That’s Ms Pissed-Off-Reporter To You

The modern woman doesn’t know who she is: Miss, Mrs or Ms? Nancy Gibbs, from Time, doesn’t either.

Considering what I went through this week, she needs to learn pretty fast. Whether a woman is married still counts for a lot more than it should.

Here’s a quick refresher course on titles. Mrs denotes a married woman and Miss denotes a single woman. That was once incredibly relevant because married women were given a lot more respect than single girls were.

• Silly as it is, this matters. Because words shape our world. Ms. is not some trendy modern social contraption. It was first spotted on the tombstone of Ms. Sarah Spooner in 1767, the handiwork, perhaps, of a frugal stone carver. For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, Mrs. and Miss were deployed to signal age, not marital status. Both were derived from Mistress, a word that, before it put on its feather boa and fishnet stockings, was the title for any woman with authority over a household.

The term Ms was first adopted in 1952 in the National Office Management Association guidelines to avoid confusion over whether a woman was married. At the time, if you didn’t know you referred to a woman as Mrs, because it was kinder.

Oh how the tables have turned!

I was out for a lunch this week with my Editor-in-Chief and a single female colleague. Lunch was going well and he was doing the kindly older mentor thing. It was nice.

He turned to my colleague and asked her whether she had a five year plan.

Then he turned to me, “What is your five year plan?” he asked, before spying my engagement ring, “Oh never mind, you’re getting married.”

I have been plugging away at this paper for years and suddenly I am on the Mommy Track because I have a hunk of carbon on my finger!

Silly me, assuming that in the 21st Century a woman can be defined by more than her relationship to a man. I don’t care about formalities so the difference between Mrs, Miss and Ms has been academic until now.

Ms is great. It avoids any confusion about whether a woman is married, divorced, widowed or single. It also cleverly masks a woman’s marital status, which shouldn’t be relevant to anyone other than her partner.

I like Ms because it is easy. Too bad it is also necessary.