young lady

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Letter with the address "Miss"

Until the 1970s, Fräulein ( Frl. for short) was the formal form of address for unmarried women , regardless of their age. The women's movement criticized the diminutive "Fräulein" (of woman ). In 1972, the German Federal Ministry of the Interior decreed that the use of the word Fräulein in federal authorities should be avoided and that adult females should be addressed as "Frau" (Frau Schmitz) . Comparable terms for young, unmarried women can also be found in other languages, but are sometimes considered outdated or undesirable ( List).

word history

Era "man/woman - gentleman/woman"

In New High German before the 19th century, the salutation "Fräulein" was restricted to persons of rank. " Frau " or Middle High German " frouwe " was not a gender designation (there was " Weib " or Middle High German "wîp" for that), but the designation of an aristocrat , just as " Herr " was not a form of address for everyone, but for the feudal lord . Correspondingly, the "Miss" referred to the prince's daughter and the " Junker " - the 'young gentleman' - the prince's son, while the " Jungfer " or the " Jungmann " referred to young women and men regardless of their social status. This original meaning of "Miss" still appears e.g. B. in Goethe's Faust , when Faust addresses Gretchen with the words (verses 2605 f.):

My beautiful lady, may I dare
To offer you my arm and company?

Since Gretchen is a person of low status, this is to be understood as a deliberately gallant form of address with which Faust wants to "beguile" Gretchen according to all the rules of ( courtly ) art. She replies factually correct and ungallant (verses 2607 f.):

I'm neither Miss, neither beautiful,
Can go home unguided.

Later Marthe says to Gretchen (verses 2905 f.):

Think, child, for all the world!
The Lord takes you for a miss.

Era "Man/Woman"

Form of address Mr. vs. Mrs. or Miss

Job advertisement in the Bozner Nachrichten from 1917: "Miss" wanted for child rearing

In the late 19th and early 20th century, the salutation Fräulein became established primarily for working women (e.g. employees in department stores, waitresses and teachers), since female employment was still strictly limited to the time before marriage.

In the German Reich there was a ministerial decree from 1880 to 1919, according to which female teachers had to be unmarried, the teacher celibacy . Fraulein Rottenmeier from Johanna Spyri 's novel Heidi is a well-known representative of the "Miss teacher" type.

Until 1957, § 1354 BGB gave husbands in West Germany the right to prohibit their wives from gainful employment. Such regulations explain the stubborn correlation between employment and celibacy in thinking, which has existed for a long time with regard to women in German-speaking countries and which found expression in the designation Fräulein for working women.

time of exceptions

"Miss" in conversation with British soldiers, July 16, 1945

During the National Socialist era , the practice of calling all women, regardless of their age, “Fräulein” if they had never been married was relaxed: in 1937, the Reich Minister of the Interior gave all mothers of illegitimate children permission to apply to the responsible police authority to register as “Frau ' after this permission had been entered on the identity card . From May 1937, the uniform form of address “Frau” was the rule for official traffic in the public service . During the Second World War , this was also granted to unmarried mothers of adopted children and fiancés of war dead.

After 1945 the "doitsche Froilain" was discovered by the American GIs stationed in Germany and the "Fräulein" became a foreign word in English. Since then, the proverbial saying “German Miss Miracle ” has existed. In 1951, Wolfgang Koeppen created a literary monument to this type in his novel Tauben im Gras ("The Fräulein" is one of more than thirty characters in this novel).

Establishment of the designation "woman" and suppression of the designation "Miss"

In 1869, the Prussian Minister of the Interior Friedrich zu Eulenburg issued a decree, according to which the predicate "woman" was awarded as a title or royal favour. In 1919, the Prussian state minister Wolfgang Heine changed the use of the designations "Frau" and "Miss" from 1869 (MB 298) with a decree, as he saw the lack of a legal basis for this and it no longer corresponded to the living conditions and facts.

In the Weimar Republic, from 1919 onwards, the form of address “Frau” was no longer used as a designation of civil status, so that unmarried people were also allowed to call themselves that in everyday non-official life.

From 1937, according to a circular by the Reich and Prussian Ministers of the Interior, unmarried females were allowed to call themselves “woman” without prior official approval being required in individual cases. With the circular issued by Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick in 1941, women had to apply to the registry office for permission to call themselves “woman”. Permission was to be entered on the identity card. Without an entry in the identity card, the designation as "woman" was forbidden. Every time you change your place of residence, you have to apply again. This also applied to illegitimate mothers and unmarried adoptive mothers.

In the GDR , unmarried females were allowed to use the designation "Frau" without permission from 1951 onwards.

