Something I wondered about before I started my seven-month teaching post as an English language assistant with the British Council in Lille, northern France, was what my charges, aged between seven and eleven, would call me. Since roughly the age of 18 I have been a ‘Ms’ in the UK, due to feeling increasingly irritated that once into adulthood, men can happily exist as ‘Mr’ for the rest of their lives without having to publicise any details about their personal lives; whereas women are generally expected to disclose their marital status in the use of the titles ‘Miss’/‘Mrs’. Despite the use of ‘Ms’ by women as an abstention from this disparity being reasonably common since the 1970s, I still frequently encounter problems with it. Just recently upon telephoning my UK bank to inform them that when my debit card expires in a couple of months I would like the title to be changed from ‘Miss’ (the card was issued before I was 18) to ‘Ms’, I was told that as ‘Ms’ is a title used only after marriage and divorce, I would need to provide evidence of both these events. I assured the man I was speaking to that it is perfectly possible for a woman to use ‘Ms’ whenever she should want to, and he eventually conceded that oh yes, I do actually know my own title. In another UK bank upon issuing the same request I was patronisingly asked by the (male) bank clerk whether I knew what the title ‘Ms’ was used for.
But nonetheless, ‘Ms’ does at least exist in the UK, unlike in France where there is to my knowledge no real option of abstention from the ‘Mademoiselle’ (‘Miss’)/‘Madame’ (‘Mrs’) system. Single women who do not wish to be patronised by ‘Mademoiselle’ (why it is patronising, in my opinion more so than ‘Miss’, I shall come to shortly) can obviously call themselves ‘Madame’ but this is not a true rejection of the divisional binary between married and unmarried women in French society as it merely suggests that a woman is married even if she actually is not. At the bank in France I was registered as ‘Mademoiselle’ without even being asked, and places like banks are really where the problems start. I find ‘Mademoiselle’ to be problematic because the difference between it and ‘Madame’ aren’t quite as clear cut as the difference between ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs’. As I said, women can use ‘Madame’ without being married if they want, and with women marrying later it has become a signifier as much of age, status, wealth and property ownership as whether or not a woman is married. In the UK one is not greeted in a shop, restaurant, or bank by their title (perhaps ‘Sir’/‘Madam’ but ‘Madam’ is used for women of all ages) in the same way as they are in France – ‘bonjour Monsieur/Madame/Mademoiselle’. In the use of titles in this way, as a woman someone is sizing you up, taking in your appearance and using it to judge your age and the likelihood of you being married, working (as opposed to studying) and/or owning property. I am sometimes greeted as ‘Madame’ and sometimes ‘Mademoiselle’ and when it is the latter I find it difficult not to feel patronised, particularly in financial or bureaucratic environments.
Age does, as I have said, come into the distinction between the two titles, and part of what I dislike is what I sense to be a certain lack of respect, for want of a better phrase, towards not just young women, but young adults in general. My experiences in renting property have thus far been fairly poor and I have found that in overcrowded cities where rented accommodation is difficult to come by, young adults end up hard done-by with few rights in these matters. The problem may perhaps stem from a situation where bad unemployment renders it far more difficult than in the UK for young adults to move out of the family home upon going to university – it is far more common here than in the UK to go to university in the town or city where one was born – and so when people do move out of home, it is often as a newlywed; as was the case in the UK in the past. Although young adults are increasingly bucking this trend and living alone or with friends in rented accommodation, when doing so one seems to be much less recognised as an independent adult with rights just like any other. My bank for example, after a four month battle to change my address (French bureaucracy; we’ll save that one for another time) which required a form filled out by my landlady in addition to a letter written by her to prove that I live here, still could not quite bring themselves to afford me the address as truly my own – on bank statements it appears as ‘Chez Madame…’; the equivalent of ‘C/O’. She does of course own the house but does not live there, and I’m paying the rent.
I teach at two schools, and the first immediately introduced me simply as ‘Rachel’, which I had no problems with. At the second however, the English teacher calls herself ‘Mrs *first name*’, and suggested we introduce me as ‘Miss Rachel’, and explain to the children that I am called this because I am not married. A precise example of why I have a problem with these distinctions in the first place – teaching small children to recognise and judge women according to their marital status; great idea? I explained that I am a ‘Ms’ in the UK and would thus be happy to be ‘Ms Rachel’ – the teachers had not heard of the title, and were very interested by it, stating even before I suggested it that it were high time that France got itself an equivalent! The children have actually ended up, like at the other school, calling me Rachel, which I have no problem with. In a way I quite enjoy the total abstention from the complications of titles, and being able to exist, like the children, innocently by my first name.
