Woman, thy name is...confusing

On CBC Radio's The Sunday Edition this morning, Michael Enright talked about a female friend's dismay that her niece is taking her husband's family name when she gets married.

I’ve never married, so I’ve never had to face the decision of whether or not to take a man’s family name – but I was intrigued by Enright's characterization of the dilemma women face as a choice between cutting oneself off from either one’s history or one’s future. I don't think that's an easy choice. I sent The Sunday Edition an e-mail saying:

Though I'm pretty sure I'd keep my father's name, no system seems to satisfy -- how about men and women keeping their surnames, but giving male children the father's surname and female children the mother's? It can't be any stupider than what we do at present.

At least we don’t often see the old practice of calling a woman by her husband’s first AND last names, save when we’re trying to be a tad sarcastic. I got a glimpse of the way this custom not only erased women’s identities but led to some confusion when I happened to read a booklet that outlined the history of the Lutheran church congregation to which my grandparents and their relatives belonged many years ago, in the tiny town of Alice, Ontario, which is outside of Pembroke. In a chapter called “The Role of Women in the Church Life of St. Peter’s 1866-1940” we read that “It can be conjectured that most of the church organists were women. The first factual evidence of this can be found however only in the minute book of January 3, 1934, when Miss Grace Born was asked to fill this position. Mrs. Wilbert Stencill followed her in 1936 and received for her labours not a salary but a gift of $10.” No need to worry that Miss Grace Born might have envied the generous stipend given to her successor, Mrs. Wilbert Stencill, since Miss Born and Mrs. Stencill were one and the same person. But how could the writer of this history have known from reading the old minute books that the organist had remained unchanged between 1934 and 1936 -- except that my Great-Aunt Grace had, in fact, married my Great-Uncle Wilbert?

Meanwhile, I discovered when I was teaching business writing to college students that the younger generation (God, it feels weird to use that phrase) hasn't a clue what the honorific title "Ms." means. Of course, Ms. was intended as a substitute for both Miss and Mrs., conflating the two, in keeping with the sensible notion that there is no reason a woman's title should reveal her marital status if a man's title doesn't. The idea was to have two parallel titles: Ms. and Mr. But when I asked class after class of students what Ms. meant, I always got the same answer: "It means a divorced woman, doesn't it?" I can only assume this misconception comes from the fact that because Ms. never completely caught on, since it became current in the 1970s, the designers of forms have attempted to please everyone and offend no one by giving us four boxes to check off: Mr., Mrs., Miss and Ms. Why would it occur to young people that one of those titles is meant to subsume two of the others? Logic tells them that Ms. must stand for something that is mutually exclusive of the other two female titles -- and if it isn't "married" or "single," it must mean "divorced"! Makes perfect sense, sadly.

Perhaps we should have adopted the system used in French and German, whereby a young woman is called "Miss" until she is "mature," at which time she becomes "Mrs." (i.e., Madame, Frau) regardless of whether she's married or single. That is, provided we used a similar system for men...