Feminist Woes

In my office, everyone is on a first-name basis. So it wasn't until last Friday, when I was inserting a brief bio into a proposal for a new project, that I was hit with the title conundrum. While the other two bios in the proposal used "Dr. This" and "Professor That," I don't have a PhD. The default for me would be "Ms. Shain," as per the current position of the Emily Post Institute on the form of address to women in the business world:

Ms. is the default form of address, unless you know positively that a woman wishes to be addressed as Mrs.

Incidentally, this is a far cry from Chapter X ("Cards and Visits") of Emily Post's 1922 book Etiquette, in which she laments the necessity of any derivation from the Mrs. His Name format:

She is Mrs. John Hunter Titherington Smith, or, to compromise, Mrs. J. H. Titherington Smith, but she is never Mrs. Sarah Smith; at least not anywhere in good society. In business and in legal matters a woman is necessarily addressed by her own Christian name, because she uses it in her signature. But no one should ever address an envelope, except from a bank or a lawyer’s office, “Mrs. Sarah Smith.”

But I digress.

I very much prefer Mrs. Shain, because the use of Ms. as the default form of address for a woman was, if not invented, certainly pushed into the mainstream by the feminist movement. And I reject the label "feminist," because -- and I say this with all due respect to the very real accomplishments of the first- and second-wave feminist movements -- the (third-wave) feminists of my generation spend most of their time promoting a post-structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality, which I utterly reject, and advocating for issues more and more marginal to modern women's lives.

So, as part of my rejection of this trend and affirmation of gender, marriage and other tools of the Patriarchy*, when the time came to refer to myself in the third person in this proposal, I...boldly typed in Mrs. Shain, you ask? Nope. I avoided the issue and used my first name, which was eventually replaced with pronouns in the final draft.

Oh, well. At least it didn't read "Ms. Shain."

*This is a joke.