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.
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.
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.
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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:
- https://nymag.com/news/features/46166
- https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/mistress-miss-mrs-or-ms-untangling-the-shifting-history-of-titles
- https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/hunting-the-elusive-first-ms
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jun/29/gender.uk
- https://www.brides.com/difference-between-miss-ms-mrs-4802684
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms._Pac-Man#Development
- https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/magazine/25FOB-onlanguage-t.html
