Does the word "master" denote masculinity?

The other day, I had a little argument with a friend. He asserted that if the principal of a school is a female, she would not be called a "headmaster", rather - a headmistress.

But I disagreed with him, saying that headmaster is a gender-neutral term. I couldn't believe that people still used the word "headmistress"

Turns out I was wrong. So my question is about the word "master" - does the word have some masculine origin?

Or is it that "mistress" goes with "mister"?

Solution 1:

English is in a state of flux with regard to the use of gender-differentiated terms for professions and nationalities. For some speakers (like my parents), female terms must be used when the referent is known to be female. Such speakers have to say she is a waitress, not she is a waiter.

However, for other speakers (like me), words like waitress, actress, and Frenchwoman are, like scrumptious and copacetic, recognisable as English but usable only with ironic or pedantic undertones. I would comfortably say she is a waiter to refer to what my parents call a waitress.

Not all such words have deteriorated at the same rate. Where the female versions themselves refer to outmoded or old-fashioned professions or roles, I am happy to use the feminine, for instance, washerwoman or nun. (But I would only use nun to refer a Christian. In the past, I’ve referred to a Buddhist nun as a monk, leading an academic colleague to think I’d mistaken the woman for a man, because of her shaved head. Being 40 years my senior, he wasn’t aware that monk in this context was simply gender neutral for me.)

Tying all of this back to your question: you’re both right, but you’re right about the conventions of different speech communities. Your friend has correctly described a more conservative dialect. You (like me) conform to a more innovative one. I’m not sure that dictionaries have come to reflect this shift in usage. But if you google "she is headmaster" / "she is a headmaster" / "she is the headmaster" (plus "-daughter" for convenience), you’ll appreciate that there are a reasonable number of speakers like us.

On the question of the origin of the master, @Jim correctly observes that magister is the Latin root of English master, and in Latin magister was a masculine word. However, if you ask Who was the greatest actor ever?, this would not normally be taken to preclude a woman’s name being given in response. In other words, masculine forms are default rather than male-specific. (They require additional context for male-specific readings; e.g., Excluding actresses, who was the greatest actor ever?) I’ve seen various studies of languages in which gender indication is obligatory (including French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, Spanish), and the same holds there: masculine forms are (only with specific exceptions) default forms, covering both genders. I don’t know if evidence is available for Latin, but my guess would be that, as a well behaved Indo-European language, it could reasonably be expected to behave similarly.

Solution 2:

If you were to look up the two words (headmaster and headmistress), you would see that they are the man and woman, respectively, who is the head of a U.S. private school or a British school.

Furthermore, the two words, master and mistress, can be traced to the Old French words, maistre and maistresse, and the Modern French words, maître and maîtresse.

Both are derived from the Latin magister, from which we also get "magistrate" (magistratus).

So to answer your question ("does the word master have some masculine origin?), you can look at the definition in The Latin Dictionary, where it states that magister is a masculine noun. In Latin, nouns have fixed gender, and in this case it is masculine. This differs from the Romantic languages that descended from Vulgar Latin (as in non-standard, common, as opposed to classical Latin), where it is common to have both masculine and feminine forms of some nouns.

(reference link)

Solution 3:

In theory, mistress is the precise female equivalent of master, being the translation of Latin domina rather than dominus. In practice master (particularly as a verb) is used in many contexts where dominance is more relevant than gender, and mistress is used only in a few specialised contexts. Education is one of them: though games teacher is a neutral term, a games mistress is always female, and one of the senior bodies in British independent education is called the "Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference" (confusingly abbreviated to HMC).

Solution 4:

In Britain, when I was at school, (1950s) the head was always a headmaster or a headmistress. Single-sex education was far more common than it is today. Boys' schools had headmasters and girls' headmistresses.

The terms survived the move to co-education and certainly well through the time that my children were at school in the 1980s and 90s, their heads were either Headmasters or Headmistresses.

More recently there has been a move away from the terms to calling them simply 'Head'. 'The Head wants to see you in his/her study'.

The other teachers, in my day were known as masters and mistresses, though those terms have mostly given way to 'teachers'. However in a lot of traditional schools they do remain. There is perhaps still a slightly higher cachet associated with giving your occupation as 'schoolmaster' rather than plain 'schoolteacher'.

Solution 5:

"Master" has at least two slightly different uses. It's gendered up to a point, with "mistress" the female form.

One use means (roughly) a person in authority over one or more others, as for example a teacher over students or an employer over household servants, and there are several specific relationships it has been most commonly used for. This usage traditionally was strongly gendered.

"Headmaster" is this first usage, but the "master" refers to the teachers that the head is in charge of (the headmaster is the head among the masters), not the headmaster himself (he is not the master of heads). In schools with both sexes of teacher, "master" is being used to mean all "masters and mistresses" (the male embraces the female). So I don't suppose that it would be technically incorrect to refer to a woman as the headmaster. However, I don't think it's done in practice: those who care to skip the tradition of gendered titles will use "headteacher" or "head". You could even perhaps argue that it's a kind of inaccuracy (despite being established usage) to call a woman in charge of men, or of a mixed group of men and women, the "headmistress". This doesn't change the usage, of course, and any argument based on referring to a mixed group by the male form but a female group by the female form is going to seem out-dated.

"Mistress" does also go with "Mister", because "Mister" was originally a variant of "Master" although the two are no longer interchangeable as titles. "Mrs." was originally a variant of "Mistress". Just to be confusing, so was "Miss" and so is "Ms."

As an aside, the other use means (roughly) a person who is expert in their profession ("a master craftsman") and I think is less gendered. I speculate that in the relevant centuries, women were rarely considered experts in their professions! Of course such people might well have a managerial role as well, but I do not believe that is what "master" refers to here. Rather, they are "masters" of their craft.

There isn't any such phrase as "mistress craftswoman", but you could say "mistress of her craft". You also might say "master craftswoman" if you want a gendered term, "master craftsman" if you apply male gendered terms to both men and women, "master crafter" or whatever if you prefer a neutral term and are willing to accept "master" as neutral in this context. Each strategy exists, irrespective of what we think of them, and not everyone uses one strategy exclusively for all kinds of gendered term.

"Master" is also a verb, and there is no corresponding verb "to mistress".