Whether they're shopping online, opening a bank account or booking flights, women are today nearly always required to identify themselves as 'Miss', 'Mrs' or 'Ms'. But it's little known that these titles all derive from the same word: mistress…. How did one word come to have so many different meanings? It also could apply to a woman with a dubious sexual reputation, but then so many words of female address can, including dame, madam, miss, hussy derived from housewife , mother, wife, lady, and queen.
A man who employed servants or apprentices was a master Mr , and a woman who did so was a mistress. But being called Mrs did not mean you were married. Raymond A Anselment, Cambridge, illustrates the range of women for whom Mrs could be used. The autobiographer herself was Mrs Elizabeth Freke; her unmarried niece, daughter of a lady, was Mrs Grace Norton; her unmarried chief servant was Mrs Evans; and the woman from whom she bought newspapers in Norfolk was Mrs Ferrer.
The social standing that earned the title Mrs could derive from gentle status — from chief servant status, or from business proprietorship. These uses of Mrs became more widespread over the course of the 18th century in an increasingly urbanised, commercial society — just as Mr too became more widespread. One of the better known 18th-century businesswomen was Eleanor Coade — , who ran a ceramics factory on the south bank of the Thames in the s and invented the material now called Coade stone, in which she cast shatter-proof sculptures and architectural details that still today ornament London, as well as other cities around the world.
She was invariably known as Mrs Coade — not to appear more respectable or because she had been married she never married , but because that was the normal title for a businesswoman. The marking of marital status in titles began, not with married women, but with unmarried women.
The marking of fashionable women, but not other women, on the basis of their marital status may have been a custom adopted from the French. The development of the Mrs Man form, like the development of Miss more than half a century earlier, was probably an attempt to establish social precedence by the aristocratically connected gentry over the urban commercial proprietors who used the same form of address in Mrs. As Mrs progressively lost its distinction of social level, only its marital meaning remained by the 20th century, with the sole exception of upper servants, who were still Mrs though unmarried.
