Sheila Michaels, who brought 'Ms' (the title, not the mag) into mainstream, dies at 78

Sheila Michaels, who brought 'Ms' into mainstream, dies at 78

Feminist turned the term into a symbol signifying a woman’s right not to be defined by any relationships to men

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Sheila Michaels turned the term”Ms” into a symbol signifying a woman’s right not to be defined by any relationships to men Photograph: Handout




The American feminist who half a century ago fought a campaign to popularise the honorific “Ms” for women, which is now in mainstream use, has died aged 78. Though Sheila Michaels did not invent the term, she turned it into a symbol signifying a woman’s right not to be defined by any relationships to men. She began her campaign in 1961, but it would be 10 years before “Ms” was adopted as the title of a feminist magazine, and 25 years before it appeared on the front page of the New York Times.

Michaels had first seen “Ms” on an address label on a Marxist magazine posted to a Manhattan housemate and initially thought it was a typo. It resonated with her, both as a feminist, and also as a child of unmarried parents, she told the New York Times in an interview last year for her own obituary. She was looking for a title for a woman who did not “belong” to a man, she told the Guardian in 2007.

“There was no place for me. No one wanted to claim me and I didn’t want to be owned. I didn’t belong to my father and I didn’t want to belong to my husband – someone who could tell me what to do. I had not seen very many marriages I’d want to emulate – the whole idea came to me in a couple of hours. Tops,” she said. She later recalled thinking of the significance on first seeing that address label. “Wonderful,” she told the Japan Times, an English-language newspaper in 2000. “‘Ms’ is me!”

Michaels, a feminist and civil rights campaigner, who worked mostly as a writer, editor and publicist, began what she would later describe as a “timid eight-year crusade”. When she found herself, in 1969, invited to the popular liberal New York FM radio station WBAI, she introduced the term, provoking a discussion that reached the ears of Gloria Steinem, who was looking for a name for the women’s magazine she was founding.

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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jul/07/sheila-michaels-who-brought-ms-into-mainstream-dies-aged-78



Sheila Michaels, Who Brought ‘Ms.’ to Prominence, Dies at 78


Sheila Michaels, who half a century ago, wielding two consonants and a period, changed the way modern women are addressed, died on June 22 in Manhattan. Ms. Michaels, who introduced the honorific “Ms.” into common parlance, was 78. The cause was acute leukemia, said Howard Nathanson, a cousin.

Ms. Michaels, who over the years worked as a civil-rights organizer, New York cabdriver, technical editor, oral historian and Japanese restaurateur, did not coin “Ms.,” nor did she ever claim to have done so. But, working quietly, with little initial support from the women’s movement, she was midwife to the term, ushering it back into being after a decades-long slumber — a process she later described as “a timid eight-year crusade.” “Apparently, it was in use in stenographic books for a while,” Ms. Michaels said in an interview for this obituary in 2016. “I had never seen it before: It was kind of arcane knowledge.”
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According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “Ms.” is attested as far back as 1901, when The Sunday Republican, a Springfield, Mass., newspaper, wrote:
“The abbreviation ‘Ms.’ is simple, it is easy to write, and the person concerned can translate it properly according to circumstances. For oral use it might be rendered as ‘Mizz,’ which would be a close parallel to the practice long universal in many bucolic regions, where a slurred Mis’ does duty for Miss and Mrs. alike.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/us/sheila-michaels-ms-title-dies-at-78.html