With two letters, Sheila Michaels shook the world

To me, Miss is silly, Mrs. is creepy and Ms. is normal. But to each her own. The key is choice.

“I didn’t belong to my father and I didn’t want to belong to a husband, someone who could tell me what to do. The whole idea came to me in a couple of hours. Tops.” Sheila Michaels

Ms.

It’s just two letters with a dot, but it shook the world. Sheila Michaels, the American woman who popularized Ms. as a replacement for Miss and Mrs., has died at 78. What a life she had.

“Ms.” had been around since 1901 when a Springfield, Mass., newspaper called the Sunday Republican recommended it as a handy transplant from the South. Sounds good, saves time.

But Michaels noticed it on an address label of a Marxist newsletter sent to her roommate in the early 1960s. And a “timid eight-year crusade,” as she called it, had begun. Around 1969, Michaels mentioned it on a local New York radio show. Gloria Steinem was looking for a name for her upcoming feminist magazine, and in 1971, Ms. introduced itself to the wider world.

All this information comes from a 2016 interview by the New York Times in preparation for Michaels’ death.

Banked obituaries are good things and I credit the newspaper, despite it not having used “Ms.” until 1986.

I don’t remember life before Ms. I call baby girls Miss and strongly object to Mrs., which has only been conferred on me by German hotel desk clerks and, strangely, Bell Mobile. It upsets me to be referred to by my husband’s surname.

In olden times, couples were often referred to as, say, the Fred Smiths. He was Fred Smith, and she was Margaret Johnson, and suddenly she was Margaret Smith and then she vanished into coupledom. It seems nightmarish now.

This was my view of marriage, as a crevasse, a turned back, a shutdown. I read Anton Chekhov’s short stories as a child, there being nothing else to do up north — I wasn’t allowed to snowshoe alone — and my view of marriage came from lines like this in “The Name-Day Party.”

“‘For God’s sake!’ Olga Mihailovna cried again. ‘Pyotr, understand, understand!’

‘Damnation take those visitors!’ muttered Pyotr Dmitrich, getting up. ‘You ought not to have gone to the island today!’ he cried. ‘What an idiot I was not to prevent you! Oh, my God! ... Make haste and fetch the doctor, or the midwife! Has Vasily gone? Send someone else. Send your husband!’

‘Pyotr, buy yourself hounds,’ she moaned.”

It was only years later that I realized what was going on. Olga and Pyotr were fighting over money — she had more of it than he did, which he resented — he had retaliated by cheating on her and she, finding out, had gone into labour on the very day she celebrated her husband’s given name according to the Orthodox calendar.

This is why you shouldn’t let your children inhale adult literature. What was labour? I just assumed this was standard behaviour. Men tormented wives who pleaded for understanding, the wives learned “a dull indifference to life” and then they were chloroformed.

And it was all about names. Her mother’s surname goes unmentioned, but Michaels was given multiple surnames: Michaels (her mother’s husband), London (her birth father), Kessler (stepfather), Michaels (Kessler’s request after she became a prominent anti-segregationist) Shiki y Michaels (husband) and then presumably Michaels (postdivorce).

I developed an allergy to the word “husband,” although I am cheerfully married (to a partner/boyfriend/mister) and never changed my surname (father). Thanks to feminism, I call myself Ms. and buy myself hounds.

Ms. protects you from men like the talk-show host I met recently, whose face lit up when he learned I had children. “YOU have children?” he said. I had achieved legitimacy in his eyes and he was clearly greatly relieved.

Surnames are as tangled as ever. Many women now change their names when they marry, wanting to share their children’s surname, another fretful thing. It matters not. Even if Ivanka were a Kushner, she’d still be a Trump.

To me, Miss is silly, Mrs. is creepy and Ms. is normal. But to each her own. The key is choice.

“I didn’t belong to my father,” Michaels once said, “and I didn’t want to belong to a husband, someone who could tell me what to do. The whole idea came to me in a couple of hours. Tops.”

And with that, Ms. Michaels, take a bow.