The Mrs. Files looks at history through a contemporary lens to see what the honorific “Mrs.” means to women and their identity.
About two years ago, when we started going through the millions of photos in The New York Times archives for the Past Tense archival storytelling project, we noticed something puzzling. In one of our files, Frida Kahlo was identified as “Mrs.” Diego Rivera. In another, Ray Eames’s name was scrawled in pen next to her husband’s, which was typewritten. When we went looking for pictures of June Carter Cash, the card catalog directed us to “Cash, Johnny & Mrs.”
How a woman earned the right to be referred to by her own name seemed to be as varied as the lives themselves. On many cards for Coretta Scott King, who stepped to the fore after the assassination of her husband, her name was typewritten over a splotch of white-out, covering what we believe read “King, Rev. Martin Luther Jr.” — just above the familiar letters “Mrs.”
The Times, like much of society, almost reflexively referred to women using the construction “Mrs. Husband’s Name.”
The practice extended into our news pages, often referring in articles to married women — famous or not — by their husband’s names: Mrs. John F. Kennedy, for instance, or Mrs. Frank Sinatra. These women, no matter how extraordinary they were in their own right, were symbolically subsumed into their husbands’ stories.
Amelia Earhart, for one, wasn’t having any of it. In a 1932 letter to The New York Times, she implored the paper to call her by her “professional name.”
“Despite the mild expression of my wishes, and those of G.P.P.,” she wrote, referring to her husband, the publisher George Palmer Putnam, “I am constantly referred to as ‘Mrs. Putnam’ when the Times mentions me in its columns.”
“However,” she added, “it is for many reasons more convenient for both of us to be simply ‘Amelia Earhart.’” (The Times heeded her request.)
This practice was, of course, emblematic of the time.
But we wanted to know how it came to be. It sent us on a journey to learn more about the history of the word “Mrs.” What struck us was how the meaning changed over time.
In 16th and 17th century England, and in its American colonies, “Mrs.” — which was short for mistress — marked a woman’s social status, either through marriage or as “someone who managed her own money or business and governed other people,” Stephanie Coontz, author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage,” wrote in an email. “A married woman of middling status was usually called Goodwife or Dame, while lower-status women didn’t get any honorific at all.”
Only in the 19th century did the “Mrs. Husband’s Name” form develop. “In America this was at first considered ‘a new fashion’ associated with wealthy women and social climbers,” Coontz said. But by the end of the century, “Mrs. Husband’s Name” had been widely adopted. Coontz partly attributes this to the cult of domesticity, which defined women “more exclusively by their marital status.”
Many women, she added, embraced the “Mrs. Husband’s Name” title as a sign of their “pride in their wifely identity.”
Not every woman felt that pride.
In 1855, the suffragist Lucy Stone famously kept her birth name after her marriage to Henry B. Blackwell. As she wrote in a letter to Blackwell: “My name is my identity and must not be lost.”
A century would pass before Sheila Michaels and others would change the way modern women are addressed, by bringing “Ms.” into common use (though the honorific would bubble up for generations even before that). The Times began using Ms. in its pages in 1986.
The title of Mrs. can still summon up fairy-tale imagery of weddings where brides are treated like princesses. When the American actress Grace Kelly became the Princess of Monaco, in 1956, her wedding was covered by more than 1500 reporters and photographers. Three years later, The Times referred to it as “the wedding of the century” — the first time that phrase appeared in the paper.
The iconic American actress gave up both her maiden name and her film career for marriage. But fans never stopped hoping that the star of films like “To Catch a Thief” would return to acting. Gary Cooper, who was Kelly’s co-star in “High Noon,” dismissed the notion that films could offer the actress more than the charmed life of a European princess. “Why should she?” he told reporters, “She’s gone from an artificial stage to a real one.”
Yet one doesn’t need to be a princess to feel that marriage is a stage on which you are being assigned to play a part different from the one you played before.
With the Mrs. Files we’re looking back at our archives with a contemporary lens to explore, through essays, photos and poetry, what names and marriage mean to women and their identity. What we’ve found is that who a woman becomes in the world, and how she is regarded, can never be reduced to a one-dimensional story of titles and honorifics.
In this moment of the coronavirus pandemic, love, partnership, support and the decision to join forces and become family have taken on a new urgency. We have watched with awe and appreciation as couples have decided that marriage is a thing too important to wait for the pomp and circumstance of a big wedding. With each generation, the emphasis on marital titles fades further and further into the past, but what pulsates through time remains vital: The story of how two people endeavored to build a life together never gets old.
Jennifer Harlan contributed reporting.
