A big coup for "les femmes"

I AM not a Mrs. At school I may have been a Miss, but for as long as I can remember I have filled the title section of boring bureaucratic forms with a Ms. Being called a Mrs implies you belong to someone else.

My marital status is nobody's business but mine. If somebody calls me Mrs A, I refer them to my mother-in-law.

I like the neutral Ms. So I feel for French women, whose choices are limited to mademoiselle (if they are single) or madame (if they are married), and who don't have a version of the English Ms.

But the good women in Sarkozy-land have been fighting a war over these titles, and last week they made some headway. Their prime minister François Fillon has ordered that mademoiselleno longer be used in official forms. From now on, there will be two choices when filling out these forms: Madame or Monsieur.

The source of the change is not hard to find: madame implies something of age and seniority and seriousness, while mademoiselle suggests youthfulness, even coquetry.

Madame, unfortunately, like our Mrs, refers to a woman's married status. But the French feminists say that Mademoiselle is sexist. They prefer Madame.

In The Guardian, a woman in her 20s, Aurélie Duchamp, was quoted saying to her English friend: "Referring to myself as Madame immediately commands more respect, especially in my place of work and even when I introduce myself on the phone. People take me seriously, which isn't always the case when I use Mademoiselle . Madame it is for me, thank you very much."

A small but significant battle has been won, is what most French women say. There are others who ask: "Aren't there more important battles for feminists to fight?". Yes, there most certainly are.

But there was one response which particularly annoyed me. A South African tweeted that "feminists need a life." As a man in this country, he should understand that small, structural changes in language can change attitudes, which can lead to behavioural change. Racist terms are unacceptable, and so are words regarded as sexist. Gardeners, for example, aren't "boys"; French women aren't mademoiselles.

Marie-Noelle Bas, president of Chiennes de Garde, said: "Mademoiselle is only a word but it's important to fight sexist words. It's about everyday, trivialised sexism. The more we act on the little things, the more the big things will follow."