Ms ...

This week is the beginning of a term in my workplace, an English course (we teach English as the foreign language here in Indonesia.).
One thing I often do on the first day of teaching is to introduce the students to the idea of titles Mr. Ms. Miss and Mrs. Mostly they don’t know yet what is the difference between Ms. And Mrs. They think that Ms. is the abbreviation of Miss.
“My name is Nana. Call me Ms. Nana.” (NOTE: the way to pronounce Ms is Miz; while the way to pronounce Miss is Mis.)
Many students laugh when hearing me pronouncing Miz. That is the best time for me to explain the difference among those four titles.
Mr. As an example, I often use the name of someone close to me, Ery Setyawan. “If I mention the name Mr. Ery Setyawan, do you think this man is married or single?”
In fact, from the answer, I concluded that many of them still don’t know that the title Mr can be used for both single and married man.
For Miss and Mrs, the students mostly know the difference between these two titles. And then I say, “Don’t you think it is not fair? Why for men, there is no difference and for women there is difference? Man can hide their marital status with the title Mr; while for women, when they say their name is Miss bla bla bla ..., people will easily say, “Aha ... this woman is not “sold out” yet, no man wants to marry her yet. It will create another worse feeling when the woman is more than thirty years old. Being single at the age of more than thirty years old in Indonesia is not favored. When the women say that their name is Mrs bla bla bla ... people will comment, “Oh she must behave herself as a married woman. If not, she must belong to the bitch.”
Usually my explanation will trigger my students to laugh loudly. LOL. Then I continue,
“That’s why in the 1960s, the women movement in America created a new title that made women ‘equal’ with men in this case, ‘Ms’. when a woman wants to hide their marital status, she can use this title, “ms’. If she is proud of her being married, well, she can use the title “Mrs.”, if she is looking for a boyfriend and wants people to know her as single, she will use the title ‘Miss’.”
Yesterday, a student asked me why not on the way around? Why didn’t those women create a new title for men where people can recognize a man as someone single or married?
In the 1960s America, many feminists still thought that if they wanted to make themselves equal with men, they had to do anything what men did, including made themselves be like men; such as wearing clothes as men, walking the way men did, didn’t really like the idea of being a housewife, so that they didn’t really respect women who chose to be a housewife, etc. Gradually after the idea of equality between men and women were more spread all around the world, feminists thought that making a choice is really a woman’s right, including if a woman chooses to be a housewife, not only to choose as an astronout, a scientist, a boxer, etc.
Therefore, instead of creating a new title for men so that people can recognize them as someone single or married, those feminists created a title that made women like men, a title that is equal with Mr—can be single or married.
PT56 10.54 070706