"The double salutation woman - miss is nothing other than the official classification and evaluation of the entire female sex according to its declared relationship to the man. Marital status is a private matter for men, but an object of public interest for women.”

– 1952: Letter to the reader in the CDU party newspaper Union in Germany

In 1954, the parliamentary group of the German Party (DP) requested, among other things, the repeal of the regulations on the official designations of an unmarried woman. On December 17, 1954, Elisabeth Lüders, the FDP member of parliament, made a plea for the abolition of the Fräulein in the plenary hall of the German Bundestag. In 1955, Federal Minister of the Interior Gerhard Schröder (CDU) repealed the Prussian and National Socialist reference decree in a circular and decreed that every female person who wished to do so must be referred to as "woman" in official letters:

“The term 'woman' is neither a civil status designation nor a part of the name nor a title that should or could be bestowed. Nor is it synonymous with 'wife'. Rather, any unmarried female person is free to call herself 'woman'. This possibility is increasingly being used. It is therefore justified and necessary to address unmarried females as 'Ms' in official dealings if they so wish."

In 1971, the German Federal Ministry of the Interior under Hans-Dietrich Genscher ( FDP ) announced that the use of the word Fräulein in federal authorities should be avoided; With the decree of January 16, 1972, the designation Miss was abolished and the salutation of adult females with "Ms."

"It is time to take into account the equality of men and women in official language and the contemporary self-image of women of their position in society. It is therefore no longer appropriate to address adult females differently in official parlance than has always been the case with adult males. […] In official parlance, the form of address 'Frau' should therefore be used for every female adult."

In the mid-1970s, the last official form on which a "Fräulein" appeared was destroyed.

From the 1970s onwards, the women 's movement criticized the diminutive form "Fräulein" because of the social values ​​and ideas that came into play in it: on the one hand, the neuter gender (similar to the woman ) triggers unwanted associations (as if female persons were things), on the other hand it gets through the use of the distinction between Fraulein and Fraulein promoted the view that a woman could not be considered an adult until she married, while calling a young unmarried man ' Sir ' signaled that he was considered an adult hold a full-fledged man. Because the Junker (bachelor) had no comparable word history into the bourgeois age and the young man has only survived as a swear word for the " Hagestolz ", not as a formal category.

The criticism of the traditional use of language was systematized in the guidelines for avoiding sexist use of language , which four linguists published in 1980. They recommended abandoning the use of the word "Miss" altogether; anyone who does not follow this recommendation must be considered a “ sexist ”. The German UNESCO Commission agreed with this view in 1993: "The principle of linguistic symmetry states that where women and men are spoken of, both are to be treated equally." Whenever "Mr." appropriate as a form of address or designation, there is no reason to prevent a woman of the same age in the same situation from being addressed or designated as "Ms."

Current language usage

Nowadays, the salutation and the designation "Fräulein" for young women in German-speaking countries are hardly used in correspondence and in formal dealings, but they are in the German-speaking parts of Belgium. The word "Fräulein" has survived as a form of address for a female waitress in a café or restaurant, but this use is also becoming rarer in Germany - like the male counterpart "Herr Ober !". Instead of these designations, an informal " Hello !", "Excuse me!", "Order, please!" or "Pay, please!" or, if known, the salutation with the name is becoming more and more common.

The Japanese Germanist Saburo Okamura was able to prove that the word "Fräulein" is used relatively seldom today, but that there has been no decline in the use of the word since the 1990s. He found that out in an empirical study in which he evaluated all editions of the Süddeutsche Zeitung in terms of language statistics in several years. Okamura gives several reasons for his finding:

  • The word "Miss" is quoted (when naming book or film titles or when referring to historical statements).
  • It is a return to traditional polite forms of dealing without any discriminatory intent.
  • The designation often refers to minors with a pronounced female physiognomy .
  • The word is used creatively to convey facts that are otherwise difficult to express (example: "We are missing a Miss Nikola Kiefer"); the designation usually contains secondary meanings such as “(very) young”, “attractive”, “energetic” and “joyful”.
  • Occasionally, the word "Miss" is also deliberately used to devalue those so named ( not being married as an alleged symptom of immaturity or a lack of seriousness).

In the middle of 2002, the Duden pointed out in a newsletter article that people who value being addressed as Fräulein should fulfill this wish. As a rule, in such cases when speaking and writing in the 3rd person singular, the grammatically actually “correct” pronouns “es” and “sein” are not used (as was the case, for example, with the Brothers Grimm), but the words “ she" and "her" (example: "Miss Meyer left her handbag; she was probably in a hurry").

In 2008, the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy asked Germans about their acceptance of so-called “ taboo ” words, including Fräulein . 47% of respondents said they use Fräulein themselves. 44% said they don't use it, but don't bother either. Only 7% found the use annoying or repulsive.

