It started of with RayAlome wanting a system where Ms. would be attached to the maiden name of women and Mrs. would be attached to the husband’s last name.

RayAlome then suggested that the best thing to do is to use a gender neutral pronoun by calling everyone Sir.

Which I then brought up that it was funny that when we call everyone Sir or Madame, we are actually calling the women Mrs. since Madame is obviously derived from Madame in French. But apparently (according to RayAlome since he’s taken 4 years of French), Madame can be used as both Mrs. or a term of respect for women, sort of tu vs vous (tu vs ustead in Spanish) where one is formal and the other is informal. RayAlome then commented why should only the married woman be respected.

We went on to discuss Fraulein and how I learnt that word while watching Monster (the anime) and now I find out it’s disrespectful to use it in Germany. Apparently the term was used in The Sound of Music too.

We then hit the main question, why is there only Mr. for men. RayAlome questioned me back with why do women take the men’s last night. That was an interesting question, not because the answer wasn’t obvious, but the fact that when woman married, they leave their former family and enter’s the husband’s family. In Japan, you are removed from your family’s registry and relisted under your husband’s family registry in the official government records. However, there’s also been cases where men married into a woman’s family, but those cases were far and few. RayAlome then asked if those men had a different title instead of Mr. and that was what was so interesting. I didn’t really know and I didn’t even know how to start looking for it.

Anyway, while I was searching for clues, I decided to look up the etymology for these salutations:

Mr. – 1447, abbreviation of master (q.v.). Used from 1814 with a following noun or adj., to denote “the exemplar or embodiment of that quality” (e.g. Mr. Right, 1922, first in James Joyce; Mr. Fix-It, 1925, first in Ring Lardner; Mr. Big, 1940, first in Groucho Marx). The pl. Messrs. (1779) is an abbreviation of Fr. messieurs, pl. of monsieur, used in Eng. to supply the pl. of Mr., which is lacking.

Mrs. – 1582, abbreviation of mistress (q.v.), originally in all uses of that word. The pl. Mmes. is an abbreviation of Fr. mesdames, pl. of madame. Pronunciation “missis” was considered vulgar at least into 18c. The Mrs. “one’s wife” is from 1920.

Ms. – (pl. Mses), 1949, considered a blend of Miss and Mrs.

Miss – “the term of honour to a young girl” [Johnson], shortened form of mistress. Earliest use (1645) is for “prostitute, concubine;” sense of “title for a young unmarried woman, girl” first recorded 1666. In the 1811 reprint of the slang dictionary, Miss Laycock is given as an underworld euphemism for “the monosyllable.”

So now you see, the 3 terms are actually derived from the words master and mistress and Mrs. was actually used to refer to one’s wife started in 1920. I’m not sure if that meant the word used like “How’s the Mrs.?” or the title as in Mrs. Doe.

Hopefully you found this interesting.