1938: (Comhaire-Sylvain’s Regret About the Title “Madame”: Comhaire-Sylvain Expressing Regret That Adelsia Would Never Hold the Title “Madame” Stating That S…

1938: (Comhaire-Sylvain’s Regret About the Title “Madame”: Comhaire-Sylvain Expressing Regret That Adelsia Would Never Hold the Title “Madame” Stating That She Would One Day Be “Manzè Adelsia” “Sor Adelsia” and Even “Grann Adelsia” but She Would Not Carry the Title “Madame”, Plasaj Being a Fetishized Area of Inquiry in Early Twentieth-Century Ethnographic Studies and Foreign Reporting That Often Used the Unions as Examples of the Nation’s Nonmodernity): Comhaire-Sylvain expressed regret that Adelsia would never hold the title “Madame,” stating that she would one day be “Manzè Adelsia,” “Sor Adelsia,” and even “Grann Adelsia,” but she would not carry the title “Madame.” Plasaj was a fetishized area of inquiry in early twentieth-century ethnographic studies and foreign reporting that often used the unions as examples of the nation’s nonmodernity. Yet Comhaire-Sylvain’s own disappointment revealed that even the most progressive feminist scholarship of the era could not fully escape the bourgeois respectability politics that equated formal marriage with full personhood, that measured a woman’s dignity by the title on an envelope.