The NYT's Cardiff correspondent has trouble being referred to by her preferred name.

	when I said my name was Liz Shankland, they'd say: 'You can't do that. You're really Mrs. Toms.'"	Liz Shankland, a 35-year-old public relations executive here, was thrilled to marry her longtime love, Gerald Toms, last November. But she was not thrilled when people started to call her by the name of a person she does not believe exists. "At parties, people would say, 'This is Gerry Toms -- and this is his wife, Mrs. Toms,'" she related. "They didn't even give me a Christian name. And when I said my name was Liz Shankland, they'd say: 'You can't do that. You're really Mrs. Toms.'" The comments grew more extreme. "One woman said to me, 'Don't you think you're being rather disrespectful and rude?'" Ms. Shankland recalled -- and so she decided extreme measures were called for. The new bride, a former reporter and editor at The Western Mail here who knows the value of a well-timed media offensive, decided to take the unusual step of buying a classified advertisement in her old paper. "Although she has now publicly pledged undying love for her husband, she has not changed her name to 'Mrs. Toms,' " the ad said. "Instead, she will continue to be known -- personally and professionally -- as Ms. Liz Shankland, and makes no apology to the misguided fuddy-duddies who believe that to be strange or unconventional." In its small way, Ms. Shankland's situation illustrates a larger phenomenon in Britain. It is sometimes hard, women say, to convince people that you don't want to take the name of your husband (if you have one). And it is sometimes hard to get people to call you Ms., a word that while in wide use in some professions, still seems to carry connotations of the stereotypical bra-burning, man-bashing, non-leg-shaving feminists who apparently so terrorized British men in the 60's and 70's.
	"They just can't cope with Ms.,"	"They just can't cope with Ms.," said Margaret Blott, a London obstetrician in her 30's, who felt compelled to use Miss when she began practicing medicine. (Under the British system, many of the highest-qualified doctors do not call themselves Dr.) Miss Blott, the only Miss in a sea of Mr.'s on the front door of her elegant Harley Street office, said she would have much preferred Ms., but didn't want to unsettle anyone in the conservative medical establishment. "People make all sorts of assumptions when you use Miss," she said. "They come in and expect someone who's 60 years old. On the other hand, Ms. does have connotations of aggressive feminist overtones, and a lot of people don't like it." Why not? Kathy Lette, an expatriate Australian novelist who has made a career of poking fun at the stodgy ways of British males, said it was sexism, pure and simple. "When I say I want to be called Ms. Lette," said Ms. Lette, who is married to one of Britain's most respected human rights lawyers, Geoffrey Robertson, "they either ignore me or they just go ahead and call me Mrs. Robertson, or Mrs. Lette. When you make an issue out of it, they look at you like you've turned into Lorena Bobbitt." Despite their trappings of enlightenment, she said, British men are unreconstructed cave dwellers. "Women here have been lulled into a false sense of security," she said. "When I moved here, I thought I'd come to New Man planet. The men talked about gardening and opera and quoted huge whacks of poetry. They knew Shakespeare's sonnets by heart. I thought, 'Oh, they're so sensitive.' But it's a big scam -- they're just as sexist as Australian men, but it's much more hidden."
	Feminism is a highly charged concept here, and many women seem almost physically afraid of the term.	Part of the problem, it seems, is that Britain has always resisted what it sees as American-style political correctness, a term derided as describing a ridiculously tortured sensitivity that has resulted in absurd changes to the language. Britons are loath to demonstrate such sensitivity or to make such changes themselves. Thus, people who deliver the mail here are still called postmen, even if they happen to be postwomen. Michael Portillo, the former Tory Defense Minister, was routinely referred to as "the Spaniard" in newspaper reports, a reference to the fact that his father was a Spanish immigrant, and nobody seemed to object. Feminism is a highly charged concept here, as it is to some in the United States, and many women seem almost physically afraid of the term. Margaret Jay, the leader of the House of Lords, recently declared in an interview with The Guardian that she was not a feminist, even though one of her jobs is to run the Government's Women's Unit, which deals with issues like education, child care and equal pay. "In politics, feminism is seen as negative, complaining about things," said Lady Jay, who as a bona fide baroness since her elevation to the House of Lords no longer has to bother deciding whether she wants to be Mrs., Ms. or Miss. Even Ms. Shankland, who so objected to being seen as what she calls "part and parcel of my husband," balks at the feminist label. She deliberately tried to make her ad playfully hyperbolic, she said, "so that people wouldn't think I was one of those raving feminists who doesn't agree with anything." "I believe in equality and all the rest of it, but the word's just got such connotations," she said. "It reminds people of trade unions, of crew-cut hair and dungarees, and gives the impression that you sort of hate men." Ms. Shankland certainly doesn't hate her husband, a superintendent in the South Wales police force, who came in for a bit of ribbing when her ad appeared, particularly because she had not told him about it in advance.
	"I don't, as a man, need to put a tag around a woman's neck to say that I'm married to her."	"I wasn't aware that she was going to resolve the situation in such a direct and public way," Superintendent Toms said. But he proclaimed himself unfazed by the experience, even when he found that the ad was playfully inserted into the agenda at his office's meeting the day it appeared. "I don't, as a man, need to put a tag around a woman's neck to say that I'm married to her." Has there been any fallout? "Some people look at me like I'm somebody with two heads, but a lot of people have rung me up and said, 'Good on you,'" Ms. Shankland said. One other thing: "At Gerry's office, they're calling him Superintendent Shankland."

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