Okay, Gen Z, younger millennials, please tell me, are you aware of what the title Ms. means? And how to pronounce it?
Because I just listened to several young 20-somethings pronounce it Miss and talk about how it means you’re not married. And…I’m feeling weird about it, considering that’s the title I use.
(It means my marital status is none of your business. I use it because I’m married but I kept my maiden name so I’m not Mrs. anyone.)
These comments really are fascinating and it seems especially people whose first language isn’t English aren’t sure about this, which is fair. But as I suspected some young folks aren’t clear either?
It seems like Ms. has been conflated with Miss and Miss has fallen out of favor, which is fair, but the meanings have been confused.
So here:
Ms.has some antique origins similar to Mrs. and Miss (all short for Mistress) but was revived in the 20th century (mostly in the 60s and 70s) by feminists as an all-purpose female title.
The problem with Miss and Mrs. is that they are tied specifically to marital status. (Miss is SPECIFICALLY an unmarried woman and Mrs. is a woman who is married or has been married. Yes, even older women can be Miss and a widow is still Mrs. (of course if they so choose).
While Mr. isn’t tied to marital status for men, of course. So Ms. is the female equivalent to Mr., intended to be used both as a default term when you don’t know someone’s marital status and ALSO as a term of choice when you don’t wish to be defined by your relationship to a man.
This was very much a political thing, part of second-wave feminism (which of course has it’s flaws). (Ms. magazine was a feminist women’s magazine which popularized the term.)
It’s pronounced something like Miz or Mzz.
So for me, I’ve used Ms. basically since I got out of college anytime I’m asked for a title. First because I didn’t want my marital status to be a thing of concern in professional settings. And when I was living with my now-husband but we weren’t married. And then after we were married and I kept my own last name because IMO neither of the other options was relevant.
(The keeping your own name thing is a different discussion probably, but I did it partly out of desire to stay the same “person” and partly out of apathy. Also my husband’s last name isn’t even the same as his parents (because remarriage) so there was no pressure there to change it and he gave no fucks about it. In fact, he’s almost seriously thought about changing his name to mine because he likes my family better, lol.)
But anyway, I feel like it’s important to keep the intention of Ms. alive because it’s so very useful and needed to have an equal partner to Mr. And more useful than ever with so many situations where you may be married/committed but not using your partner’s name (ie. gay married, poly relationships, not legally married for reasons of disability, idk whatever).
But Ms. does NOT mean unmarried. It means someone could be of ANY marital status: never married, currently married, divorced, widowed, etc. It means “it’s not your business because you don’t ask a man his marital status the first second you meet him so buzz off.”
Famous Japanese Feminist Authors. Left Yoshiko Yusa who was a famous russian/japanese translater and right her long term partner, another feminist author Toshiko Tamura.
Photo from Library Journal, Volume 116 Issue 7, April 15, 1991, page 32; Eric Smith possible photographer. Caption reads “Clare Beck says that present-day attitudes about reference service (and the reference librarian) stem from old-fashioned attitudes toward women in general.”
Government documents librarian and feminist librarian historian Mary Clare Beck was born and raised in the American Midwest and is a graduate of the University of Chicago with an A.B. in history. She earned the Master of Library Science degree from the University of Denver, and a MA in interdisciplinary social studies from Eastern Michigan University. Her reading in sociology for the MA degree is where her interest to apply gender theory to the examination of the gendered dynamics of librarianship was generated. The result of this interest is a body of research that invigorates library and librarian history.
Beck’s career at Eastern Michigan University was one of achievement and honor when she retired at the rank of full professor from the University Library. Beck’s achievements include but are not limited to, being one of the founders of GODORT, the American Library Association’s Government Documents Round Table, giving invited lectures on library history, and championing librarianship by writing letters to library publications and educating the general public regarding library topics by publishing letters in national periodicals. Examples of such letters are “Defending the Depositories” published in Library Journal(February 15, 1988), a letter that appeared in the March 30, 2009 Wall Street Journal critiquing the press coverage of Laura Bush’s professional librarian role in contrast to the First Ladies who were lawyers, and comments on a proposed remodel of the NYPL research library which appeared January 10, 2012 in The Nation. As an alumna of the University of Chicago, Clare Beck has contributed to the alumni magazine regarding library matters with her “The importance of browsing,” which tempered for her fellow University of Chicago graduates the allure of automation with the appeal of serendipitous perusing of library stacks.
