Culture Shifts

By Dianne Collette, For the West Side Newspaper

I recently got reacquainted with my high school yearbook — North Salem High School, graduation year 1959.  I wasn’t looking for anything or anyone in particular, so I started at the front and looked at a section of the book I had rarely paid attention to — the faculty and administration.  What caught my attention was the formality of their titles, and the fact that the marital status of the women stood out.  They were either “Miss” or “Mrs.”  All the men were “Mr.”  None of the women were “Ms.”  This observation led to a discussion with my friend Char, who suggested that what has changed and why might be a topic of interest for the paper.  

I did a little research on the history of the use of Miss, Mrs. and Ms. to describe a woman’s status, thinking I would find a cultural shift unique to my lifetime.  Surprisingly, I was wrong. In the 1600s, the terms mistress and master were used to describe young men and women.  Abbreviations of these terms became Miss, Mrs. and Mr. Then Mrs. and Miss morphed into indicators of marital status.  As early as 1901, folks were suggesting the use of Ms. to get away from the marital status connotation of titles for women. In the 1970s, the revival of the use of Ms. accompanied the cultural shift defining women apart from their marital status. 

It’s that cultural shift that had a big impact on my life. Miss Collette, the old maid school teacher, became Ms. Collette, the successful career woman with a responsible job and enough credit in her own name to buy a house. Fortunately, I profited from lenders scrambling to find single women to whom they could reasonably lend money! This eventually led to my second and fourth home purchases in West Salem.  

I have addressed this cultural shift thing in earlier articles I have written for the paper. This time I did a little research on the concept of cultural shifts and found I have lived through even more of them.  For example, my mom didn’t work outside the home until I was in high school. I was a babysitter in my teens, but I never had a babysitter as a child. I have gone through television being the newest must-have – now it’s old-fashioned to still be watching TV.  I’ve seen the impact of a pandemic on remote learning, televised medical care, and working from home.

My parents bought me a 20 volume set of Encyclopedia Britannica from a traveling encyclopedia salesman who knocked on every door in the community trying to sell knowledge. I could satisfy my curiosity and do research for essays as long as the information needed didn’t need to be more up-to-date than the publishing date of the books. As a comparison, the research I did for this article is among the newest examples of culture shift impacting our collective lives.  All I have to do is type (or speak) a question, and within less than a minute AI has given me an adequate general answer based on current knowledge and thinking and will autocorrect my spelling if necessary. 

In the month of July this year, I will reach my 85^th birthday. Even the idea that an 85-year-old is alive and well and writing articles for a paper is a shift in what was expected of an 85 year old person in 1959.  I wonder how many more changes to the norm I will accept or embrace?