Standing Room

28 March 2009

Last week I was invited to join Radio 2 to discuss the European parliament’s most recent time-, energy- and money-wasting wheeze

I elbowed my Miss title when I chose to get married. I chose to become Mrs Standing. Patently my title ‘indicates’ my relationship to a man. But not just any man; my man happens to be my husband. Had I wanted to stay a Miss or to morph into Ms Sarah Forbes in the workplace, I could have done so, yet having embraced the convention of marriage, there seemed little point in then rejecting my married name. Hardly anyone ever addresses me as Mrs Standing apart from the nice lady in the haberdashery department at Peter Jones, nervous young men coming to take my daughters out on first dates, and those irritating BT employees that call late at night asking if one has five minutes to complete a pointless customer survey. To everyone else — myself included — I’m just Sarah Standing.

Men apparently have it all ways. Their unaltered lifetime title, Mr, means they never have to reveal or ‘indicate’ their marital status in the workplace, and this is what the European parliament is trying to drum up into a sexist argument.

What most bureaucrats fail to take into account, though, is that everyone has a voice they’re at freedom to use. It’s called conversation. When I asked Mr Matthew Bannister if he was married or single, he told me he was married. Sometimes it’s good to talk. And like it or not, most women are ‘masters’ of that.