It is Clare Beck’s contribution to library science research, particularly historical research, where her greatest achievements are. Through enriching library science scholarship by examining the complexities of gender issues, Clare Beck advanced library science research beyond the studies of administrative positions and gender. With critical analysis through the lens of feminist theories and gender studies, Ms. Beck added significantly and uniquely to the library literature canon.
Her work, “Reference Service: A Handmaid’s Tale” (Library Journal, April 15, 1991, p. 32-37) examines library reference work and its 1980s self-identified crisis through the lens of gender. Citing sources outside of the discipline of library science, Beck’s article gives the profession a fresh way to frame the tradition as articulated by librarian Samuel Green, of having a helpful sympathetic friend at a desk to take random on demand requests. [ed. note: if you have access to Library Journal archives, you should look up and read this article. A representative quote: “Thus we have the concept of on-demand service provided by a woman at a public desk, always ready to lay aside other work to respond ‘incidentally’ to questions. The underlying image would seem to be that of Mother, always ready to interrupt her housework to attend of the problems of others.”]
Beck’s other works include “Genevieve Walton and library instruction at the Michigan State Normal College” College and Research Libraries (July 1989). Genevieve Walton has a profile in the Women of Library History blog. Archival research figures prominently in “A ‘Private’ Grievance against Dewey,” American Libraries (Jan 1996, Vol. 27 Issue 1, p62-64), a model work of library event history that goes beyond chronology and biography that is not hagiography. [ed. note: again, if you have archival access to American Libraries, give this one a read.]
“Fear of women in suits: dealing with gender roles in librarianship” was presented at the University of Toronto and then published in the highly regarded Canadian Journal of Information Science Vol. 17 no. 3, pp.29-39, 1992. Her biography of Adelaide Hasse, The New Woman as Librarian: The Career of Adelaide Hasse, Scarecrow Press, 2006, is rich with archival material and careful analysis .
Invited lectures such as “How Adelaide Hasse got fired: A feminist history of librarianship through the story of one difficult woman, 1889-1953,” as organized by Cass Hartnett of the University of Washington, “Fear of Women in Suits: Dealing with Gender Roles in Librarianship,“ and "Gender in Librarianship: Why the Silence?” (given at the Canadian Library Association conference) introduced professional librarians, library workers, and graduate library science students to a sociological feminist examination of the library and information science professions. In her career, invited talks and juried presentations were given at such organizations as the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters (MASAL), Library and Information Science section, and ALA Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).
Clare Beck’s contribution to library history advances our field with rigorous, iconoclastic research, enriching the understanding the practice of North American librarianship.
Sometimes I feel like a bad nonbinary person because I’m not particularly interested in having my nonbinary existence acknowledged. Like I don’t care about they/them pronouns, I don’t care if a web shop form has an Mr/Ms. box, and I will never put an x in my passport so that governments can more easily identify my otherness.
I look around me and I see so many nonbinary people who care so much about these things, and I wonder: am I doing it wrong? Is it bad that instead of acknowledged, known, and understood, I seek the space to be undefined, undetermined, queer?
But I’ve been openly trans for a looooong time now and so I remember that normalization as the focus of nonbinary politics is a very new thing, and that looking for space to be undefined used to be a much more common pursuit a decade or so ago. I’m not doing nonbinary wrong, what it means to be nonbinary has changed around me.
And let’s be honest; there is a political aspect to this. Seeking confirmation of who we are in consumer forms and in state documents is not a politically neutral focus. It is a focus where those with power give acknowledgement and those without power receive it. Instead of, ya know, rejecting those institutions and any acknowledgement that they might give.
Some time in 2009 or 2010 I wrote that if our society ever normalized a 3rd gender box with specific pronouns, assumptions and boundaries, I’d have to start identifying as 4th gender to make sense of myself. It seems more and more likely that I’m going to reach that point within my lifetime.
