Since when does 'Ms' means divorced?

[Nolim]

By reading another thread i found out that, according to a significant fraction of posters, the title Ms (as opposed to Miss or Mrs) is for divorced women! This is news to me!

For context English is not my first language. When i lived in the states i learned that Ms was invented to have a female title independent of marital status, just like Mr for men. I thought it was a brilliant idea and have used Ms ever since, as did the majority if women i met there.

Have i been self identifying myself as divorced all this time in the uk? I thought that the idea of Ms was to simplify the situation, not to make it more complicated!

as an aside, I have just ordered a pair of jeans online, and the ONLY choice of titles was 'Mr' or 'Mrs'

I have pinged off a mildly sarcastic email to their 'Feedback' address.

my kids teacher taught them this at school

i was

That whole 'practising your new signature' thing - the frothy excitement of leaving your old self behind and becoming a 'proper grown up wifey' - it seems daft, but when you love someone becoming part of their family - and having that made official with names and titles - is enticing

But the man doesn't become part of the woman's family does he? At least not in any recognisable sense. It's all about the woman changing for the man. To be honest I genuinely think that women who get all frothy and excited about changing names are pretty immature and uncritical. I imagine that life will teach them different lessons.

I use Ms quite a lot. DH was a bit at first, but when I explained that I preferred to use the neutral version because my marital status is my business, he got it. Sometimes I use Mrs but that's generally because other people make assumptions, and I can't be bothered to explain that yes I'm married but I prefer my title to be Ms.

I've noticed some people assume I'm divorced because of it, when they realise I'm not they do look a little confused.

This irritates me enormously. I have been Ms elastamum for years. Both when married and now divorced. I always hated Miss as I cant think of any good reason why I need to show off my marital status

My mother taught me that Ms was for divorced women - she was divorced at the time, but continued with the Mrs Husband'ssurname. She now sends my birthday cards etc addressed to 'Mrs MrDespot'sinitial MrDespot'ssurname', because I have no identity of my own. She also gives any males in the house bigger dinners and is astonished if they can make a cup of tea. She is very sexist, my mum.

if germany and france (quite old fashioned countries in some ways) got away with various form of female adress, why can't uk?

it's confusing and unecessary.

I don't think it means divorced, but I can understand why people think this. It's pretty telling, isn't it? As a society, the basic problem is that we all expect to know women's marital status - adopting a new title is only such a tiny step towards changing that. It reminds me of the awful joke about the man who moves to Belfast and is asked his religion. 'I'm an atheist,' he replies. 'Yes, yes,' comes back the reply, 'but a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist'.

An awful lot of people want to know if you're a married or unmarried Ms.

I gave up on being Ms when I got divorced. My PhD came through about a week after I split with DH. This amuses me.

I'm embarassed to admit that up until not long ago I thought Ms meant divorced, my Mum taught me when I was younger that that's what it meant and I'd seen her go from mrs to ms to mrs to ms again so just accepted it, I learned from Mumsnet about six years ago that it's incorrect.

My understanding of the etymological history of Ms is that this title has always had a meaning along the lines of "undisclosed marital status" serving the same function for women as the title Mr does for men. This meaning of Ms has been continued by, not started by, modern feminist usage since the 1960s.

I've heard that when divorce was scandalous, particularly for women, patriarchy needed a descriptor to allow society to identify, judge and condemn these scandalous divorced women, which led to the redefinition (appropriation/hijacking) of Ms to signify divorcee.

A myth seems to have built up around Ms, in which Ms started as a descriptor for divorcee and then along came allegedly unimaginative word-stealing feminists in the 1960s who were too lazy to invent their own title, so they stole and corrupted an allegedly neutral, non-judgemental patriarchal title. I think the opposite is closer to reality: the originally non-judgemental feminist title of Ms was redefined in a judgemental, anti-woman and anti-feminist patriarchal way to mean divorcee, at a time when divorce was more scandalous for wives than for husbands. This had an anti-feminist side-effect that benefitted patriarchy: any woman who used Ms in the feminist "undisclosed marital status" sense would automatically be tarred as a scandalous divorcee, and receive the misogyny that went with it. It does not surprise me that many married or single women, including feminists, were reluctant to use Ms during the scandalous divorce era. As the scandal around divorce has faded, the use of Ms to shame divorcees has also declined.

People who currently believe that Ms means divorcee are just using the dying patriarchal redefinition, while most other people now use its original and current feminist meaning of "undisclosed marital status" as a female alternative to Mr.

