There’s one question that makes me growl like a premenstrual hyena: “Is it Miss or Mrs?” The implication is clear — your marital status must be divulged before we can proceed with the business of insuring your Ford Fiesta. As a proud Ms, I’m baffled as to why any self-respecting woman would comply with this archaic and sexist request.
Ms — that delightfully neutral, rebellion-tinged, no-nonsense honorific — has been more constant to me than any relationship. It accompanied me through adolescent singledom and strings of pointless relationships and it now trudges beside me in my civil-partnered middle age. It is just a simple recognition of female personhood, saying nothing about whether I’ve landed a husband or divorced one.
Forty years on from when The New York Times officially adopted “Ms,” even the crustiest traditionalists among The Critic’s readership must concede that it’s hardly a radical neologism. Some linguists trace its roots as far back as the 1760s. It certainly predates email and gluten intolerance, yet those of us who use it still too often have to explain “Ms” like it’s a newfangled tech trend.
The term was popularised in the 1960s by American feminist Sheila Michaels; she spent eight years trying to get the women’s liberation movement to pick up the title. “‘Ms’ is how you address a woman as a whole person,” Michaels explained to The Guardian before her death. “In a culture where women were identified on the basis of their marital status … [it was a] way to define ourselves as individuals, not subordinates or partners.”
It was a simple idea: women are people. Not half a couple, not somebody’s soon-to-be or has-been, but fully formed beings in our own right.
Yet British officialdom still struggles with using “Ms” as a default for women. The Metropolitan Police recently addressed me in an email as Miss—despite me being 42, and having given up on the title at around the same age as my Beano subscription ended. Last week, when I called to renew my car insurance, I was helpfully informed that I couldn’t be a Ms unless I was divorced. And when I posted on social media to complain about this, I was inundated with responses from women who had also faced this minor annoyance.
Of course, whenever a feminist raises a small complaint like this, someone will helpfully remind us of the much more serious threats to women’s human rights across the world. Yes. I am aware. After all, it is only thanks to the beneficence of men who allow us to read, write, and own property that we uppity bitches in the West have the liberty to carp on about being Miss-titled.
It’s … an annoying and avoidable signal of casual disrespect
It’s undeniable that whinging about honorifics is a petty complaint of the privileged — but so what? Does the Russo-Ukrainian War mean we can’t complain about the price of groceries, or the Gaza crisis mean we can’t complain about the television? It’s still an annoying and avoidable signal of casual disrespect. A linguistic sleight which men simply glide past. And unlike the male fetishists who demand to be called women, expecting not to be labelled by one’s relationship is neither unreasonable nor does it infringe upon anyone else’s rights.
Curiously, this fading of “Ms” is happening at the very moment that institutions are falling over themselves to promote neopronouns and outlaw “misgendering”. You can identify as a non-binary pansexual with a constellation of pronouns, but ask to be called Ms, and suddenly you’re the prickly customer or the difficult employee.
Titles like Miss and Mrs operate much like that odious little label “cis”. Beloved by trans activists, the term is defined by Stonewall as “someone whose gender is the same as the sex they were assigned at birth.” This slyly positions “ciswomen” as a subcategory, defining us by our relation to men.
Similarly, it is Miss for the unclaimed, Mrs for the claimed, and Ms? Well, apparently that’s for obstreperous bags like me.
So no, I’m not Miss. I’m not Mrs. I’m not anyone’s anything. I’m Ms. And that’s Ms Bloody Enough.
