Research by Cambridge University historian Dr. What she found in registers, records, and archives led her to question existing assumptions and track the changes that have taken place in the history of titles. A woman who governs; correlative to subject or servant; 2. A woman skilled in anything; 3. A woman teacher; 4. A woman beloved and courted; 5. A term of contemptuous address; 6. A whore or concubine. Before that, Miss was only used for girls, in the way that Master is only ever today increasingly rarely used for boys.
Mrs and, later, Miss were both restricted to those of higher social standing. Women on the bottom rungs of the social scale were addressed simply by their names. Erickson suggests that this interpretation is mistaken. But two thirds of these women in Bocking were specified as farmers or business proprietors.
So Mrs is more reliably being used to identify women with capital, than to identify marital status. Only one woman was Miss: the schoolmistress.
This trend was probably fuelled by the novels of the s such as those by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Sarah Fielding, which featured young gentry Misses and upper single servants titled Mrs. The boundaries between the old and new styles are blurred, but Mrs did not definitively signify a married woman until around Austen used this technique to establish seniority among women who shared the same surname. To many women in the late 20th century, the practice of replacing her first name by his first name added insult to injury.
In fact, it has an impeccable historical pedigree since it was one of several abbreviations for Mistress in the 17th and 18th centuries, and effectively represents a return to the state which prevailed for some years with the use of Mrs for adult womenβonly now it applies to everyone and not just the social elite. The question of which titles are appropriate for which women is likely to remain hotly contested. The proposal has not met with universal favour.
