Dead at 78, the ‘timid feminist’ who taught the world to say Ms
THE American feminist who popularised Ms as an alternative for Miss and Mrs has died at the age of 78.
The term – which some find liberating but critics say is pointless – actually dates back to at least 1901 and was originally a shortened form of Mistress.
But it had fallen into obscurity by the time civil rights activist Sheila Michaels, who has died from leukaemia in New York, spotted it on the address label of a Marxist publication that had been sent to her flatmate in 1961.
She initially thought it was a typing error but it reminded her of how women in the American South would traditionally be called Miz as a way to combine Miss and Mrs.
It also perfectly suited her own personal circumstances. She was 22 and still single at a time when many women married at 18, and being called Miss at her age implied she was ‘on the shelf’, she said.
‘The first thing that employers wanted to know about you was whether you were married yet,’ she once said. ‘I’d be damned if I’d bow to them.’
Determined to promote a title that did not denote a woman’s marital status, Ms Michaels – as she naturally preferred to be called – waged what she said was a ‘timid eight-year crusade’ to persuade others to use it.
However, her efforts were at first ignored by fellow feminists who thought there were more impor- tant priorities. Then, in a 1969 broadcast on a New York radio station, Ms Michaels – by then a member of a far-Left women’s rights group – casually mentioned Ms and interest exploded.
When the feminist Gloria Steinem was looking for a title for
‘I didn’t want to be owned’
a progressive women’s magazine she was helping to set up, she was told about Ms Michaels’ broadcast and duly named the magazine ‘Ms.’ when it launched in 1972.
It coincided with legislation being introduced in the US Congress to permit women not to disclose their marital status on government forms. In Britain the Passport Office conceded women’s right to call themselves Ms on their passports in 1974. And in 1976 Marvel Comics introduced Ms Marvel, its first feminist superhero.
But as recently as 2009 there was anger when the European Parliament published a pamphlet asking staff to stop using Miss or Mrs and use only Ms.
The Oxford English Dictionary notes that in 1901 a Massachusetts newspaper advised readers that Ms was ‘simple and easy to write’ and ‘the person concerned can translate it properly according to circumstances’.
Ms Michaels, who later worked as a ghostwriter and a New York taxi driver, married Japanese chef Hikaru Shiki and they ran a restaurant together in the 1980s until they divorced. Earlier in her life she had taken a dim view of mar- riage and wanted to find a female version of ‘Mr’ that didn’t shout out its user’s marital status.
This was partly because she was the daughter of her married mother’s secret lover. And her situation was further complicated because her mother, Alma, divorced her husband when Sheila was very young and remarried.
Her new husband didn’t want a child around and Sheila was brought up for years by grandparents, despite having to use the surname of the man who spurned her.
‘There was no place for me. No one wanted to claim me, and I didn’t want to be owned,’ she said. ‘I didn’t belong to my father and I didn’t belong to a husband – someone who could tell me what to. I had not seen very many marriages I’d want to emulate.’