einstein sent this to curie in 1911 when she was being harassed by tabloids. it contains everything you’d want in such a letter:
(1) your haters are trash
(2) you’re a baller, a true queen
(3) i have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in planck’s radiation field 🧪⚛️
This is a personal letter, not a professional one, would be very weird to address someone you know personally to ask them if they are OK as Dr… (at least I have never done that to my colleagues known personally).
I'm a dude and I speak to one of my lady friends using the respectful plural form sometimes. Granted, she's not a doctor, but if she were, I wouldn't address her as such because it seems irrelevant between friends, somehow. You do have a point, but it seems to be a case of friendship over formality.
Which is why the "Mrs" still bothers me. Could be a German convention that friends drop the title. But to me its just respectful. One person mentioned he used Mr. for a man, so I guess that was just Einstein. So it makes it a bit better and not so much he is dismissing the title she earned.
It isn’t an Einstein thing, it’s a “social conventions for formality in salutations” thing. We’ve lost a lot of those nuances, and English doesn’t even have the formal/informal you that many European languages have. But this form of address was the appropriate and respectful way to open this letter.
It is definitely a convention of the time, the language, and how their particular European social stratum understood degrees and honorifics.
A lot of Einstein's pretty-conventional-for-the-time gender politics wouldn't pass muster today, but she definitely wouldn't have understood this as a slight.
