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FräuleinvomAmt.jpg
Fraulein_.jpg
In German, Fräulein (literally, "little woman" or "little Mrs.") is used as a title for young girls and unmarried women as opposed to Frau for married women. It can be used with the first name or last name (Fräulein Anna or Fräulein Schmidt).
The expression is considered derogatory by many feminists, and is now hardly used any more, except by a few (usually elderly) speakers; also some unmarried elderly women would still consider it inappropriate to be addressed as "Frau". Otherwise, it is nowadays almost universally considered appropriate to address all women as Frau (plus last name).
There is no equivalent male form (*Herrlein/Männlein Schmidt). Fräulein can be translated as Miss in English, Signorina in Italian, Mademoiselle in French or Señorita in Spanish .
Literature and film have preserved the old usage very well, in some cases already in the title. Examples are E.T.A. Hoffmann's tale Das Fräulein von Scuderi (1819), Elizabeth von Arnim's epistolary novel Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther (1907), and the comedy film Fräulein vom Amt (1954), whose title was a common phrase denoting a female operator at a telephone exchange (Amt "office" because in the old days the telephone service was run by the post office). In an earlier comedy film, Unser Fräulein Doktor (1940), Jenny Jugo plays Dr. Elisabeth Hansen, a young attractive teacher at a gymnasium who has to fight to be taken seriously as an intellectual.
"Fräulein" is also the title of a 1960s song sung in German by Chris Howland [1] (http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~fenja/texte/fraeulein.html).