To think its time to get rid of personal titles ie. Miss, Mrs, Ms?

[jumpingbean1810]

I was ordering something in a shop the other day and the assistant, in her 20s, was putting my details into their system. She said, I hate asking this, I find it so embarrassing but are you Miss, Ms or Mrs? I replied I'm Miss. I was there with my daughter so in that one exchange I'd divulged I was a single, unmarried parent. It's not information the shop needs for me to order a lamp. And if I was a man, they'd be Mr and none the wiser as to marital status. I know I could say Ms but does any married woman really use Ms? So Ms just ends up sounding like a Miss with issues. It got me thinking why do we need personal titles, how often are they really used anyway? Can they not just be scrapped from form filling? With the increasing desire by the younger generation to not even be defined by gender, identifying women by their marital status feels so outdated. It's international women's day tomorrow and in the spirit of embracing equity, isn't it time we abolished women being defined by marital status?

Yep 1810 to 1890
Jane Austen’s books came out in that window.

Right, well I'm not sure which years between 1890 and 2022 you think most people haven't used the words Miss and Mrs in this way.

All of those years with gradual increase in frequency, especially after Ms was invented.

This might help- many more articles on the actual history to corroborate what I’m saying:

newrepublic.com/article/119432/history-female-titles-mistress-miss-mrs-or-ms

That's absolute nonsense. Throughout my life, everyone aroubd me has used Miss to refer to an unmarried woman and Mrs to refer to a married woman. I've never met an unmarried woman who called herself Mrs.

You might not like the fact that these titles are used to signify marital status, but that is the reality. And the use of Ms still isn't widespread, as much as I would like it to be, as this thread shows.

And your lived experience is the same as all women then? You know what 0.0000001% of the population…not quite a sample size that engenders confidence.

I was a Mrs before I married. And many many divorced and widowed women are Mrs…many with their own surname.

I've never heard of anyone using Mrs before marriage either. Keeping it after being widowed or divorced yes but not using it before marriage

When I said unmarried, I should have said never married. Obviously it is normal for widowed and to a lesser extent divorced women to keep the title "Mrs" after they have been married.

But since I grew up in human society and not a bat cave, yeah, I am in fact familiar with how these titles are used by the vast majority of people in everyday life. They use the terms "Miss" and "Mrs" to distinguish between women who have never been married, and women who have.

You are the one extrapolating your perfectly valid but nonetheless unusual choice to use "Mrs" without ever having been married to the rest of society, by pretending that this is how people generally use the title. It isn't.

But anyway, if everyone adopted "Ms" we wouldn't have to have these tiresome discussions.

Maybe we should go old school and adopt 'Mistress' as the universal female title and that way we all get to keep what we have now.

I never said my choices were a majority choice or generally used, I have only countered your assertion that ALL women, EVERYONE you said uses Mrs/Miss the way you have experienced. Not everyone does. And it’s people like you who continue to ASSUME they are ALWAYS used this way that are doing damage. Not those of us using them while ignoring YOUR RULES.

I’m with everyone getting to choose what they prefer.

Just a no title option and I’m good. It doesn’t need to be a blanket thing.

Not sure how anything is my fault.

I use the titles that people adopt for themselves.

Nearly all the women I know who are or have ever been married refer to themselves as Mrs. Most of the women I know who have never been married refer to themselves as Miss.

Every time I come across a Ms I do a little cheer inside for feminism.

There’s more than one way to be a feminist. And not using Ms doesn’t make it my fault for sexism/misogyny that you and others perpetuate by insisting that Mrs/Miss usage cannot change or shift from what you were raised to think it means despite the fact its meaning and usage has changed many times before in history.

I married, kept my own surname ( my husband didn’t want to change his either ) and therefore became a Ms.
My husband married and didn’t have to change title. Legally, however, I could no longer be a Miss so I had to change mine.
So why can’t we all be treated equally from birth and be Mr and Ms.

Its no one’s business if I’m married or not and as other PPs have said Ms makes us sound like we re just being difficult.
Historically the title Ms has been around since the 1700s when some wealthy women could use the term if ‘they were of independent means’. ie not relying on men for money.

Well that’s all of us now, or the majority at least.

So I agree
Either we all have no title
Or
We all get to keep our title from birth irrespective of marriage status.

There is nothing legal about Miss or Mrs. I flit between Miss and Ms, and have done for the entirety of my 19 year marriage.

it has zero legal status.

As an aside
If you keep your own surname you cant be a Mrs as that would mean you married someone with the same surname as your own….
You have to be a Ms.
Mrs is used if you take your husbands surname.
Interestingly I know of one couple who both hated the man’s surname so took the wife’s instead. He remained a Mr.!

Personally I think he should have been made to change to it Mrs,🤣🤣 we ve got a long way to go for basic equal rights

There are NO laws about who can or can't call themselves Miss, Ms or Mrs. It's entirely personal choice. A single person has every right to call themselves Mrs just as a married person can call themselves Miss or Ms. In fact, there's no law stopping a bloke from calling himself Mrs, whether married or not! I don't know where you got the idea that there are rules, laws or restrictions!

I was wondering about that. I’m married but interchange between Ms and Mrs because I don’t really want any title so mix it up

The usage of Miss/Mrs hasn't shifted though. That's the point. It is still used, by pretty much everyone, to signify a woman's marital status, which is patriarchal and anti-feminist.

Women choosing to use Ms is the shift. It's a move toward women being treated as men's equals in the sense of having a neutral title which doesn't define us according to our marital status.

That's why it's a feminist shift.

Using Mrs when you're not married isn't shifting anything. It will just make people assume you are married/widowed/divorced and think (or say) "that's weird" if they find out you've never been married and are just calling yourself Mrs because you want to.

Where have you got this utter bollocks from?

No, Quite right.
Its the passport office that make a fuss, or did when I married.
Although these days you can just be ‘person’ on a passport application or chose whatever title you like, even Dr. ( they don’t check 🤯).

Of course you can be a Mrs if you keep your own surname. You can do whatever you like!

When I married I had to send our marriage cert to passport office, banks etc in order to change from Miss to Ms.(Driving licence didn’t request any proof tho).
Although now I understand you can simply request to be almost any title you like ie ‘ person’ or Dr. Only certain titles like King are checked and protected.

I was living in Sri Lanka then although still a British citizen, I don’t know if that had any bearing on the requests.

Mrs is used if you take your husbands surname.

You can use Ms even if you take your husband's surname. I did.

The whole point of Ms is that it does not denote marital status.

There seems to be something about this issue that provokes people into making laws up.

I like keeping my title. Why not campaign for an extra blank space in the forms for people who'd rather not say instead of taking away the option from other people?