Using 'Mrs'

[Booboobedoo]

This is something I've been pondering for a while, and now I'm posting on here to garner opinion.

I'm sure I can't be the first to suggest this, but would it not be a logical step to start addressing women as 'Mrs' as soon as they are adults, in the same way that men become 'Mr'?

It would render 'Ms' unnecessary.

Ultimately I suppose I'd prefer all titles to be done away with altogether, but I'm not sure the world is ready 😁.

Any thoughts? Any obvious reason why not?

Anyone?

I understand why the OP prefers to reframe Mrs rather than get people to use Ms. But I don't think it will work.

Didn't Mister/Mr originally come from Master? And both Mrs and Miss from Mistress?

I don't object to it, I'm just pointing out that it isn't used universally, and probably never will be, as it's too associated with, y'know, us man-hating, lesbian, Millie-tant feminists. In this country at least.

That's why I'm advocating the reclamation of Mrs by the feminist movement.

I do understand the desire to use Mrs to 'prove that I got a man'. I think on some level I quite enjoyed it when I was very young, because it was only five years since I left school, having gone through my teenage years, like many young girls, being constantly reminded by boys that I didn't meet their (very high) standards of beauty and hence was unlovable.

If we addressed boys feeling totally entitled to judge girls, and loudly pass comment, on their looks, the pride in 'snaring a husband' probably wouldn't be so great.

With bells on Bertrand As long as I'm not "Missus" I don't mind either Miss or Ms and use both. I haven't been under 16 in decades.

That is, looking back on my much younger self, not that I feel pride in being married now that I'm much older.

Ms is a title for all and any woman.

Why would we choose Mrs, the married title, to come to encompass all women?

I don't think I could bring myself to adopt / assimilate that title for myself.

The whole thing is ridiculous, we don't really need any sex specific titles.

Citizen Blu.

According to Dale Spender in 'Man Made Language' Mrs used to be the correct term for all older women.

Miss was used for younger women.

They had nothing to do with marital status that is a new fad.

but I'd have imposed Mr and Ms years ago.

You see this ^ is the problem for me. Why is it better to have these things imposed on me by a woman than a man?

I haven't phrased that very well I don't think... but it seems to me that I can be oppressed by men or by feminists and that actually my personal choice is there to be ignored. And that still doesn't sound right - but I struggle with it.

Personally I think the best solution would be to get rid of the whole title system all together. It's just so antiquated and yet another way in which women get discriminated against.

It's so ingrained in society though. I admit that I did like it when I got married and could change Miss to Mrs as I supposed as a 30 something woman I felt it made me sound more grown up and was starting to feel a bit too old to be a Miss. where do those feeling come from though? It's nonsense when you think about it! We shouldn't have to feel like that. Yet another thing that men never experience as they are always a Mr regardless and no assumptions can be made of them by a title.

The societal status issue is so true. I suppose it harps back to the days where if a woman wasn't married by her mid twenties then she was basically seen as a total failure in life. When you think about it, it's pretty incredible that these hang ups still exist today.

The dbs will have been rejected due to lack of evidence to support the surname change, nothing to do with the use of title

A

Airlines had DD as Ms when she turned 16. Her correspondence is a mix of Ms and Miss.

Just using Ms would be better than Mrs, if Ms wasn't available I'd have thought keeping Miss would be better. The easiest to say (my only reservation about Ms really is its not a very clear sound, 'muz' or 'mizz'). And then the next iteration would be for the 'ter' in Mister to become silent and we just call everyone Mis. (despite the grin, I think thats not a bad idea).

I, too, would prefer that titles were done away with altogether, comrades.

And milkandtwosugars I absolutely take your point with regards to being dictated to by either camp.

In my view, the reclaiming of Mrs would be a step in the right direction.

I think this discussion is helping me to clarify why I feel as I do.

Generally, I think change needs to happen gradually to root itself in the public psyche and shift perception.

It will never happen because the majority of women want to be Miss until marriage then become Mrs. My two closest friends are educated, professional women who both delightedly became Mrs after their weddings. If Facebook is anything to go by, it's standard and doesn't seem to be changing.

I can't bear Miss/Mrs but if people choose it for themselves there's not much to be done about it.

I just booked flights for my family, and BA has Mstr for my sons... slightly irrelevant, but people have been asking.

Choc beat me to it. We've had air tickets and travel itineraries with Mstr for our sons.

I just don't get why we can't use Ms for adult women as marital status should be irrelevant in the public domain, unless we think signalling that a married woman should be accorded more respect and hit on less (being 'taken'/another man's property/not fair game) is OK. However, given the slow acceptance of Ms, I recognise it's a somewhat political decision for a married or single woman to use it (as I do) and carries a degree of discomfort for some divorced women. I have a recently retired male colleague who kept referring to me as Mrs mySurname in shared correspondence, rather than Ms, which amused me no end as - in my mind - Mrs mySurname is my Mum or stepmother (my Dad's ex/wife). I didn't take my husband's name when we married, which seems to really confuse some people despite this being the 21st century.

Oh yeah, goes without saying I'd utterly reject being addressed as Mrs. Bleurgh.

I had a hospital letter last week addressed to the parent or guardian of Master 1471521546. I suspect that if Miss was only used for girls under 18, people would say that nobody ever uses Miss. It is only commonly used because it is used as a title for adult women.

Would people who are in fields where some formality/hierarchy persists - the most obvious being teachers - be happy with the abolition of titles, how would they want to be addressed? Perhaps they'd come up with a professional type title similar to Dr or Prof.

but Miss wasn't always strongly tied to marital status in quite the same way.

Miss was for unmarried/young women, Mrs for older women (OK, probably because they would be assumed to be married by a certain age), and because women were infantilised by continuing to call them miss into adulthood if they weren't yet married.

Master should be the equivalent of Miss - if only we could lose the whole marriage baggage from Mrs.

We can't though.. perhaps instead we would have more traction inventing terms for married and unmarried men?

I just don't get why we can't use Ms for adult women

But you can! You are totally at liberty to use the title Ms if you wish to do so.

If those that wanted to just did it, encouraged their daughters to do the same, encouraged those daughters to encourage their friends etc and did so without imposing their personal choice on others, you'd see a slow shift in public perception until it became the norm. Sure, probably not in our lifetimes... but you'd get the shift eventually.

There seems to be this idea that we can demand instant change and that everyone else should suck it up. From one oppression to another.

As an aside, can you imagine the outrage if we started to call unmarried men "Master"......

I imagine lots of them would like it.

Especially Doctor Who geeks.

A bit off piste but all of our children are boys and would be delighted to lose 'master'....they get to a certain age where being called 'Master Baker' isn't humoured by them...

Sorry, realise I hadn't answered the DBS question.

This was about eight years ago.

She was extremely taken aback because she hadn't changed her name.

Ever.

Agreed, it was probably mishandled by an incompetent arse, but is illustrative nonetheless.

Teachers at my kids school are all Ms in official literature.. then the kids all call them Miss and Mr

It's hard to change it when there's such inertia.

At my first secondary school, we used different titles for each teacher depending on their preference (it was a girls grammar), and we always used their name as well - it was a weird change to go to a different school and hear people yelling 'Miiiiisssss' for all the female teachers - it felt disrespectful.