Miss, Mrs., Ms., or None of the Above: Gendered Address for Women in the Legislature.

• Author: LeBlanc, Amanda

When it comes to titles used in the official setting of the legislative Chamber or the slightly less formal committee room, women are in the unique position of having several conventional options for identification purposes: Miss, Mrs., or Ms. (1) Each term specifies a different though similarly gendered status, whether one is single, married, or, for lack of a better term, indeterminate and thus independent of the matrimonial framework. The following article explores ways of naming women in the Legislature and is underscored by the history of general usage for women's titles since the turn of the 20th century. Furthermore, this discussion looks toward re-evaluating aspects of current parliamentary language, with the topic of gender-neutral address.

A Short History of Ms.

At the 2016 Hansard Association of Canada (2) conference in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, a panel dialogue suggested that Ms. was the most popular title for women parliamentarians in Canada. It seems logical, then, to begin here, with Ms., which represents a relatively recent change in how the English language classifies women. While the examples noted below are exclusively American (as are the origins of the term) using Ms. is a widespread, accepted way of acknowledging women in Anglophone cultures. In 2009 American linguist Ben Zimmer traced Ms. back to a 1901 edition of the Sunday Republican, a newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts. A brief, anonymous entry proposed the title as an elegant solution to not knowing a woman's marital status, for "to call a maiden Mrs. is only a shade worse than to insult a matron with the inferior title Miss." The writer deemed the title respectful, "easy to write" and pronounce as well as a merging of Miss and Mrs. (which both evolved from older terms for female master, the Middle English "Mistress" and the Middle French "maistresse"). (3)

There are prior historical examples of Ms. being used, but none argue its merits in the same way as the Republican excerpt. The first documented case is the 250-year-old gravestone of Sarah Spooner from Massachusetts, and it may more so highlight the term's brevity for "a stonecutter trying to save space on an already crowded slab" by simply abbreviating Mistress or Miss rather than inventing a new form of address. (4) Another instance occurred in 1898, when the Milwaukee Sentinel used Ms., in this case presumably as a shortened form of Mrs., (5) for a headline regarding silent film star Caroline Dudley Carter, known professionally as Mrs. Leslie Carter. It would not be a stretch to spot inadvertent commentary in the editor's choice to alter Mrs. here, bearing in mind Carter's very public divorce from a wealthy Chicago businessman nine years earlier and her well-known persistence in keeping her married name throughout her career. (6)

The popularity of Ms. picked up steam in the 1950s, and it eventually became emblematic of the 1970s feminist movement, with the founding of Ms. Magazine in 1971. Today Ms. denotes respect through ambiguity, bypassing the issue of marital status. But instead of avoiding the "embarrassing position" (7) of having incorrectly addressed a woman, which would signify a loss of stature according to the Republican's early twentieth-century contributor, the impetus now is more about questioning the relevance of domestic and gender norms in how people are identified along with the values often assigned to those identifications. To go a step further, assuming that any gendered title must be used becomes problematic if the options given do not satisfy a person's needs. I will expand on this later, when discussing gender-neutral language in the Legislature.

Ms. and Mrs. in the Legislature

In February 2010 Glen McGregor of the Ottawa Citizen drew attention to the fact that out of the 69 women then in the House of Commons, more Conservative government MPs preferred the "traditional honorific" of Mrs. (comparing two-thirds of Conservatives to one quarter of Liberals, for example). (8) Female representation in the House of Commons reached a record high following the 2015 election, and out of the 92 women currently serving, 24 go by Mrs. But the title is statistically waning; in 2010 it had a usage rate of 39 per cent overall, (9) and that rate has dropped 13 per cent. Liberals...