In 2012, Iris Berben described it as a "little private joy that I'm still a young lady". She regrets that no one dares to call her that today.

In September 2019, the District Court of Frankfurt am Main ruled that a tenant has no right to injunctive relief if she is addressed by her aged landlords in the hallway with the salutation "Frl." or "Miss" on the stair cleaning plan. This designation is not defamatory, but in the overall view of the circumstances, the behavior is at best unfriendly and characterized by a lack of willingness to compromise.

Further use of the designation "Miss"

Persons:

place name:

Literature:

Movie title:

Music:

Operetta, Theater:

Additional:

literature

  • Annette Brauerhoch : Misses and GIs: history and film history. Stroemfeld, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 3-86109-170-4 .
  • Sophie Cohen: Female forms of address: A linguistic history sketch. In: The woman. Volume 26, 1919, pp. 147-151.
  • Anne Quinn Cramer: "Frau" or "Fräulein": How to address a woman in German. In: The teaching practice / For the teaching of German. Volume 9, Issue 1, 1976, pp. 28-29.
  • Theodor Matthias: Wieland's essay: Demoiselle or Miss. In: Journal for German word research. Volume 5, 1903/1904, pp. 23-58.
  • Andreas Nentwich: The Misses. In: Andrea Köhler (ed.): Small glossary of disappearance: From drive-in cinema to double-declutching: Loud obituaries. Beck, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-406-49467-6 , pp. 92–96.
  • Senta Trömel-Ploetz , Ingrid Guentherodt, Marlis Hellinger , Luise F. Pusch : Guidelines for avoiding the use of sexist language. In: Linguistic Reports . Issue 69, 1980, pp. 15-21; Reprinted in Magdalene Heuser (ed.): Women - Language - Literature: Scientific research approaches and didactic models and field reports for German lessons (=  ISL information on language and literature didactics. Volume 38). Schöningh, Paderborn and others 1982, ISBN 3-506-74088-1 , pp. 84–90 ( searchable on Google Book Search).

web links

Wiktionary: Fräulein  – explanations of meaning, word origin, synonyms, translations

itemizations

  1. ↑ Ordinance of the Reich Ministry of Justice No. 2697. In: Reich Budget and Salary Gazette , June 21, 1937
  2. ↑ Angelika Gardiner-Sirtl: Equal rights? What women have achieved - and what remains to be done . Mosaik-Verlag, Munich 1982, p. 84f.
  3. ↑ a b c Beatrix Novy: The salutation "Fräulein" has been abolished. In: Deutschlandfunk . February 16, 2021, retrieved February 16, 2021 .
  4. ↑ RMin.Bl.iV, 1937, p. 885
  5. ↑ RMin.Bl.iV, 1941, p. 1181
  6. ↑ Decree on the use of the designation "woman" by unmarried female persons of December 15, 1951 (MBl. p. 140).
  7. ↑ a b Kerstin Schenke: Virtual exhibition: The young lady in office - 40 years of the Federal Ministry of the Interior's circular "Use of the designation 'woman'". In: Bundesarchiv.de. Retrieved February 12, 2021 (Materials and background information on the circular of the Federal Ministry of the Interior of January 16, 1972);
    ibid as PDF: scan p. 1 , scan p. 2.
  8. ↑ a b Effective date: February 16, 1971 – Germany abolishes the form of address “Fräulein” in official German. In : WDR.de. February 16, 2011, accessed March 12, 2021.
  9. ↑ Marlis Hellinger , Christine Bierbach: A language for both sexes: guidelines for a non-sexist use of language . Published by the German Commission for UNESCO , Bonn 1993, ISBN 3-927907-32-4 (with foreword by Irmela Neu-Altenheimer; PDF: 37 kB on unesco.de).
  10. ^ Institute for Demoscopy Allensbach , press release: How do Germans think about their mother tongue and about foreign languages? ( Memento from December 30, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) In : GfdS.de. 13 June 2008, accessed 29 November 2021.
  11. ↑ Message: Iris Berben: Likes to be a "Miss". In: Bunte.de . October 17, 2012, accessed November 29, 2021.
  12. ↑ Wolfgang Ihl: Tenant sues landlord couple - cleaning plan for the stairwell: designation of a tenant as "Miss" becomes a case for the judiciary. In: Saarbrücker Zeitung . September 4, 2019, retrieved on November 29, 2021 (file number 29 C 1220/19).
  13. ↑ Oliver Teutsch: "not defamatory": tenant fails with "Miss" lawsuit at district court. In: Frankfurter Rundschau . August 31, 2019, accessed November 29, 2021.