The feminist who brought ‘Ms.’ to the masses

When Sheila Michaels first saw the honorific “Ms.” on a Marxist mailing to her New York City roommate in the early 1960s, she thought it was a typo. In fact, she learned, the term had been floated as a marriage-neutral alternative at least since the turn of the 20th century, but had never caught on. An ardent feminist, Michaels resolved to rescue Ms. from obscurity. For years, she waged a one-woman campaign to popularize the title. “There was no feminist movement in 1961, and so no one to listen,” Michaels recalled. “I couldn’t just go ahead and call myself Ms. without spending every hour of every day explaining myself, and being laughed at to boot. I had to learn to be brave.” Born in St. Louis, Michaels was the daughter of a radio writer and her lover, “a noted civil liberties lawyer whom Sheila did not meet until she was 14,” said The New York Times. Attending the College of William & Mary in Virginia, Michaels was expelled during her sophomore year, partly “for her anti-segregationist editorials” in the campus newspaper. “Deeply involved in the civil rights movement,” Michaels later worked for both the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, said The Washington Post. Her family objected to her activities and ultimately disowned her. Michaels spent years seeking a prefix that would reflect her independent status. “No one wanted to claim me, and I didn’t want to be owned,” she explained. “I didn’t belong to my father, and I didn’t want to belong to a husband.” Ms. filled the bill. “The whole idea came to me in a couple of hours. Tops.” At first, fellow feminists were lukewarm to Michaels’ Ms. crusade, said USA Today. Even Mari Hamilton, the roommate whose mail inspired the effort, scoffed, “Oh, Sheila, we have much more important things to do.” But when Michaels introduced Ms. on New York’s iconoclastic WBAI radio station in 1969, it began to catch on. Three years later, feminist leader Gloria Steinem named her new magazine Ms., “catapulting the term to the forefront of mainstream media.” Michaels, who drove a New York City cab and ran a Japanese restaurant, among other pursuits over the years, cherished her threecharacter legacy. “Ms.,” she said, “is me.”