What we call women
Deborah Cameron has an interesting post about “a longstanding feminist bone of contention: the use of the terms ‘Miss’ and ‘Sir’ to address teachers in UK schools.”
You can see where the contention comes in: “Sir” ain’t comparable to “Miss.”
In other contexts the female address term analogous to ‘Sir’ is not ‘Miss’ but ‘Madam’ or ‘Ma’am’: though ‘madam’ has undergone some semantic derogation (it has acquired the specialised meaning ‘woman in charge of a brothel’), as an address term it retains a higher degree of formality and gravitas than ‘Miss’. That’s presumably why the related form ‘Ma’am’ has become the standard address term for senior female officers in the armed forces and the police. ‘Miss’ does not suggest deference to someone senior…
Even if you don’t find it belittling, it’s less deferential than ‘Sir’. As the feminist linguist Jennifer Coates commented in 2014, ‘Sir is a knight, but Miss is ridiculous–it doesn’t match Sir at all’. She added:
It’s a depressing example of how women are given low status and men, no matter how young or new in the job they are, are given high status.
But it’s complicated. Do we level up, or do we level down?
One complicating factor is our old friend the sociolinguistics of status and solidarity. The non-reciprocal use of any title marks the existence of a status hierarchy (if you call me ‘Professor’ and I call you ‘Susie’ it’s a safe bet that I outrank you), and feminists tend to be ambivalent about that, caught between resenting the way respect-titles are often withheld from women when men get them automatically, and feeling we shouldn’t care, because after all, we believe in equality. In that egalitarian spirit, some of the people who answered my question on Twitter said they’d prefer to be called by their first names. Though these commenters were critical of ‘Miss’, their objection was more to status-marking in general than to the sexism of ‘Miss’ in particular. This brought them into conflict with other people who were more interested in levelling up (ensuring that women teachers got the same respect as men) than levelling down (flattening the hierarchy by eliminating titles).
Speaking of “Miss” and “Madam” and their connotations…
The connotations of “Mind your place” are all too chillingly obvious.
Are they supposed to address married women teachers as “Miss”?
The use of Miss for female teachers might be connected to the employment and education policies of the last century, in the UK. When counties controlled the recruitment, several banned women altogether, for decades!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/history/sites/themes/society/women_teaching.shtml
Politicians, education providers and, (no surprise) the various churches running/influencing schools, had several excuses: to keep men employed, when unemployment was rising; to provide better discipline in schools; women teachers were only good for girls schools in secondary roles; these are just a few I heard from a relative who was a primary teacher (she taught in the 1930s in a rural area).
In the UK the equal to SIr (Knighthood) is Dame, which itself is looked down on by some. “Sir” is also the title of a Baronet (an hereditary title passed down the male line, invented in the time of James I (or VI to Scotland) as a way of buying favour. Ma’am (rhyming with ham) is normally used by the military or class rigid establishments.
Miss, Mrs, Mr or Dr, in my school years, was used with their family name. At college, then University it was first names. Some schools adhere rigidly to title only; it differs greatly.
@Colin Day,
I was wondering if this is a relic of the days when women were expected to quit teaching when they got married.
Re “Miss”, she mentions in the article the marriage bar, eventually removed, but the title remains.
Note that this issue isn’t so much about calling a teacher “Miss Smith”, but about addressing the teacher without using a name, the way “Mr Smith” might be addressed as “Sir”. This version of “Miss” she says derives possibly from “mistress” or “headmistress” or “schoolmistress”. It’s connected to but not identical to the use of “Miss Smith” for an unmarried woman.
I’d be in favor of calling women “Dames,” if only so I could pretend I’m Frank Sinatra.
It does seem like ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs’ are used in some contexts without any connotation of marriage status. All of us professional theatre dancers, for example, were called ‘Miss’, and it was how our costumes and makeup boxes were labelled; I understand it was (maybe is?) traditional to call cooks and housekeepers ‘Mrs’ irrespective of whether they’re married.
I’ve been rewatching Battlestar Galactica, while waiting for the next season of For All Mankind, and I notice that people call both male and female officers and other officials sir.
“Madam” may theoretically be equivalent to “Sir” but I bet nobody has ever said of a naughty boy “ooh, he’s a right little sir”. Funny how easily all the words for female people slide into being insults.
In most military scifi “sir” is used for officers and non-comms of both sexes. I suspect that’s the case. Of course TV Tropes looked at Lorelei (played by a TIF) being called “sir” and insisted she might be an NB without any actual evidence.
I don’t think I’ve ever called anybody “sir” or “ma’am” in my whole life except as a joke. I’ve never really heard it used as a serious term of respect in the real world outside of TV and movies either. The only time I hear those terms is service workers using them when they don’t know somebody’s name: “Sir/Ma’am, you forgot your keys.”
Calling a teacher “sir” seems hilarious to me. I always called my teachers Mr./Mrs./Miss Name.
Obviously things are different in the UK.
We didn’t call teachers “miss” or “sir” when I was at school in the UK in the 70s. But my niece and nephew do. It’s not a fancy hoity-toity school or anything, just a village school. Their mother is a teacher at a different school and her charges call her Mrs latsot’s-sister-in-law.
So it depends.
We called teachers by their names (i.e. Mrs or Miss Lastname), but in fact I don’t think we usually called them anything, except in referring to them between ourselves. It didn’t come up. There was only ever one teacher teaching, and we faced her, so…
For much of my life I called people Sir or Miss: “Excuse me, Sir/Miss, I think you dropped this”, for example More recently I started using Ma’am instead of Miss. Even more recently I learned that some people avoid titles entirely in such interactions, and I’m largely at a loss for how that works. I know some people who use Mister instead of Sir. The cases I’m thinking of all involve speaking to a stranger, so no name is even possible to be used.
