Being called Mrs *-*

[LorlieS]

I'm married and a Ms My Last Name - His Last Name (hubby also double-barrelled when we married).
So why do so many people insist on addressing me as a Mrs?! AIBU to be annoyed by this?

@Justkeepingplatesspinning where did you get the Mr's thing from? It's demonstrably nonsense. Mrs is the abbreviation on Missus, which refers to a married woman.

@CurlewKate my thoughts too. People just make stuff up on here, I swear.

Mind you- I have it on good authority that it used to be standard practice for HCPs to refer to babies as "he" if they didn't know because people would be offended if a boy was mistaken for a girl but not the other way round. Good that's not a "thing" any more, eh?

@DeadbeatYoda It matters. It's a "big deal" to many of us because of its entrenched misogyny. HTH?

@LorlieS not every situation is a personal attack. It's a simple misunderstanding. Militance has its very important place in feminism but it's just not always the best way to get our point across. Campaigning to power is a better use of energy than battering anyone that makes a simple mistake with your chosen title, surely?

@DeadbeatYoda you're the third person (possibly fourth) to explain this. I genuinely thought it was to do with possessive pronouns and linked to when wives were husbands property.

The title "Mrs" to all intents and purposes you are a married woman, no? It reveals your marital status. Not for me, thanks.

@LorlieS "The title "Mrs" to all intents and purposes you are a married woman, no? It reveals your marital status. Not for me, thanks"

Me neither. And I hate the idea gay marriage somehow confers status on a woman.

*gay marriage? What an odd typo! Just "marriage"

I’m not sure it’s an idea so much as a fact.

Not that it should confer any status, but nevertheless it does- many many people still equate it with ‘success’ and ’respectability’.

@CurlewKate Totally agree. In fact, I am "proud" not to go by Mrs; I am an independent woman in my own right and don't need a partner (male or female) to be either "successful" nor "respectable". I am capable of being both of those alone - I was before I met my husband.

No one is saying you aren’t.

The point was that a large proportion of the population consider unmarried women as lesser in terms of success (hasn’t caught a man), and respectability (is probably after my husband/sleeps around etc etc).

Just think of the posts on here saying ‘my single friend has asked my DH to fix her tap/for a lift’ and the flood of responses about ‘over stepping’ and how she is clearly trying to shag him, she is no friend of yours etc etc.

Its clearly bollocks, but nevertheless they are the judgements a lot of people make, which contributes to the choice of some women to go by ‘mrs’.

@Notlikeamother But like you say, these judgements are absolutely ridiculous and women shouldn't be calling themselves Mrs in an attempt to avoid them.

I don’t tend to tell other women what they ‘should’ do, especially when they are trying to avoid negative repercussions for themselves.

Women are socialised to care what others think of them, it’s not surprising that some behave in ways that help them fit in with the majority.

@Notlikeamother Again, by calling themselves Mrs without questioning it they are continuing to condone such misogynistic social conditioning.

That may be (if by condone you mean ‘overlook’ rather than ‘accept’) but it’s entirely understandable behaviour.

Women are not obliged to use their every action to ‘smash the patriarchy’, it’s ok for them to just live their lives to their own liking sometimes.

The difficulty . I work with older generation and like teachers we refer Mr , Mrs ,Ms .

Lots of older people are offended by been called by first and surname .

I wish people could stop been offended .

if you tell me you are Ms I will respect that .

However . I would say as a teacher your kids probably are saying it wrong at home .

i can tell from my own experience . I ended up at a party -Ta was co incidentally there . So called him Mr …. Turns out every time I had spoken to him over the term I had got the surname wrong but he did acknowledge my Ds seems to have adopted the incorrect surname too . We had a drink and joke about it .

Also a secretary .. Mrs Garnett .. my Ds insisted her surname was garlic no matter how many times I corrected him 😳.

I’m 43 and never married.

Why do some organisations think it’s ok to call me Mrs? Good job my mum isn’t about when this happens

@Auburngal Same age as you, married.
When the kids at school call me Mrs *, I'm looking around for my mum!

The thing is, though, without talking to them about it, you can’t possibly know which women who call themselves Mrs have done so “without questioning it” and which have done it after endless deliberation.

My Dad gave me away at my wedding. I knew it was a tradition that was steeped in patriarchy and connotations of ownership and all the rest, but it meant a lot to him and that meant a lot to me. But without me saying so, you’d never know that I’d thought about that tradition - only that I’d adopted it.

The same goes with Mrs. I have trouble understanding the mindset of anyone who “can’t wait to become Mrs X” or is “proud to be Mrs X” - but I have no way of knowing which Mrs Xs are proud unquestioning adopters of the tradition and which ones are well aware of all the problems with it but have ultimately decided it’s still the right choice for them.

@ZebraDanios I do see that, and I appreciate I see this in very black and white terms.
You can imagine my wedding day! Didn't have my dad walking me down the aisle, no throwing of bouquets and definitely not just the men making speeches 😀

@ZebraDanios "Mrs Xs are proud unquestioning adopters of the tradition and which ones are well aware of all the problems with it but have ultimately decided it’s still the right choice for them."

I am happier with the unquestioning adopters. They can learn and change and grow. The women who understand the issues but still sign up for the patriarchy are the problem. And before anyone says it-no I don't think that a choice is automatically a feminist choice because a woman makes it!

I was wondering as I wrote the post whether the more important thing was the decision itself or the intention behind it.

And I guess the way I see it is this: as I mentioned earlier, as a teacher I frequently get asked what my title is, and I always ask my pupils whether they’d ask their male teachers the same question. We quite often get into a discussion about surnames etc as well. I could have this discussion regardless of what my own title or surname was - but I’d be much less likely to have that discussion as an unquestioning adopter: why would I do anything other than proudly announce that I was Mrs X, if that was how I felt?

It seems to me that if you’ve thought about the issues yourself you’re far more likely to encourage the next generation to think about those issues too. Yes, as an unquestioning adopter you have the opportunity to change your thinking, but how often does that happen, in practice? And if they do, does it matter whether they go on to change their title/surname, or just think about it differently?

Re: asking teachers about titles.

Where I'm currently working, the default title being used for female teachers is "Miss" - that's from staff as well, no matter how many times I say that it's "Mrs". (I quite like the French way of automatically using "Madame" with women of a certain age. I'm told - by my French teacher - that it's now very rare to hear "Mademoiselle" being used with a young woman in France.)

I'm old enough to remember when "Master" was used as the title for a boy, so I don't have a problem with Master/Mr and Miss/Mrs. If people want to use 'Ms', that's fine. I used it for a while myself, but find "Mrs" easier on the ear.

I've come across one case of a man telling pupils (and others) to call him "Mx". In that case, I noticed that the kids were very careful to use his correct title, but couldn't cope with his wish for 'they/them'.

So far as surnames are concerned, in my part of Scotland it was usual for people to refer to married women by their maiden name - even if the surname being used officially was the husband's. Until very recently, it was always the wife's maiden name that went on any memorials and that's what I have on both the memorials to my husband. (We can only rent a memorial at the crematorium, so I've had his details added to the family headstone as well.)

@WearyAuldWumman "I'm old enough to remember when "Master" was used as the title for a boy, so I don't have a problem with Master/Mr and Miss/Mrs."

Gosh-I thought I was the oldest recorded Mumsnetter.....

Two things. There is no correlation between Master and Miss. And Master is no longer a "thing"-men now have a title that indicates neither marital status nor age. Why do women?