IIRC, some newspapers dropped male honorifics before female ones; so that, after the first mention, John Smith would become just Smith but Mrs. or Miss Smith would remain Mrs. or Miss Smith all the way through the story. (Any paper still doing this wouldn’t have been using Ms.)
And then there were the producers of The Waltons, who added “Miss” to Michael Learned’s name, to avoid confusion about the actor’s gender.
Interesting. I wonder whether there’ll be a resurgence in the use of titles in response to the recent need to identify genders. We’d have to first decide what the set of titles should be, though, so maybe not.
I want “Honorable”, even if it’s a lie.
The New York Times used Mx yesterday when referring to someone who identifies as non-gender binary (because they were the first to receive a US passport with an X gender identifier rather than M or F).
Not just theatre folk: British surgeons used to do this. Some still do.
Regardless of what you see these days, it is incorrect to refer to a woman as Mrs. [her own name], and that includes her own first name with her married last name.
When Lucille Ball was married to Desi Arnaz, she was “Mrs. Desi Arnaz,” and it was correct to address her that way, but that was not her professional name, so no one would ever have called her that when introducing her where she was appearing in her capacity as a star in her own right.
However, she was never correctly “Mrs. Lucille Arnaz,” and that would be true even if she were really the housewife she played on TV, who had taken her husband’s name upon marriage.
When she used her maiden name, she was correctly “Miss Lucille Ball.” “Miss” did not indicate her marital status, just the fact that she was using her maiden name, marital status notwithstanding.
You can look it up in Emily Post, or Judith Martin.
Joan Crawford was another thing altogether-- “Miss Joan Crawford” was entirely a work of fiction, as her maiden name was Lucille LeSueur, but I suppose it was less incorrect to call her “Miss” than “Mrs.”
“Miss” indicates certain family ties as well-- the oldest unmarried daughter in a family is “Miss Ball,” while the other sisters use their first names a well. That means that if Lucille Ball is the oldest of several sisters, and married, but using her maiden name, she is not the oldest unmarried sister, and so she uses her first name along with the family surname. Whichever of the sisters is the oldest and unmarried is “Miss Ball.”
For all the women out there who style themselves “Mrs. [given first name] [husband’s last name],” well, it’s wrong, but it’s wrong like wearing white after labor day, or a tuxedo in the morning is wrong. I will admit that it bugs me, but then, so does people thinking the plural of “fetus” is “feti.” It doesn’t bug me nearly as much as able-bodied people parking in the handicapped space. It’s not even in the same paradigm.
Yup. Per Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932):
IIRC, upon the death her husband, Mrs. Robert Smith then became Mrs. Jane Smith. Her wedding ring would be moved to her right hand, and she would wear black for one year. Her social life would largely consist of chaperoning her young relatives courting.
Yeah, sucks.
Mrs. Jane Smith could only escape this fate if a scalawag gentleman caller bought her a big green hat.
It’s been widely practiced for centuries, though. As Miss Manners has noted, the Elizabethan title “Mistress” (the ancestor of both the modern abbreviations “Miss” and “Mrs.”) did not change upon marriage: Mistress Nell Quickly became Mistress Nell Pistol.
And the same sort of format using the abbreviation “Mrs.” was very widespread up through the 19th century. Here’s an 1878 postcard from the poet Walt Whitman addressed to a “Mrs Anne Gilchrist”, for example. Here’s an 1853 song dedicated to “Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe”, for another.
As my second cite observes, “Mrs did not definitively signify a married woman until around 1900”. Etiquette manuals shifted their tone over time to reflect and reinforce the association of “Mrs.” with the married state and married name. Here, for example, is how an 1896 etiquette book treats the use of the title “Mrs.”:
And here’s Emily Post’s Etiquette in 1922, firmly putting the kibosh on any such flexibility:
I think it’s more accurate to say it’s wrong somewhat like splitting an infinitive in English is wrong.