We always called our teachers Mr/Miss/Mrs LastName. In college, it was Dr. LastName or Professor LastName. When I started teaching college, I did the normal thing, and had students call me by my first name. I changed that; now they are not allowed to call me by my first name, because…several things. First, no matter how much equality we want, things are not equal in a classroom. There is a hierarchy no matter what names we use, no matter how we teach, because there is a person who assigns, who teaches, and who gives out grades. There is a person who has learned more than the rest of the people. It is impossible to avoid a hierarchy, and I don’t believe all hierarchies are bad. Most of the feminist theatres in the 70s and 80s had no hierarchy; they were egalitarian. They are also mostly defunct. No one did the work, or one person did the work and the rest resented her because it looked like a hierarchy. Yes, hierarchy can be bad when abusive, but some hierarchies are necessary and needed.
Another reason I don’t let them call me by my first name: once I started going by Dr. X [not my actual initial], students didn’t take advantage of me nearly as much. The respect increased. And I discovered that, while calling me by my first name (even after I started telling them no to that), they were calling all the male teachers by their last names. Mr. A and Mr. B. A student was talking to me one day after class, a student who had been calling me by my first name all semester even though the class was told I did not go by that. She told me “Oh, Mr. U wants me to call him by his first name, but I just can’t bring myself to!” Every man was called Mr. LastName. Women were called by their first name.
Calling someone by their first name is used by journalists as a means of juvenilizing. I learned this from a sportswriter, who pointed out how usual it is to call white players by their last name, and black players by their first name. Women are nearly always called by our first name because we are not considered fully adult.
That being said, I hate Miss or Mrs. They connote ownership. Since I also hate Ms. for my own reasons, I would be in a quandry if I didn’t have that other title by which students can refer to me. A lot of them still call me Mrs. but most of them use Dr. FirstInitialofLastName. It’s friendly and accessible, leaves the appropriate amount of hierarchy in place, and they don’t have to spell my last name.
I get into those situations fairly often, I guess because I walk a lot & use the bus a lot. I just start talking – at least, when I’m facing the person. I can think of a couple of times when I did come up from behind and did feel at a loss for how to get the person’s attention. I think I went with a quick hi followed by did you drop this. One time it was a couple of women deep in conversation as one of them pushed a kid in a stroller – I had to call to them a LOT of times that they had lost a toy. Hello hello HELLO
Oh and of course there’s also excuse me – I think I tried that with the stroller pushers too. But when it’s face to face “I think you dropped something?” and a point seems the way to go. Adding a sir or miss would seem odd. I guess I look them in the face, instead? A kind of accosting via eye contact?
That’s always been one of my pet peeves, actually. It struck me as trying to escape being female by getting people to pretend you’re male long before I encountered the non-binary and trans stuff. It still does.
Star Trek Voyager featured a female captain. She was called Sir. She explained to the crew that it was right and proper, according to regulations, to call her Sir, but she’d prefer that they call her Ma’am. She was Ma’am for the rest of the series.
As Sakbut said, miss was a shortening of the word mistress. Teachers were originally referred to as school masters or school mistresses, hence the term headmaster/headmistress.
When I was at school you referred to female teachers by their name, eg Mrs Patterson or as “Miss”. Even as a child I understood that the term miss had nothing to do with marital status.
In Denmark it’s a little easier, if your teacher is named Peter Larsen you call him Peter. If she’s named Lis Hansen you call her Lis.
If you’re at Uni and have a professor named John Jensen, you call him John.
Only when I was serving in the military was I ever expected to use a formal title, and that ended when we stopped being recruits.
Until then it was Sergent Hansen, and Captain Mortensen, Afterwards it was Sergent, or Mads, and Captain or Peter.
On a train in France I was impressed that strangers addressed each other as Monsieur and Madame, which are much less formal in France than their equivalents in English. It is useful to have a polite way of addressing strangers. I look forward to when the “Mate” greeting will be acceptable at all social levels and ages and both sexes.
The American “ma’am” sounds less formal than “Madam” which always sounds stilted except in posh shops and it’s one Americanism we could adopt. At present it’s only used for the queen and high-ranking policewomen (according to the thrillers I watch).
Shop assistants used to address you as dear, duck, hen, love, depending on the region, but I don’t think they do it so much these days.
In non-fictional militaries that use English, “sir” and “ma’am” are used to address male and female officers, respectively. Not sure why UK schools wouldn’t follow the same practice.
Giving teachers a title for officers seems wrong to me.
It’s not that I don’t respect teachers — I do! I still call my kids’ teachers Mr./Ms./Mrs./Miss LastName. My wife when talking to me will refer to them by their first name which seems so strange to me. But calling them “sir” or “ma’am”, or asking my kids to do that? Seems weird.
A lot of women I know were displeased if they were called ma’am at a younger age, feeling it’s a title for an older woman.
Nobody would have assumed that was your actual initial until you protested too much that it wasn’t. Now we know it is.
Yeah, nobody’s going to mess with Dr. X.
Sir/Ma’am is very solidly embedded in Southern dialect. When asked question, people will answer “Yes, Sir” or “Yes, Ma’am” rather than just “Yes”. It might even be “Yes, Sir, Mr Lastname” or “Yes, Sir, Mr Firstname”. I don’t know exactly what the conditions are that provoke these responses, but they are extremely common.
Personally, I think I only use those words when trying to grab the attention of someone whose name I don’t know (“Sir, would you mind moving your bag?”, or “Excuse me, Ma’am, are you Mrs Potter?”).
Apart from Professor X. And presumably Magneto.
Bollocks to all of this sir/madam/mr/mrs/miss business in any context.
I’m calling you by your first name and whether I do so in a friendly or a sarcastic way depends entirely on your attitude. I expect my fictional children to do the same.