And ya know, it’s okay. New generations of trans people are going to want new things and I am happy for them. But I hope the nonbinary people who are like me - the genderqueer, genderfluid, genderfreak, whatevers of the world - also know that they’re not doing it wrong. I hope they know that it’s okay to find no comfort in a third box. To want the space to not know what you’ll be next. To want to rebel until all the boxes fall apart.
the thing i love the most about being non-binary is that there is no way to do it wrong. i spend zero time on it. i change my title to mx because that one grates on me, but as much as that it’s because i’m afab and i resent the idea of my marital status defining my title
in the meantime i can do whatever the fuck i want, and after a lifetime of being told i did gender wrong i can be absolutely secure knowing i can’t, actually, do gender wrong
I think it’s also worth noting that there’s almost a spectrum between “I care all the time” and “I literally couldn’t care less.” Like, I use she/her pronouns at work and it’s fine, but I’m actively bothered when people close to me who should know better just keep steamrollering on with incorrect pronouns. I would feel very, very weird using Mx. even though I’m not a big fan of Ms. either (although for me that’s more about that fact that Miss/Mrs./Ms. are markers of one’s marital state, rather than being about the gender implied by Ms).
We’re all experiencing it different ways, and “it” includes just how much we want to belong.
(who is using Ms. as a marker of marital state? the whole entire point of Ms. is and always has been to be the female equivalent of Mr., which does not indicate marital state and never has!)
(why is that field required on online forms anyway, I wouldn’t be half so grumpy about the absence of Mx. as an option when I contact my one senator if I could use that contact form without any such prefix at all)
If there’s one catalytic person who bears a lot of that credit [saving eight million lives]. It’s Iris Long.
- David France, director of How to Survive a Plague .
More often than not, the name ‘Iris Long’ unfortunately doesn’t ring a bell. Iris Long is an unsung hero whose scientific knowledge and benevolence made invaluable contributions to ACT UP during the AIDS epidemic in the United States that effectively helped end suffering and save millions of lives.
Iris Long received her Master’s degree in chemistry from Hunter College in 1964. Thereafter, she worked at Sloan-Kettering as a chemist where developed nucleosides, helping her to understand the workings of the drugs that were first used to treat HIV and AIDS. After 11 years at Sloan-Kettering, Iris left and earned her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Connecticut, the Department of Pharmacy, in 1972.
Iris had no connections to the LGBTQ+ community but had taken an interest in the aids epidemic and felt that she couldn’t be on the sidelines and watch any longer. She believed that her insights into the science and the pharmaceutical industry might help make a difference. She offered them to numerous nonprofits whom didn’t recognize her value. However, Iris understood that “You had to stand up and fight for the medical – actually fight – for the care and the drugs”so in March of 1987 she made her way to an ACT UP meeting.
ACT UP has been described as a scrappy downtown activist group at the time. They protested outside government health agencies, stopped traffic, and chained themselves to desks (and rightfully so) to urge change and reform. Iris believed that these methods were misguided. For instance, instead of feeding the parallel market for HIV/AIDS drugs by importing drugs from other countries that were not yet approved by the FDA, Iris wanted to make the real system work. She began to organize the Treatment Registry and for the next nine years worked tirelessly with other activists to make this a reality.
Under Iris’s leadership, ACT UP’s initial oppositional stance was transformed to one that productively cooperated with the institutions they initially protested. Iris’s efforts yielded respect from noble prize winners, direct reforms in the NIH and FDA, and ultimately the discovery of effective treatment to HIV and AIDS.
Iris Long efforts saved eight millions of lives. Let’s not forget that.
In writings about her time in the Army during the second world war, Rita Laporte reveals that she fell in love for the first time. Laporte decided that the only way to rejoin the woman who had been transferred to a different base was to “sacrifice all on the altar of love” by admitting that she was homosexual to get discharged from the Army:
I awaited my fate. Then the Major smiled. In a kindly voice he said, “You’re kidding. I don’t believe you.” I was stunned. Naturally I had rehearsed all the Major’s possible answers. I was ready to hang my head in deepest shame, to bear up under all insults, to weep or not weep, as might be necessary. Something was terribly wrong.
At last I blurted out, “But I AM one!”
We argued. I pleaded But it was useless; I could not convince him.
Women were undeniably an integral part of the US military during World War 2. The army also became a place where women who loved women could feasibly meet women like themselves. Their contributions were so crucial that officials were put in the awkward position of either condoning what had been condemned as “monstrosities” only a decade ago, risking what had clearly worked to their benefit, or denying the lesbianism that clearly flourished around them. They chose the latter.
Read more about WLW in World War 2 and it lead to the start of lesbian political consciousness in the United States HERE
Source: “We Protest” Leaflet distributed by the Coalition for a Feminist Sexuality at Barnard College Conference “The Scholar and the Feminist”