Thank you vesuvia for an interesting scholastic post.

It is interesting that a perfectly reasonable female equivalent to the male mr has been hijacked to brand (oh the horror!) scandalous divorcees and pretencious militant feminists.

Sigh.

I guess divorced women might often come under the broad and sensible category of women who prefer what men have always had - a title that denotes you are an adult and is not related to your - irrelevant - marital status.

I use Ms. My Lawyer who, please God is a better lawyer than he is a human being has asked me at least 10 times if I'm SURE it's MZZZZZZZZZ, what with having a husband and everything.

But why did this divorcee connotation happen in the UK, but not the US? In so many ways, the US as a nation is so much more conservative than the UK, yet, although there was some grumbling in the early days of the Second Wave about its use, Ms became the default fairly easily, even in the South where traditions are often held onto longer.

Is is because titles are maybe more important or more resonant in the UK: lords, ladies, dames, etc?

When I am in the UK and using a credit card or showing my passport, I nearly always get called Mrs (which sounds especially strange to me since I did not take my husband's name). I suppose they assume Mrs. based on my age or notice that I am wearing a ring. It would be the opposite in the US. People would use Ms.

I heard a theory that it's because Miz sounds southern

That's true. Mrs has been pronounced as Miz by most Southerners for a long time. So when another title appeared with the same pronunciation, it did make things easier.

As a side issue, does anyone use "Mrs Maiden Name"? I feel (instinctively perhaps inaccurately) that that's just wrong. Mrs Maiden Name implies to me that I'm married to my father, which is one if the reasons I prefer Ms. Mrs DH's Name is my DMIL.

I suppose Ms was the divorced woman's title because a woman's title is (and must be) a declaration of her marital status (and it seems to some people sexual preference!)

I use Ms as first preference (and where I work noticed recently that the selection is either Mr or Ms)

I recently sent my niece a letter and addressed her as Ms Firstname Surname (usually I wouldn't bother with a title but I did so out of interest if my sister or bil would comment on it. I has picked up recently from MN that 'Ms' is a major issue for some people (mostly the 'i hate ms' posters who think the ms users are the one with nothing else to worry about)

I have always used Ms I'm married but didn't take my husband's name.

I remember at school a teacher (male) once informed the class that Ms was just used by silly women who didn't want people to know if they were married or not. So there you go, now you know what it means.

I'd never heard of Ms being for divorcees until I read it on Mumsnet quite recently. I've always understood it to be a title used by women who don't want to reveal their marital status. In fact, it came into general use as a title to use when writing to women whose marital status you didn't know, I think.

I use Ms because Miss sounds ridiculous for a woman of 43 & I am not married (or divorced!) so am not Mrs.

I think when it first came into common usage in the UK - as far as I noticed anyway, even ancient old me was very young - it appeared to be for divorcees. The implication was "What should divorcees call themselves? They don't want to be Mrs any more and why should they go back to Miss?"

My impression about it, looking back, was that women WANTED to broadcast their marital status to all and sundry and when divorced were genuinely distressed by not being able to tell people whether they were unmarried, married or divorced. Quel horreur!!

Of course this is all balls and the main reason for Ms is because women don't see why they should have to reveal such personal information every time they fill out a form. But if the young me didn't twig all this then I understand why other people didn't either.

It's because some people think the only people who care about feminism are dungaree wearing lesbians or bitter divorcees. You know the ones who can' get a man so have to be all political and use Ms.

I'm struggling to elucidate what I mean (coming from the POV of a married woman who has always used Ms Ownsurname) but this

That whole 'practising your new signature' thing - the frothy excitement of leaving your old self behind and becoming a 'proper grown up wifey' - it seems daft, but when you love someone becoming part of their family - and having that made official with names and titles - is enticing.

makes me feel really sad. Why are girls conditioned to feel like this? Even as a girl it puzzled me when marriage and changing name seemed to be the height of some of my friends aspirations in life. It's as if being unmarried means you aren't properly grown up and by implication if someone doesn't change their name their marriage is less valid than that of a Mrs DHsurname.

Like others my impression has always been that Ms is so that marital status is not displayed ie same as Mr.

I've been a Ms on and off depending on mood since I was 16, so 25 years. No-one has ever batted an eyelid and TBH it's only on MN that I have seen people and organisations thinking it meant divorced.

I think the connotation in this neck of the woods when I was growing up was Ms = crazed man-hating feminist, rather than divorcee.