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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 7 Hansard (19 June) . . Page.. 1948 ..

ADJOURNMENT

Motion (by Mr Humphries) proposed:

That the Assembly do now adjourn.

MS McRAE (5.23): Mr Speaker, this morning we had an unpleasant situation when somebody called me Mrs, and I replied, by way of interjection, that I was not very happy with that title. I thought I would take this opportunity to read an article which puts the case probably a little less heatedly than I would in relation to the use of Ms. It was in the Canberra Times - Mr Humphries may have read it - on 15 June, but I will just read it through because it makes the points very well about why we find it so insulting to not be called what we choose to be called. Under the heading "The point of Ms still being missed", the article states:

Do you have a man, did you have a man, have you ever had a man?

Each time you use Miss or Mrs you give out this type of information - that's why some women choose to use the supposedly neutral title of Ms.

Ms is defined as "a title prefixed to the name of a woman, used to avoid reference to marital status", or to put it more plainly so people don't know whether a woman has a man, had a man or never had a man. But in its attempt to avoid reference to marital status it seems to have accrued some rather unintended meanings and inferences about its users.

A senior lecturer in women's studies at Murdoch University in Perth, Dr Bev Thiele, says Ms can identify women in a radical political way. "People often react negatively -

as we have noticed -

to the use of Ms. There's often a kind of connotation to it and misunderstanding around the meaning".

About the early 1970s there was discussion about whether Mrs and Miss were appropriate ways of indicating women's status.

"Women thought, `Damn it, we need another way of labelling ourselves' and Ms was a natural contraction of Miss and Mrs and the equivalent of Mr," Thiele says. "There was no equivalent terminology for men so why was there for women? Were women less intelligent - did they lose their brains when they married? Miss and Mrs indicated whether a woman was sexually available or another man owned her, so hands off."

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