GERMANS SAID auf Wiedersehento their "Fräulein" as a term to address adult women in 1972. The English language has allowed the Ms alternative for some years, but Italy and Spain retain their señoritasand signorinas. Now France has also accepted the logic that the designation of a woman's marital status need not be part of her name, a demeaning signal, feminists argue, of her sexual availability. (Although, it has to be said, "Madame" may also refer to a brothel owner...)
Prime minister François Fillon has directed ministers and prefectures to ensure that the term “mademoiselle” and other phraseology deemed discriminatory, such as “maiden name” and “spouse’s name”, are removed from all official French documents like tax forms, social insurance claims and voting cards. The use of the male version, “Mondamoiseau” (“squire”), has long disappeared.
Fillon's election-year gambit has not gone down well with conservatives – a Figaroonline poll of its readers recorded a 70 per cent Non– and there are attempts under way to persuade the legal guardian of the French language, the Academie Française, to step in. Some feminists are scornful of a "piece of tokenism", arguing that the government should be addressing more pressing issues like inequality in the workplace.
But language is important too. It reflects and to a degree legitimises social attitudes, in this case of unequal treament of men and women, a hangover, some would say, from times when women were largely defined as the property of men. Fillon’s decision is right.
How much further the argument should be taken is another matter. The next target of some of France's feminists is now French grammar and its inherent sexism, specifically the rule for the agreement of adjectives – it requires that when referring to both male and female nouns the former trumps the latter. As a Guardianblogger has explained it: "We say 'Un Français et 30 millions de Françaises sont contents'; those 30 million French women have to be contents in the masculine form as dictated by their one male companion, rather than contentes as they would be without him."
The prevalence of the masculine appeared with rules introduced by the grammarian Claude Favre de Vaugelas in 1647. "The male is the most noble," he wrote "he must prevail whenever masculine and feminine appear in the same sentence." And this from the land of Jeanne d'Arc whose national emblem is Marianne, a representation of liberty and reason! À vous, l'Academie...