Dead at 78, the feminist who taught us 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 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 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 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 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. 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 feminist Gloria Steinem was looking for a title for 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.
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.