure interim protective status for forests in Manitoba. Part of the Boreal Leadership Council, she is now pushing to have the Asatiwisipe Aki Lands, also known as Canada’s green belt, recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage site. That would protect over 43,000 square kilometres of pristine boreal forest. Canada’s boreal region contains one-quarter of the world’s remaining original forests.

Research shows that the impacts of climate change fall disproportionately on women (see this UN Women explainer) . It is no surprise, then, that women have been taking action against deforestation.

Sources and read more

We’ve previously written about Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring that led to the banning of DDT.

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Hattie McDaniel and her Oscar

A black and white photo of Hattie McDaniel. She is a Black woman with hair tied back in a bun. Text reads 'Hattie McDaniel wins an Oscar - 29 February 1940"

On the leap day in 1940, Hattie McDaniel made history as the first person of colour to both attend the Oscars ceremony and to win one. Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar’s own history reflects her complicated place in history: side-lined by the White Hollywood establishment and challenged by radical Black activism.

One night in the Cocoanut Grove

The 1939 Academy of Motion Picture and Arts Awards, the Oscars, was held in the Cocoanut Grove nightclub of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 29 February 1940.

The Cocoanut Grove was one of the places to be in Hollywood at the time: Marion Davies allegedly rode a white horse through the hotel lobby to get to a costume party there. It was spoofed in a Merrie Melodies cartoon, The CooCoo Nut Grove (1936, dir. Freleng).  If you think the modern maximalist interior design style is a bit bling then the Grove makes it look austere. They had salvaged papier-mâché palm trees from the 1921 Valentino film The Sheik. They had life-sized mechanical monkeys with glowing eyes lurking in the trees. They had a running waterfall, lit by an artificial moon.

And they had racial segregation. No Black people were allowed to patronise the Grove or the wider hotel.

The audience applauded McDaniel as she walked into the Grove for the Oscars. Then she was escorted to a small table at the back, set apart from the rest of the attendees. This was the hotel’s concession. Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick  had wrangled this seating arrangement from the hotel when McDaniel was nominated – at his suggestion – for Best Supporting Actress. She and her plus one, Ferdinand Yober, could attend but could not sit with the rest of the party.

This is the context for the rather patronising presentation by Fay Bainter, and McDaniel’s acceptance speech.

After applauding her win, the rest of the Gone With the Wind group went to an after-party. In another Whites-only club.

The whole evening was an illustration of the racism McDaniel faced every day in her chosen career. But her approach to surviving in a racist culture drew criticism from Black audiences and activists.

The double-bind of McDaniel’s career

“Despite her success, to many in white America, their beloved “Hattie,” was beloved because she did not rock the Hollywood racial boat.”

W Burlette Carter, Finding the Oscar

McDaniel is now best remembered for her roles as Mammy in Gone With the Wind (1939, dir. Fleming), and Aunt Tempy in Song of the South (1946, dir. Foster and Jackson). Both films are racist, perpetuating white supremacist ideas of Black people. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) rightly criticised them. They also criticised McDaniel personally for taking the roles in them.

McDaniel felt this was unfair. She had started out on the stage with her brothers, before launching her own all-woman minstrel show in 1914. In that, she had written her own songs, subverting the White minstrel show stereotype of the Mammy. When she got to Hollywood she already had a name as a blues singer, and was one of the first Black woman to appear on the radio, but she took on bit parts as maids in films because it paid the bills. Her quote about preferring to play a maid than be one makes more sense when you see she was born in poverty and was taking the parts during the Great Depression.

By the 1930s, 20 years into her career, she had turned the subservient Mammy from the White minstrel shows of her childhood into a long-suffering woman rolling her eyes at the antics of a white heroine.

Gone With the Wind (1939) is a huge problem though. The book is deeply racist and contains white supremacist ideas and derogatory language. It reinforces the Lost Cause of the Confederacy mythology that still haunts American culture and politics. There’s no “things were different back in the day” excuse for it because it was widely criticised at the time. Walter White and NAACP, learning of Selznick’s adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling novel, asked the producer to hire a Black adviser on it. Selznick instead picked a White woman to advise the Black actors on how to play the enslaved characters. Hattie said, but only in the Black press, that she hoped to imbue Mammy with spirit of Harriet Tubman, and the mothers of Booker T Washington and George Washington Carver.

After Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar win, she was seen as part of Hollywood’s use of negative racist stereotypes about Black people. Not least because she vigorously defended her choice to take both the roles and the money. Her film career stalled and she was increasingly out of step with the Civil Rights movement.

When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1952 McDaniel wrote a will asking to be buried in the Hollywood Cemetery. After her death in 1954, the cemetery refused to accept her, as they did not allow Black people to be buried there.

The Legacy of Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar

In her will, McDaniel also asked for her Oscar to be donated to Howard University after her death. The state appraiser, valuing her estate in 1954, wrote the Oscar had “no value”. McDaniel had died in debt, so the specific requests in her will were sold instead of passed on. W Burlette Carter’s investigation, Finding the Oscar, suggests the Oscar was sold as part of a job lot. It eventually arrived at Howard, as McDaniel originally wished, in 1961.

And then, ten years later, it had vanished.

Rumours and speculation abounded. It had been stolen, it had been lost, it had been thrown in the river by a student angry about her collusion with racist Hollywood. Carter’s investigation into what really happened to it is meticulous and worth a read. When the Academy opened their own museum in Los Angeles in September 2021, they put in an empty display case for McDaniel’s Oscar to prompt conversations about erasure from history.

On 1 October 2023, the Academy finally presented a reproduction of McDaniel’s Oscar to the Chadwick A Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard. You can watch Howard’s celebration, called Hattie ‘s Come Home, on their website: https://finearts.howard.edu/

Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar is an object that provides a way of exploring the history of Black women’s participation in, and exclusion from, Hollywood.

Discovering McDaniel

We are not experts on the history and complexities of race in Hollywood because we’re White and British. This article has been drawn from a range of sources, listed in Sources. In particular, we’d encourage you to explore the following to discover more about Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar and legacy:

We’ve also welcomed recommendations and corrections from American cultural historian Dr. Tiffany Knoell, Bowling Green State University. Her advice has been invaluable: any errors in this post are solely our own.

Read more about women who achieved things between 1900 and 1950.

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Sources