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The utility of "Ms." provides an interesting precedent, not least for the epicene pronoun (ze/hir, or whatever). Those campaigning against it as being unnecessary and confusing frequenbtly appear to be employing, almost word for word, the same arguments as those who believed that "Ms." would cause nothing but confusion.
However. To stop this from turning into a series of disjointed personal musings, how about a proposition:
"Master" and "Mister" are a useful control for the simple reaosn of their programmed obsolescence. You are "master" until you are old enough to own property, vote and so on, after which you are "mister", unless you go way back...can anyone supply references on the use of "master" to describe an unmarried but adult man? Generally, one is as an adult the master of a house, a college, a hunt or an Art/Science; there is the informal way in which somebody keeping bachelor hall might be described as "master of bachelor hall"...hmmmm. Not sure about this at all - I have a feeling that an adult male whose father was still living might be described as Mr. Johnson, the young master of property, but Master Johnson woudl either by the immature Johnson or possibly someone who was not Mister by dint of a hereditary title, but one currently possessed by his father.
Women, meanwhile, until the Married Women's Property Act (1870 in Britain) were never old enough to own property (that is, property was owned, in the natural scheme of things, either by their fathers or their husbands"), they never stopped being children effectively until they were married. In effect, the "miss/mrs" divide has, as Smoothly Weaving suggests, its origins in ownership - it, along with the change of surname, defines to which household the woman belongs. Therefore Miss Peters belongs to the household headed by her father Mr Peters, and Mrs Peters belongs to the household headed by her husband Mr Peters. All pretty simple. The wedding band was also a handy "hands-off" to potential threats to that system; I think it's pretty recent that the ring became traditional to both man and woman, though I'd need to look that one up.
The purpose of "Ms" was to mess with that system, by preventing you from knowing simply from a woman's name whether she was available or owned, and thus to destabilise the patriarchal code structure, but not perfectly - the name after "Ms." would, of course be a referent, but it no longer allowed you to know whether it referred to the father's or the husband's name. That structure is further disrupted by the wife keeping her family name, as it means that Ms Peters may be the unmarried daughter of Mr Peters, the married daughter of Mr Peters, or the wife of Mr Peters. It's still a patronymic, but it's less and less use as a way to track the structures, and so towards making the terminologies as person- rather than structure-focused as "Mister" always has been - Mr. Peters is and remains a member of the Peters family, and epigone of the Peters line.
Leading on from which, in a sense, why do we need a language structure to identify who is single and who is not at all? Since issues of fidelity and inheritance are comparatively unimportant and more matters of individual conscience, we don't need a sign saying "if you are seen unchaperoned with this woman you are likely to be subject to violence, legal action or at the very least the odium of your society" anymore...isn't the desire to advertsie singleness or non-singleness somewhat archaic in a society where marriage is only one possible option in a broad spectrum of relational and indee cohabitational propositions? |
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I suppose if I was the lover of a god that would be good grounds for name changing. That's really something to show off about.