Namely, it’s a naturally arising and historically widespread practice that was officially prohibited, comparatively recently, by a bunch of professional rule-makers interpreting the concept of “correct usage” in a much more narrow way. But it was never entirely stamped out, and it has recently regained a lot of its normative status as the prestige of the more prescriptivist rule-makers has declined.
(And I say that as somebody who personally adores both nitpicky etiquette distinctions and persnickety Latinate grammar rules in English. Just because they’re fun doesn’t mean that the people who decreed them always had a well-informed sense of whether or why they should exist.)
My ex-wife needed a date for a high end charity event a few years ago so I went with her. She took my last name when we got married and kept it when we divorced*. When the paper took our picture, we told them that they had to caption it as “He Lastname and She Lastname” as opposed to “He and She Lastname” since we were not married. Obviously she and I and the journalist were amused by this insistence of correctness.
*We were engaged for nearly a year before we got married. In that time we never discussed whether or not she would take my last name. I assumed that she wouldn’t. I literally didn’t know that she was going to do the name change until we were filling out the forms a couple of days prior to the wedding, Likewise with the (very friendly) divorce and keeping the name.
Maybe she only married you for your name? 
I have a monosyllabic last name, and the only reason I could think of for getting married (when I was a kid) was to get a nice long last name. I only have nine letters in my entire first/last name combo! I always envied Bernadette Grandilli. Now, that’s a name!
Her previous last name is perfectly fine and fairly common. Mine is very rare and honestly super cool, like hotel clerks take a second glance and compliment me on it. On social media, people accuse me of making it up. The only three people in the entire western US with it are me, the ex and my step-mom.
See??? I told you!
I just had to explain this to someone yesterday. He called me Mrs. MyLastname and I had to explain to him that I am not Mrs. MyLastname. He looked at me surprised and said "I thought you were married. " I replied that since MyLastname is not HusbandsLastname , it’s Ms , not Mrs.
Somehow or another, my daughter paid no attention during her entire life and failed to notice that I am not opposed to using Mr. & Mrs. HusbandsLastname socially for invitations and Christmas cards etc. So I assume now her in-laws must think that I am married to someone other than her father - because her wedding invitations referred to us as
Mrs. Doreen MyLastname and Mr. Danny HusbandsLastname
I hope you also explained that your preference is by no means universal or mandatory (see post #32), and that plenty of married women use “Mrs. Herfirstname Herlastname” as their preferred form of address. Otherwise you’re just going to confuse him worse.
I may not have been clear ( or maybe I didn’t understand post #32 correctly) - but I’m not talking about referring to the woman married to Calvin Stowe as Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. I’m talking about referring to her as Mrs. Harriet Beecher. Or Mrs. Anne Burrows, the wife of Alexander Gilchrist , or Mrs. Grace Etheridge , the wife of George B. Cleveland. Or (going back to the OP) referring to Mrs. Lucille Ball, the wife of Desi Arnaz.
I am not going to say there is no married woman who uses Mrs. with her own last name that is different from her husband’s - but it is certainly not common and I have never met a woman who used that style for herself . I’ve known plenty who didn’t argue or correct someone else who referred to them that way - but that is not the same as preferring it.
Yup, got that.
Yup, any discussion thread about nomenclature on wedding sites, such as this one, will turn up dozens of them.
As noted in post #32, using “Mrs.” didn’t always necessarily even mean that a woman was married. (Nor does it nowadays for many English speakers in countries like France, Germany or the Netherlands, where these days adult women by default get the “married” title Madame/Frau/Mevrouw or its English equivalent Mrs., irrespective of marital status.)
Of course, any woman is entitled to prefer the more recently established forms of address that are now regarded as “traditional” or “conventional”, such as “Mrs. Hisfirstname Hislastname” or “Ms. Herfirstname Herlastname”. I’m just saying that as time goes by and mores shift, it’s becoming less and less valid to characterize deviations from those forms as “wrong”.