Ms Is Older Than You Think

Most people assume Ms arrived with the women’s movement of the 1970s, along with consciousness-raising groups and an uncomfortable conversation at the family barbecue. In fact, someone suggested it seventy years earlier. And the titles it was meant to replace were never as tidy as they looked.

All three started as the same word: mistress. For centuries it was a respectful title for a woman of standing, the female equivalent of master, which is where Mr comes from. Over time it was shortened in writing to Mrs and Miss, and for a long while the difference between them wasn’t about marriage at all. Historians have found plenty of women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries called “Mrs” who never married. It marked an adult woman of some status, while “Miss” tended to mark a girl.

The marriage distinction settled in later, and by the nineteenth century it was firmly fixed: Miss before the wedding, Mrs after it, and nothing for anyone who didn’t care to say. Men, meanwhile, were simply Mr from adolescence onwards, married or not, which seems to have struck nobody as odd for an impressively long time.

In November 1901, an unsigned article in the Springfield Republican, a Massachusetts newspaper, proposed a solution. Why not use a simple abbreviation, Ms, when you didn’t know whether a woman was married? It would spare everyone embarrassment. The article was forgotten for over a century until a language columnist turned it up in 2009, which tells you something about how long good ideas can sit in archives waiting for someone to notice them.

Through the middle of the twentieth century, Ms popped up occasionally in business-writing guides, mostly as a practical convenience for secretaries addressing letters to women whose marital status they didn’t know. It was efficient rather than political.

That changed with Sheila Michaels, a civil rights activist in New York, who started promoting Ms in the early 1960s as a title for a woman in her own right, rather than as someone’s daughter or wife. Hardly anyone took up the idea until 1969, when she mentioned it during a radio interview. Within a couple of years Gloria Steinem and her colleagues had named a new magazine Ms., and the title went from fringe to familiar remarkably quickly.

The pronunciation, miz, wasn’t invented either. In parts of the American South, Mrs had long been said “miz” in everyday speech, so the new title arrived with a sound people already knew.

One small typographical point, since this is a linguist’s blog. In Australia and Britain, we usually write Ms, Mrs and Mr without a full stop. The traditional rule is that you only add a full stop when an abbreviation chops off the end of a word, as in Prof. for professor, but not when the abbreviation ends with the same letter as the full word, as Mr does with mister. Americans tend to add the full stop anyway, which is why the magazine is Ms. and an Australian letter usually isn’t.

What I find most interesting about the whole story is how long it took. The problem was obvious, the solution was proposed in 1901, and the word was available for decades. What was missing wasn’t a word. It was enough people deciding that the question the old titles asked, “and are you married?”, was nobody else’s business.

Language usually follows a change in attitude. It very rarely starts one, however much we’d like to think otherwise.