A single mom found herself inadvertently addressing issues of gender theory when she posted a question to the forum Mumsnet, an English website “by parents, for parents.” She explained that she ordered a lamp at a store recently, and as the store clerk put her details into the system, she asked the mom, “Are you Miss, Ms., or Mrs.?”

The shop assistant qualified her question by saying, “I hate asking this, I find it so embarrassing,” and the mom clearly agreed. The mom identified herself with the title Ms., even though doing so made her uncomfortable. “I was there with my daughter, so in that one exchange, I’d divulged I was a single, unmarried parent,” she said.

The mom said it’s time to get rid of Ms., Mrs., and Miss titles to stop defining women by their marital status.

“If I was a man, they’d be Mr. and none the wiser as to marital status,” she said, pointing out the inherent inequities of honorific titles.

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“I know I could say Ms., but does any married woman really use Ms.?” the mom wondered. “It got me thinking, why do we need personal titles?” She went on to say, “With the increasing desire by the younger generation to not even be defined by gender, identifying women by their marital status feels so outdated.”

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She has a valid point, since relationships are constantly evolving throughout life.

A sharp uptick in unmarried adults in the U.S. lends even further credibility to this mom’s wish to do away with honorific titles based on marital status. A report released by The Pew Research Center, in which they analyzed 2019 Census data, found that 4 in 10 adults, ages 25 to 54, were unpartnered.

The history of defining women in relation to men is nothing new, though it is complex. A research paper published by Amy Erickson in 2014 titled “Mistress, Miss, Mrs. or Ms.: untangling the shifting history of titles” delves into the complicated origins of titles for women. Erickson found that, until the 19th century, most women were addressed without any prefixes before their names. Not only that, but Mrs. and, later, Miss were both restricted to women with higher social standing.

Today, it seems Miss is only used as a designation of youth. Mrs. is a married woman, and Ms. has become the scarlet letter catch-all for older women, widows, and the divorced. 

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Using Ms. was a way to make women known separately from their relationship to a man.

The introduction of Ms. as a neutral alternative to Miss or Mrs., and the direct equivalent of Mr., was proposed as early as 1901. Activist Sheila Michaels is named as having first utilized the title Ms. in 1961 as a way to signify a woman’s inherent right not to be defined in relation to men.

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Michaels stated,  “There was no place for me. No one wanted to claim me, and I didn’t want to be owned. I didn’t belong to my father, and I didn’t want to belong to my husband — someone who could tell me what to do.”

While it feels like Ms. is a unifier for women, many feel it is just a designation that a woman is old and unmarried instead. And since aging is a borderline crime for women, it’s not always well-received. 

As our societal relations to both marriage and gender shift in form, maybe it’s time to rethink our use of honorific titles in general, especially for activities as innocuous as buying a lamp. 

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