Sheila Michaels, who half a century ago, wielding two consonants and a full-point, changed the way modern women are addressed, has died in Manhattan. Ms Michaels, who introduced the honorific "Ms" into common parlance, was 78.Â
Ms Michaels, who over the years worked as a civil-rights organiser, did not coin "Ms," nor did she ever claim to have done so. But, working quietly, with little initial support from the women's movement, she was midwife to the term, ushering it back into being after a decades-long slumber.
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According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "Ms" is attested as far back as 1901, when The Sunday Republican, a Springfield, Massachusetts newspaper, wrote:Â "The abbreviation 'Ms' is simple, it is easy to write, and the person concerned can translate it properly according to circumstances."
In his 1949 book, The Story of Language, the linguist Mario Pei wrote, "Feminists âĤ have often proposed that the two present-day titles be merged into âĤ'Miss' (to be written 'Ms'), with a plural 'Misses' (written 'Mss')." But for generations, until Ms Michaels invoked it in a radio broadcast, "Ms" lay largely dormant.
![Sheila Michaels, in the 1960s, changed the way modern women are addressed.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170714162640im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/8/6/u/a/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gx879i.png/1499728427739.jpg)
Ms Michaels first encountered the term in the early 1960s. She was living in Manhattan, sharing an apartment with another civil-rights worker, Mari Hamilton. One day, collecting the mail, she happened to glance at the address on Ms Hamilton's copy of News & Letters, a Marxist publication. It read: "Ms Mari Hamilton."
Thinking the word was a typographical error, she showed it to Ms Hamilton. No, Ms Hamilton told her: It was no typo. The Marxists, at least, appeared to have had a handle on "Ms" and its historical meaning.
For Ms Michaels, an ardent feminist, she had long dreamed of finding an honorific to fill a gap in the English lexicon: a term for women that, like "Mr," did not trumpet its subject's marital status. Her motives were personal as well as political. Ms Michaels held a rather dim view of marriage, she said, partly as a result of her mother's experiences both in and out of wedded matrimony.
The daughter of Alma Weil Michaels, a writer for radio serials, Sheila Babs Michaels was born in St Louis on May 8, 1939. She was given the surname of her mother's husband, Bill Michaels, though he was not her father. Her biological father was her mother's lover, Ephraim London, a noted civil-liberties lawyer, whom Sheila did not meet until she was 14. When Sheila was still very young, her mother divorced Mr Michaels and married Harry Kessler, a metallurgist.
Mr Kessler did not want a child around, and so for five years, between the ages of about three and eight, Sheila was packed off to live with her maternal grandparents in the Bronx.
After graduating from high school in St Louis, she enrolled in the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia. She was expelled in her sophomore year, partly, she said, for her anti-segregationist editorials as a member of the board of the campus newspaper.
In 1959, she moved to New York, where she went to work for the Congress of Racial Equality. In 1962, she worked with the organisation in Mississippi, where she also became involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Named a field secretary for SNCCÂ the next year, she worked in Tennessee as an editor of The Knoxville Crusader, a civil-rights newspaper. Her co-editor was Marion S. Barry Jr., the future mayor of Washington.
"There was no place for me," she continued. "No one wanted to claim me, and I didn't want to be owned. I didn't belong to my father, and I didn't want to belong to a husband â someone who could tell me what to do. I had not seen very many marriages I'd want to emulate."
Surprising as it seems now, Ms Michaels's proposal met with little interest from other feminists.
In the early 1960s, many women on the frontlines felt that there were bigger battles to be waged.