Put ‘Ms.’ into popular use Wife, 93, of comics legend

“Ms.” To Sheila Michaels, it looked like a typographical error when she saw the strange honorific, neither “Miss” for the unmarried nor “Mrs.” for thewed, on a Trotskyist mailing to her New York City roommate in the early 1960s.

But itwas not a typo, and the honorific had existed at least since the turn of the 20th century, although it enjoyed only limited circulation.

In 1901, a writer for a newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts, proposed “Ms.” to guard against missteps, nothing that “to call a maiden Mrs. is only a shade worse than to insult a matron with the inferior title Miss.”

The term had a certain utility in business correspondence, when the martial status of a female addressee was unknown. Some early feminists found it appealing, a counterpart to the masculine “Mr.” that did not betray one’s private life.

WhenMs. Michaels saw the word, she was in her early 20s and active in the civil rights and women’s movements. Immediately she saw the egalitarian potential of those three characters. By the time of her death on June 22 at 78, she was widely credited with spurring society to make room for “Ms.” — in common English usage, in the standardized forms of officialdomandincultural attitudes towardwomen.

Michaels died at a hospital in New York. The cause was acute leukemia, said a second cousin, HowardNathanson.

Theword “Ms.” was perhaps first introduced to a wide audience with the founding of Ms. magazine by Gloria Steinem and other feminist organizers in 1971. The title was proposed to Steinem by a friend who had reportedly heard Michaels promoting the term on “Womankind,” a feminist radio show in NewYork.

Michaels envisioned widespread use of “Ms.,” but it also served a concern of hers in particular.

“Partly because of my personal situation, partly because ofmy observations at large, I had a lowopinion of marriage— and certainly no desire to marry,” she once told the Japan Times in an interview. “I felt strongly about not ‘belonging’ to aman— either tomy father as a Miss, or to a husband as a Mrs.”

“‘Ms.’ ”, she said, me!”

Sheila Babs Michaels was born in St. Louis on May 8, 1939. Her mother was a radio writer, according to accounts of her life, and her biological father was a civil liberties lawyer. Her parents were not married, and she had several stepfathers, the result being “is a fluidity in her surname, the NewYork Times reported in an obituary.

Shetold the JapanTimes that, during her upbringing in St. Louis, she “developed a curiosity about a woman known as Miz Noble who lived behind our house.”

“I wondered whether this meant she was unmarried or a widow,” Michaels said. “I liked the ambiguity.”

Michaels enrolled at the College of William and Mary inWilliamsburg, Virginia, where, her cousin recalled her saying, she was kicked out because administrators considered her a “troublemaker” and didn’t agree with her “views.”

She became deeply involved with the civil rights movement, working with the StudentNonviolent Coordinating Committee and Congress of Racial Equality in the South. For periods, she earned a livelihood as a cab driver. Later in life, she interviewed civil rights activists for oral histories housed at Columbia University.

She expressed frustration at the slow pace with which was adopted, even among her most socially minded contemporaries, although it did eventually blossom into wide use.

Michaels’s marriage to Hikaru Shiki, with whom she operated a Japanese restaurant in New York, ended in divorce. Survivors include a half brother.

LOS ANGELES — The wife of Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee died Thursday at age 93.

Lee and his family released a statement saying Joan Lee died peacefully Thursday morning. The couple had been married 69 years.

Lee's longtime publicist Dawn Miller confirmed the statement's authenticity when contacted by The Associated Press.

No additional details were provided, and the statement requested privacy.

Stan Lee co-created numerous Marvel Comics superheroes including Spiderthe Fantastic Four and theX-Men.

The 94-year-old Lee has credited his wife with supporting him early in his career, when he was trying to create superheroes that he andothers could care about.

Associated Press