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Essays for Today and Tomorrow
Call Me Mrs.: A Journey from Feminism to Common Sense
by Lorraine Murray
A rose by any other name, Shakespeare said, would still have a lovely aroma, and that is certainly true. Still, names are important. If you disagree, ask someone whose surname is Pig, and compare that person's life to someone named Jones.
As for me, I am perfectly fine with my last name, Murray, but I wish people would stop automatically sticking "Ms." in front of it.
I am not suggesting that "Ms." be banned, but I would like very much to see a rebirth of the lovely, old-fashioned title, "Mrs." The beauty of Mrs. is that it implies the existence of a Mister to whom the woman is attached. By contrast, Ms. has a cold edge to it, and lumps all women—young, old, married, single, engaged and widowed—into the same amorphous group.
Ms. became fashionable in the seventies, heyday of the women's liberation movement, when feminists reasoned that women should not reveal their marital status in their title, because men, who used "Mister," did not.
As an ex-Catholic and an atheist at the time, this reasoning appealed to me because it reinforced my belief that women should be treated like men. After all, I didn't believe in the existence of inherent, unchangeable masculine and feminine natures since, without God, who would have created them?
As the years passed, however, I found feminism's premise about men and women being the same impossible to defend, largely because it ran afoul of common sense and my everyday observations.
The people who burst into tears during arguments, I noticed, were nearly always women, while those responsible for nearly all violent crimes were men. I never saw a man showing off a wedding band to friends, or shopping for hours to match the shade of his shoes with his shirt.
I also observed that a man encountering an infant in the grocery store generally did not begin talking to it in high-pitched baby talk. And a woman confronted with a spider in her kitchen usually would call for a man, but I never saw the reverse happen.
In What's Wrong with the World, G.K Chesterton writes about a woman who asked him if he believed in "comradeship between the sexes." He found this a bad idea, because men act differently in groups of men than they do with women.
"If I were to treat you for two minutes like a comrade," he said to the
woman, "you would turn me out of the house."
Chesterton was writing in 1910. Still, his words about the deep truths of gender differences struck me as completely reasonable, because I counted myself among those women who had no interest in being treated as "one of the guys" by men.
When I came back to the Catholic Church, I realized that I did not want to live in a society that treated men and women the same. I liked men who had muscles, and had no desire to compete in that category, nor did I want to dress in ties and pin-stripe shirts.
If men wanted to gather in men's clubs and do things they wouldn't do
if women were present, that was fine with me. Women, after all, didn't
want men tagging along on "girls' night out."
I suspect that Chesterton would not have cared much for the "Ms" title either. Some proponents of the title claim that the neutral label allows women to keep their marital status private, which supposedly helps women maintain equal footing with men in the business world.
I can imagine Chesterton pointing out that this argument is rather thin,
because it is remarkably easy to deduce a woman's marital status. You
simply glance at her left hand or engage in the simplest of conversations:
"So does your husband take the bus to work also?"
Besides, it is clear that when you tweak language, you shake up people's perceptions of reality. For many generations, for example, women embraced the label of "housewives," which implied a woman's connection to both husband and house. Later, that title was replaced by "homemaker," a term that no longer implies a marital relationship, and also doesn't entail that the person in question necessarily is a woman.
Today, mothers who remain at home with their children are awkwardly called "stay-at-home" moms, a term that in Chesterton's time would have seemed as redundant as "go-to-work dads." Mothers with jobs are called "working mothers," as if moms at home just twiddle their thumbs.
All of us, thank God, exist in relation to other people, and our titles reveal our deepest connections. Growing up, I was accustomed to being called "Grace and Tom's girl" or "Rosemary's sister." Today, I like being known as Jennifer's aunt or Sarah's godmother.
As a little girl, I dreamt of one day being a teacher and a writer, but there was always another strong current running beneath my fantasies: I hoped and prayed that I would find a man to love, who would love me back—and who would marry me.
I finally did meet my soul mate, Jeffrey Murray, and I was delighted
to stand with him before God as we vowed to become one. I was thrilled
also to take his last name and assume a new identity as his wife. Ever
since then, "Mrs. Murray" has sounded perfectly beautiful to me, and as
sweet as the proverbial rose. 
Lorraine Murray is the author of Grace Notes: Embracing the Joy of Christ in a Broken World and How Shall We Celebrate? She writes a bi-weekly column for the Faith and Values section of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.