809-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Mrs John Dylan asked when mistress became a term for the female half of a long-lasting extra-marital relationship. It’s on record from 1601, though it’s probably older. Incidentally, miss, the conventional term for an unmarried woman, began life at about the same time as the shortened form of mistress in the kept-woman sense but by the middle 1600s was already being used as we do now for any unmarried woman. And Ms was then very occasionally used as an abbreviation for mistress, in all its meanings, though its application as a neutral alternative to Mrs or Miss is a modern US introduction. Though popularised during the 1960s, it is on record as having been suggested by a correspondent to the Springfield Sunday Republican of Massachusetts in November 1901.

“Mistress has been used as a form of address in relatively recent times,” wrote Gill Dunn. “In the late 1950s, my stepmother, as the wife of the headmaster of a village school in Northumberland, was addressed as Mistress Wood.” George Chamier concurs: “Mistress as a term of address to a married or mature woman was still used until very recently in the Scottish Highlands — and may still be by the elderly. I recall a railway official at Inverness station (I suspect he was a Gaelic speaker which may account for the usage) addressing my wife as such in the 1970s.”. “In 1954, as a young teenager living in Exeter (UK),” wrote Roger Clark, “I took part in a school exchange with a French boy who stayed with us for three weeks. When he came downstairs the first morning he greeted my mother with ‘Good morning, Mistress!’ I never did discover where he learned this but I suspect he had a rather old-fashioned teacher.”