If the world can be changed with a word, then American feminist Sheila Michaels, who has died aged 78, had a role in it. Fifty years ago Michaels popularised the honorific Ms, which she thought was a typo when she first saw it on a Marxist magazine address label. But this was no mistake. It was the assertion that a woman belonged to herself and should not be defined by marriage. However, the battle to liberate women from “belonging to their menfolk” became more a “timid eight year crusade,”she admitted.
In 1969 Michaels introduced the default address form to the liberal New York FM radio station WBAI and as a result, Gloria Steinem adopted Ms as the title of the women’s magazine she co-launched in 1971 .The first issue sold out in eight days. Arguably Michaels’ greater coup was that soon after publication a New York congresswoman successfully legislated against women having to disclose their marital status on federal forms. But it was not until 1986 that the New York Times accepted Ms into common currency.
The idea came to her in a Eureka moment when she proclaimed: “Ms is me!”
Michaels was the daughter of playwright Alma Weil (then married to salesman Bill Michaels) and lawyer Ephraim London. They did not marry each other. Her mother’s second husband was metallurgist, Harry H. Kessler, and Sheila was sent to the Bronx to live with her maternal grandparents. But at eight she returned to her mother and adopted Kessler’s surname.
