|
About Us | Publications | Mailing List | Initiatives | Donations
Fiona Stewart "In a Man's World, People Make a Ms-ing Link" The Age March 11, 2001 In recent weeks, discussion on Australia's foremost feminist email list - ausfem-polnet - has exploded. The matter at the heart of the debate is, "To be or not to be". To modern feminists, the dilemma of title - Miss, Mrs or Ms - and whether or not it matters that your work colleagues, institutions such as banks or the government, know your marital status, is a serious one. This is why the email discussion has become so passionate and so drawn out. Non-feminist sisters may imagine those who prefer Ms to be overall-wearing radicals, but to most younger women there is no longer any alternative to the term. With marriage rates falling, divorce rates rising and women choosing to keep their own names after they marry, Ms has taken on a new importance. This is why, when the Howard Government - with its ageing front bench - chose to dispense with such "modernisms" upon its election in 1996, there was widespread outrage among under-50 women on all sides of politics. And rightly so. After all, why should women have their marital status stamped so obviously on their foreheads? What the email feminists have wanted to talk about this week, however, is that things have not always been this way, and why. Salon.com writer Margot Miffin says that Ms was first used as an abbreviation for mistress, a 14th-century translation from the French term maitresse, which was used as "a term of respect for women of prestige". From its earliest documentation on a Massachusetts tombstone in 1767, to the title of the feminist magazine of the second-wave feminist movement, Ms Magazine, women everywhere have attempted to make Ms the default term for all women. Like the anonymous and asexual Mr for men, Ms has been promoted as the neutral counterpart for women. It is a title from which no conclusions can be drawn and no fault found. If only life, and sex, were that simple. In a 1998 study, by the American linguist Barbara Kelly, it was the supposed neutrality of the term that was investigated. In her exploration of "folk-linguistic attitudes", Kelly concluded that Ms, unlike Mr, continues to be surrounded by misunderstanding. For example, Kelly found that, rather than safeguarding a woman's privacy, the use of Ms meant that a woman had "something to hide". Worse still, a married woman who used Ms was seen as uncommitted to her husband. This slur on reputation is, perhaps, among the most ironic factors given the neutrality the term is supposed to engender. A practice aimed at giving women confidentiality seems to have backfired, and it is this backlash that has prompted some Australian feminists to be inventive in thinking of other ways forward. Take, for example, email feminist Felicity from deakin.edu.au. She suggests that women "choose Mr and tell them that that is the closest of all the options you have been offered". Alternatively, she advises that the term Sr might be more useful because this would leave the inquirer wondering if it was "religious, nursing or neither". Kaz from bigpond.com has other ideas, finding that she is "now nearly always asked whether I am a Miss or a Missus". When she insists on Ms, Kaz says she usually gets "one of those kind of reactions". "While Mrs always leaves me feeling like I am opening my mother's mail, what intrigues me most is the number of times, as coordinator of a women's legal service, that mail is addressed to Mr and letters start `Dear Sir'. I am the manager, so I must be a bloke." For many women, the assumptions raised by experiences such as this go to the heart of the title issue. Although having the world privy to whether or not you have a husband to go home to is one thing, the issue of female legitimacy and independence is something else altogether. For modern women, the idea of having your place in the world questioned because you are not willing to declare your marital status is nothing short of preposterous. The Prime Minister, among others, should realise that it is high time that women's worth is judged and rewarded in more sophisticated ways.
|
