Why is a man called Mr. no matter what his marital status, but a woman is called Mrs. or Miss or Ms. ?
Thanks.
It used to be that a boy or young man would be reffered to as ‘master’, but this is no longer in common use.
Re the OP: I would say it probably has it’s roots in the historical idea of the bride becoming the property of the groom.
Because an adult man’s legal and social status, and his relationships with the world at large, never depended on whether he was married or not, whereas an adult woman’s status did. Hence people wished to know whether a woman was married or not (and many women wished people to know whether they were married or not). So Mrs and Miss developed. Now that a woman’s marital status no longer matters to anyone but her and her husband, Ms has developed.
Mangetout, attitudes may have been regressive in the past but a woman was never the property of her husband.
Well, perhaps not formally, but in many practical ways such as the right to initiate divorce, ownership of property (intellectual and tangible) and so on.
Interestingly, Miss and Mrs. are contractions for the same thing, Mistress, which now means something different than either one of those. Not sure when they bifurcated to mean two different things.
Ms can be used by any woman of any marital status. It’s equivalent to Mr. for a man. The advantage of using Ms is that you know to always use the woman’s first name and last name with it, no matter what her marital status. Mrs. is another story.
If Miss Alice Jones marries Mr Bob Smith, and you wish to send something to her that is very formal (like a wedding invitation) you don’t use her name at all, you use a convoluted courtesy title, Mrs. Bob Smith (i.e. wife of Bob Smith). If Bob dies, you then address it to Mrs. Alice Smith (i.e. widow of Mr. Smith-- you don’t use his first name, because he’s dead.) If, instead, they divorce, you send it to Mrs. Jones Smith if she keeps the name for children’s or career’s sake (i.e. the ex-wife of Mr. Smith, and since there can be more than one, it’s the ex-wife who was formerly Miss Jones).
If Alice Jones decides to keep her own last name in marriage, then she must formally be Ms Jones, not Mrs., because she’s not married to someone named Jones, and Mrs. in the case of a married woman means “wife of.”
Alice is free to use Ms even if she takes Bob’s last name, with one exception-- she cannot be Ms Bob Jones, because Ms doesn’t state anything about her relationship to Mr. Jones.
Corr
a Ms now and always
Mangetout’s getting at the right idea - but it wasn’t so much ownership as it was fusion of identity. Prior to mid-19th-century statutory reforsm, a married woman had no separate legal identity from her husband. Blackstone’s Commentaries illustrate the point:
With all due respect, I would submit that, when addressing a person in a formal manner, one should use the form of address preferred by that person. If the aforementioned lady preferred to go by “Mrs. Alice Smith”, then that is the way in which formal correspondence should be addressed to her.