Have you ever felt confused by the salutation to use in a formal communication with a woman you don’t know? Although there are many confounding factors, a woman is Ms. So-and-So in formal situations. This is a comparatively new salutation (certainly not as new as Mx.—more on that on Friday) that came about because of the confusion. Here’s the history.
Back in ye olden days, a woman was Miss before she got married and Mrs. after. The honorific Ms. is actually fairly old, with the first known use of it from 1901. The idea was that it was insulting to call a matron (ahem) by the insulting and apparently dreadfully inferior title of Miss because… I guess she had been promoted by snagging a man?
Anyway, the term didn’t come into common usage until the late 1960s, when people, especially feminist writers, noted the need for a more neutral term of address for women. A man continues to be Mr. throughout his life, regardless of whether he gets married (with some particular exceptions for British medical doctors) so how on earth is it fair that a woman’s status changes?
These terms, of course, assume binary gender, and we are becoming increasingly aware of the limitations of this way of thinking, but the old traditions are pretty ingrained, and we lack a gender-neutral formal term of address that has been largely embraced. So for now, at least, we are stuck with at least some of these gendered terms.
So of you wish to address a woman you don’t know formally, call her Ms. Unless she has a PhD or is a medical doctor. (The terms actually has a longer history of use with those who hold doctoral degrees, so I will absolutely address the First Lady as Dr. Biden.)
You can see how thorny this issue is, even without gender-neutral language! My grandmother, having helped put my grandfather through medical school, was of the belief that dentists shouldn’t be called Dr. (I never had the nerve to ask her about veterinarians.) But for our purposes, your default choice, especially if someone lists her pronouns as she, her, and hers, is to call her Ms.
