08.03.2005
I recently ran across an old electronic mail message from Dr Toporoski, Associate Professor in the Classics Department of the University of Toronto, which he wrote to me when I was taking his Introductory Latin class. He discusses conventions on the uses of the titles `Miss', `Mrs' and `Ms', and traces their social implications, with his own opinions sprinkled throughout. I thought it a gem, and with his permission I have posted it here.

The email was in response to a question I had asked him regarding his forms of address in the classroom. His convention is to address the men in the class as `Mr' and the women as `Miss'. In my class, there was for a while a married woman, whom he addressed as `Mrs'. I asked him, somewhat jokingly, why he did not call upon the unmarried men using the title `Master'. I was pleasantly surprised by his long and fascinating response.

23 January, 2001.

Mr Hincks,

I've just looked into my electronic mail this evening, so that is the explanation for my delayed reply to your reply.

Since I rather fancy myself as an expert on titulature, I hope you won't mind if sometime, when we are speaking together, I explain why I, personally, eschew that title, "professor". I'd go into a long explanation here but, believe me, it will be shorter and more efficient if we can do it *viva voce*.

Now, having made that claim to expertise for myself, here is my understanding of the titles "Miss" and "Master". Getting into a discussion of "Miss" nowadays is a tricky business and I would be delighted to do it, but again, it would work better if we could discuss it in person. Let me just say as an introduction that "Miss" does not so much indicate an unmarried woman as it does a woman lower in status than one styled "Mrs" (both terms being abbreviations, as you know, of "Mistress"). Now I know that discussions of social hierarchy are not going to be very popular in our democratic liberal republican society, but social hierarchy there will be, whether one likes it or not. So one has to decide whether the hierarchy will be based on one's position in the Communist Party (that, at least, has now passed away) or on the amount of money one possesses (that distinction shows no sign of passing away). I would simply rather base a social hierarchy on other, traditional, principles. So "Mrs" is indeed applied to married women, but because they are higher socially than unmarried women. But it has also been historically applied to other women to indicate status, regardly of marital status. For example, in the last couple of decades in Britain, women who have become high court justices are styled "Mrs Justice...", regardless of whether they are married or not. Canadian practice cannot accept that because we are so Americanised that we do not realise that there are other meanings for "Mrs"; so, ironically, because we are not supposed to like titles, such judges in Canada are styled "Madam Justice..." (I won't get into the Governor-General's insistence that she be referred to as "Madame" Clarkson!).

So I'll leave the discussion of "Miss" there and come to what we are to call males, men or boys. The practice as I understand it (apart, for example, for heirs to Scottish lordships, who are styled "The Master of ...") is that a boy is styled "Master" from his infancy to high school age, at which time he is styled nothing (and can always be addressed by his first name) until he reaches university age, when he acquires the title "Mr". This is because, I will maintain, and, as I say, I would be happy to discuss this at much greater length, the titles "Master" and "Mr" and "Miss" and "Mrs" have nothing to do with matrimonial status (except insofar as that contributes to social status), but everything to do with one's place in society. As for the view that women are unfairly treated in revealing their marital status by their title (but not all women do, obviously; the Baroness Zouche, to pluck an example out of the air, certainly indicated her social status by her title, but nothing about her marital status), this comes down, I will argue, to Christian anthropology, that is, the Christian understanding of family, an understanding now generally abandoned by contemporary society.

Wow! If you are game, there are a lot of things to discuss there.

As for the first point in your note, would you be able to write the test some time on Thursday? If not, Monday will do. Perhaps you could just go out at the beginning of class for five minutes. May we can make a final decision tomorrow?

Yours,

Richard Toporoski.

P.S. Watch out for this common slip:
>however, Monday would be alright.
The expression is "all right".

R.M.T.

To-day, he emailed me with some more thoughts on the subject after he re-read the above message. These are posted below.

Unfortunately, I seem to have forgotten to mention another example of the use of "Mrs" in addition to its use for high court women judges. It was the practice in a noble or any great house for the principal woman servant to be styled and addressed as "Mrs So-and-so", regardless of whether she ever had been married or not. Again, the title indicated her status at the head of the serving household.

I might add something that I wrote many years ago (and will have to reconstruct from memory) for The St Michael's Bulletin to explain the practice with regard to titles which I was going to follow. I remember pointing out there that (before the introduction of "Ms"), while "Mrs" had indeed become, in the North American mind, exclusively an indication of marriage, the title "Miss" certainly did not exclusively indicate an unmarried woman, but was the normal title for a woman in her professional life, using her original family name. I used as my example the then "Miss Elizabeth Taylor", pointing out that no one was in any doubt about the married, indeed multiple-married, state of Miss Taylor. (Now that she is Dame Elizabeth Taylor, the situation no longer arises.) For that reason, I have always been puzzled why the media jumped to use "Ms" for women, when "Miss" had been so universally used for professional women without any aspersion being cast that any individual woman hadn't been able to find a husband. (I suspect that, though feminists present as their argument that a woman should not have to take her husband's name or declare by her title that she is dependent on a man, the real psychological reason lurking behind all this is the unwillingness to admit that she either has not been able to find or does not want to have a man. My evidence for this is that the title "Mrs" is in fact much more popular (when a woman marries) than the title "Miss" seems to be. One cannot tell this, of course, even from the National Post, which uses "Ms" for 95 per cent of women, even when the article is chiefly about the husband and the wife uses the same name! Well, I guess their policy makes it possible for them not even to have to think about what title to use. In a way, they do the same thing with men. "Mr" is attached to everyone. The most recent example I can remember is a reference to "Mr Branson" in an article which was clearly, and by title, about Sir Richard Branson. They've done worse than that, although I cannot remember the particular example; all I can remember is that they have definitely joined the school of The Globe and Mail, which is once (and I'm sure that this is true and not apocryphal) said to have referred to the Emperor of Japan as "Mr Hirohito"!

My other major example of the professional use of "Miss" in that explanation was Barbara Ward, the famous British (and Catholic) economist of thirty or forty years ago. She spoke at U. of T. once under St Michael's auspices. And she was always known professionally as "Miss Ward", even though she was married. Socially, as the wife of Sir Robert Jackson, she was, of course, "Lady Jackson". I think she became estranged, perhaps even divorced, from her husband, but when she was raised to the peerage, she did not use "Ward" in her title but actually used her husband's name and assumed the title of "Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth". P.D. James, on the other hand, though Mrs White by marriage (her husband died a long time ago), has become Baroness James of Holland Park.