The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social StructureAmy Erickson
The English language uses three formal terms of address – Mr, Mrs, and Miss – for people ‘without a higher, honorific, or professional title’ (as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it). Many consider these terms archaic, and Go Title Free campaigns for their abolition with the slogan ‘Freedom from marital status titles’.
It is often assumed that the use of two honorific terms for women (Mrs and Miss), and only one for men (Mr), is a relic of patriarchal control in a system where men wanted to know women’s marital status. The real story is entirely different.
A woman with assets
Mrs and Miss and are both abbreviations of ‘mistress’, a word now mostly associated with a ‘kept woman’. But from its origins the primary meaning of mistress was a woman who governed subjects (that is, employees or servants or apprentices) or a woman who was skilled or who taught. English retains this meaning in ‘schoolmistress’ (the reason that English pupils universally call their female teachers ‘Miss’) and in ‘postmistress’.
Anne Butler (Hounslow’s first postmistress). Hounslow Local Studies Library.
From the 15th century, Mrs was the direct equivalent of Mr (master), used to indicate gentry status or any woman with capital, whether those were physical or social assets. Most people had no such title before their names.
In the list of the inhabitants of Astley in Warwickshire in 1782, shown below, the head of household at Astley Castle was Mrs Mary Conyers, 52 years old, a Spin[ster] and a Com[municant] of the Church of England. Her housekeeper was Mrs Comfort, age 39, a widow. Her four other servants, an older couple, a young man, and a young woman, were all recorded by their names only. Housekeepers were Mrs, regardless of marriage, because they were in charge of the house and of a higher social status than other servants.
A Survey of the Inhabitants of the Parish of Astley, 1782. Warwickshire Record Office CR1841/40.
Until the mid-18th century, actresses were known as Mrs because of their skill and salaries. Anne Oldfield (1683-1730) never married, although she did maintain two long-term liaisons. She was Mrs Oldfield because she was ‘the celebrated Comedian’ and a shareholder in the Drury Lane Theatre. Her renown is indicated by the fact that this print (below) was made from a contemporary portrait three decades or more after her death.
Anne Oldfield at the Covent Gardens. Edward Fisher, after Jonathan Richardson (1760–1785).
Little miss who?
The history of Miss is more complicated. In the 17th and first half of the 18th centuries, Miss had two meanings, defined in Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological Dictionary (1721) as: ‘a young Gentlewoman [i.e., a child]; also a kept Mistress, a Lady of Pleasure’. In other words, a Miss could be a child who would become Mrs at the age of 21, but the more common use in print was that of the kept mistress. Bailey used Miss as a synonym in his definitions of ‘Concubine’, ‘Harlot’, and other more obscure words for whore.
The first use of Miss in print to describe virtuous adult women appears to be Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), where the gentry daughters are Miss, but Pamela as a servant and also the (unmarried) housekeeper are both known as Mrs.
Similarly, in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) the heroine is Miss, and her waiting gentlewoman (the unmarried daughter of a curate) is Mrs. The same distinction appears in Sarah Fielding’s Adventures of David Simple (1744) and The Governess (1749): the young gentry Misses have upper servants described as Mrs (waiting woman, housekeeper, governess), all of whom are unmarried.
So, Miss was introduced to distinguish unmarried upper gentlewomen from their unmarried (but sometimes also lower gentry) servants. As with so much of English terminology, the point was to establish status in a world in which the number of women distinguished by the title Mrs was growing rapidly, fuelled not only by the increase in actresses but also writers and printers and shopkeepers and women in businesses of all kinds employing others. These continued to be known as Mrs, regardless of marital status.
Trade card of Miss Kent, Schoolmistress (1790). © The Trustees of the British Museum, asset number 1129537001.
Those businesswomen who wished to be thought particularly genteel might use Miss, but this title in the later 18th and early 19th centuries was largely restricted to the occasional milliner and to those running schools, such as Miss Kent of Billericay, whose trade card is shown above.
All words for women in the English language have been used to mean whore. But Miss is the only one which appears to have successfully ameliorated its status – from designating whore to adorning fashionable women and prominent writers. Where writers of the first half of the 18th century were invariably Mrs, those in the second half could opt for Miss if they were unmarried, although the choice was not inevitable. Frances Burney was Miss, but portraits of Hannah More, who never married, and Mary Wollstoncraft, before her marriage, are titled Mrs.
Portrait of the writer Hannah More. © The Trustees of the British Museum, asset number 1614133030.
Social or marital status?
Mrs was not applied to unmarried women of a certain age to raise them to the respectable status of married women, as is often implied or assumed. Mrs was simply the standard counterpart of Mr until the 19th century.
It was the introduction of Miss in the mid–18th century for unmarried adult women, that distinguished women’s marital status by title for the first time. But still only the members of the slightly higher gentry were distinguished by marital status. Our earlier post Mrs Man explained that England was the only European country in which women took their husbands’ surnames, and from the early 19th century a new fashion described a woman by her husband’s first name as well, in the format dubbed ‘Mrs Man’.
This formulation became so pervasive that earlier portraits were rechristened on acquisition by museums. The wealthy colliery owner Ellen Morewood appeared in the post on Female Entrepreneurs. When the National Trust in 1983 acquired Joseph Wright’s portrait of Morewood, it was retitled ‘Mrs Henry Case-Morewood’, referring to her future second husband Henry Case (who hyphenated her name with his as a condition of the marriage settlement). To Morewood herself, this representation of her name would have been unrecognisable.
Joseph Wright of Derby, Ellen Goodwin, Mrs Henry Case-Morewood. National Trust, Clandon Park.
In the 1840s, ‘titles of politeness’ (as the OED terms them) were extended to what George Eliot called ‘the poorer class of parishioners’. In Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), Eliot’s fictional charwoman was Mrs Cramp and the gardening odd-job man was Mr Tozer. This application of ‘titles of politeness’ would have been incomprehensible even 50 years earlier.
Ms
The alternative title of Ms had been proposed in the US in 1901, precisely to solve the problem of not knowing, or not wanting to know, a woman’s marital status. It was not widely taken up until the 1970s, when Mrs no longer seemed aspirational to many women, and when direct-mail marketing required a more universal form of address. The use of Ms restored the function that Mrs had served between the 16th and the 19th centuries: to describe adult women (now regardless of capital).
The history of Mrs and Miss indicates that marriage had less significance for female identity before the modern period. But our modern preconceptions continue to influence our interpretation of the past.
How do we know?
The use of titles can be traced in dictionaries and printed material of all kinds, and in private letters and diaries. In tax lists and in population (proto-census) listings, such as that shown from Astley in 1782, a handful of people were usually recorded as Mrs or as Mr. A few business cards use titles, but the vast majority give only first name or initial and surname of the business owner.
The census from 1851 only occasionally recorded titles. As late as 1881, of 734 single women designated by a title, between one fifth and one quarter used Mrs rather than Miss. As Mrs progressively lost its distinction of social level, only its marital meaning remained by 1900, with the sole exception of upper servants who were still Mrs though unmarried.
Further reading (open access)
Tags: marriage, social history, women's history, women's work