Sheila Michaels had long been searching for an alternative honorific to “Mrs” or “Miss” that did not advertise its subject’s marital status. In 1961 the civil rights activist and feminist was sharing an apartment in New York when a copy of News & Letters, a Marxist publication, arrived in the post addressed with what Michaels assumed was a typographical error to “Ms Mari Hamilton”, her flatmate. Hamilton assured her that it was not.
Michaels, who had barely known her father, had felt that being addressed as “Miss” seemed inappropriate. Nor was she married and therefore “Mrs” was not right. In any case, she said, “I felt strongly about not ‘belonging’ to a man.” Seeing the envelope addressed to Hamilton was an eye-opener. “I was stunned,” she told the Japan Times in 2000. “Never having seen the term before, it seemed to provide me with the perfect solution to a problem that had bothered me for years.”
According to Amy Erickson, from the University of Cambridge, neither “Mistress” nor “Mrs” bore any marital connotation for Samuel Johnson when compiling his dictionary in 1755, but by the end of the 18th century the term “Miss” was being used by socially ambitious, single upper-class women. Erickson added in her paper Mistresses and marriage (2014), that “Ms” was proposed as an equivalent to “Mr” as early as 1901, but had never caught on.
Michaels began a crusade to champion the cause of Ms, but found little enthusiasm, even among civil rights activists and fellow feminists, who felt that there were more important battles to fight. The turning point came in 1969 when, while being interviewed about feminism on a New York radio station, she suggested the term “Ms” as a suitable honorific for women who did not wish to declare their marital status.
It caught the attention of one of Gloria Steinem’s associates and in 1971 Steinem co-created the feminist magazine Ms. with Dorothy Pitman Hughes. Before long the term had been widely adopted and institutions, such as government departments and banks, were accepting “Ms” on their forms.
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Sheila Babs Michaels was born in St Louis, Missouri, in May 1939 to unmarried Jewish parents. Her father, Ephraim London, was a lawyer; her mother, Alma Weil, who was married to a shoe salesman named Bill Michaels, wrote radio serials. When her mother remarried Sheila was sent to live with her grandparents in the Bronx, New York.
She returned to St Louis for school before enrolling at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia; she was expelled for writing antisegregationist articles in the college newspaper. She recalled that in her childhood she had known a woman whose name was pronounced “Miz” Noble. “I wondered whether this meant she was unmarried or a widow,” she said. “I liked the ambiguity.”
Michaels worked locally for a TV station and a hotel before returning to New York, where she studied mythology in evening classes at Columbia University, became involved in the Congress of Racial Equality, campaigned for civil rights in Jackson, Mississippi, and worked for a decade as a taxi driver.
In 1963 she was arrested in a civil rights demonstration in Atlanta. Later she travelled in India, Laos, Korea and Japan, and was in Istanbul in 1968 when she learnt that feminists were protesting at the Miss America Contest in Atlantic City. “‘Shit,’ I yelled. ‘They’ve started the revolution without me’.”
Although Michaels had a low opinion of marriage, back in New York she met and married Hikaru Shiki, a Japanese chef, but they later divorced. Latterly she taught biblical studies to women’s groups in synagogues and helped to amass an oral history collection of those involved in nonviolent activism. Use of language remained important to Michaels, and she is also credited with having the term “feminist” accepted in place of “women’s liberationist” and “sexist” instead of “male chauvinist pig”.
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It was not until 1986 that the term “Ms” was adopted by The New York Times. In Britain The Times Style Guide tells journalists that “Ms is increasingly common in American and UK contexts, with Miss now unusual among younger generations”, although it adds a caution when writing in a historical or cultural context. “An unmarried Victorian schoolmistress or Edwardian fellow of Somerville would not have been Ms then and should not be Ms now.”
Sheila Michaels, campaigner, was born on May 8, 1939. She died from leukaemia on June 22, 2017, aged 78