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.”
In his 1949 book, “The Story of Language,” the linguist Mario Pei wrote, “Feminists … have often proposed that the two present-day titles be merged into …‘Miss’ (to be written ‘Ms.’), with a plural ‘Misses’ (written ‘Mss.’).”
But for generations, until Ms. Michaels invoked it in a radio broadcast, “Ms.” lay largely dormant.
Ms. Michaels first encountered the term in the early 1960s. She was living in Manhattan, sharing an apartment with another civil-rights worker, Mary Hamilton. One day, collecting the mail, she happened to glance at the address on Ms. Hamilton’s copy of News & Letters, a Marxist publication.
It read: “Ms. Mary Hamilton.”
Thinking the word was a typographical error, she showed it to Ms. Hamilton. No, Ms. Hamilton told her: It was no typo. The Marxists, at least, appeared to have had a handle on “Ms.” and its historical meaning.
For Ms. Michaels, something in that odd honorific resonated. Growing up in St. Louis, she had known women who were called “Miz” So-and-So — a respectful generic used traditionally there, as it also was in the American South.
“It was second nature to me,” she said in 2016, recalling the term’s familiar sound.
An ardent feminist, she had long dreamed of finding an honorific to fill a gap in the English lexicon: a term for women that, like “Mr.,” did not trumpet its subject’s marital status.
Her motives were personal as well as political. Ms. Michaels held a rather dim view of marriage, she said, partly as a result of her mother’s experiences both in and out of wedded matrimony.
The daughter of Alma Weil Michaels, a writer for radio serials, Sheila Babs Michaels was born in St. Louis on May 8, 1939. She was given the surname of her mother’s husband, Bill Michaels, though he was not her father.
Her biological father was her mother’s lover, Ephraim London, a noted civil-liberties lawyer, whom Sheila did not meet until she was 14. When Sheila was still very young, her mother divorced Mr. Michaels and married Harry Kessler, a metallurgist.
Mr. Kessler did not want a child around, and so for five years, between the ages of about 3 and 8, Sheila was packed off to live with her maternal grandparents in the Bronx. Later rejoining her mother and stepfather, she was known as Sheila Kessler.
After graduating from high school in St. Louis, she enrolled in the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Va. She was expelled in her sophomore year, partly, she said, for her anti-segregationist editorials as a member of the board of the campus newspaper.
In 1959, she moved to New York, where she went to work for the Congress of Racial Equality. In 1962, she worked with the organization in Mississippi, where she also became involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Named a field secretary for S.N.C.C. the next year, she worked in Tennessee as an editor of The Knoxville Crusader, a civil-rights newspaper. Her co-editor was Marion S. Barry Jr., the future mayor of Washington.
Her civil-rights work did not sit well with her family. After she was arrested in Atlanta in 1963, they disowned her: Her stepfather had clients in the South. At their request, she forsook the name Kessler and became Sheila Michaels once more.
During these years, Ms. Michaels was seeking, as she told The Guardian, the British newspaper, in 2007, “a title for a woman who did not ‘belong’ to a man.”
“There was no place for me,” she continued. “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 a husband — someone who could tell me what to do. I had not seen very many marriages I’d want to emulate.”
On seeing the fateful mailing to her roommate that day in the early ’60s, she wondered whether those two incompatible consonants might solve her problem. “The whole idea came to me in a couple of hours. Tops,” she told The Guardian.
Surprising as it seems now, Ms. Michaels’s proposal met with little interest from other feminists. The modern women’s movement was then in embryo: Betty Friedan’s searing nonfiction book, “The Feminine Mystique,” widely credited with having been its catalyst, would not appear until 1963.
In the early ’60s, many women on the front lines felt that there were bigger battles to be waged. Even Ms. Hamilton, whose newsletter had moved Ms. Michaels to action, was unpersuaded at first.
“She said, ‘Oh, Sheila, we have much more important things to do,’ ” Ms. Michaels recalled in 2016.
Then, around 1969, Ms. Michaels appeared on the New York radio station WBAI as a member of the Feminists, a far-left women’s rights group.
During a quiet moment in the conversation, she brought up “Ms.”
“When the radio interviewer asked about the pronunciation,” she recalled in an interview in 2000, “I answered, ‘Miz.’ ”
Not long afterward, when Gloria Steinem was casting about for a name for the progressive women’s magazine she was helping to found, she was alerted to Ms. Michaels’s broadcast.
The magazine, titled Ms., made its debut in late 1971 as an insert in New York magazine; the first stand-alone issue appeared the next year. The honorific has since become ubiquitous throughout North America, Britain and the English-speaking world. (The New York Times, however, formally adopted its use only in 1986.)
A longtime resident of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Ms. Michaels also had a home in St. Louis. Her marriage to Hikaru Shiki, a chef with whom she ran a restaurant in Lower Manhattan in the 1980s, ended in divorce. (She was known during their marriage as Sheila Shiki y Michaels.)
Her immediate survivors include a half brother, Peter London.
In the end, then, Ms. Michaels leaves a legacy both minute and momentous: two consonants and a small dot — three characters that forever changed English discourse.
The power of those characters was something she recognized almost from the start, as she told The Japan Times, an English-language newspaper, in 2000.
“Wonderful!” she recalled thinking, on learning the significance of the word on that curious address label. “ ‘Ms.’ is me!”
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Jet Magazine
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When 'Miss' Meant So Much More: How One Woman Fought Alabama — And Won
June 1963. Gadsden, Ala. Mary Hamilton, 28, stood in a courtroom before a judge.
She was a black civil rights activist, arrested for nonviolent protest. And the judge was losing his patience.
The atmosphere in Gadsden that summer "was truly frightening and terrifying," says Colin Morris, a history professor at Manhattanville College. "The Klan was highly active. On more than one occasion there had been attacks in Gadsden."
But Hamilton wasn't frightened. She was furious. She refused to answer the prosecutor's questions.
"I won't respond," she said, "until you call me Miss Hamilton."
It wasn't just about an honorific. It was about respect and racial equality. Her demand was an act of defiance that would eventually bring her name before the U.S. Supreme Court and set a precedent for how witnesses are addressed in courtrooms today — with equal courtesy.
"We're finally fighting back!"
Hamilton grew up in Iowa and Colorado. For a while she thought she'd be a nun — then she discovered socialism, and through socialist groups, learned about the work civil rights groups were doing in the South.
She was light-skinned, like many of her relatives. Some members of Hamilton's family passed as white, but Hamilton refused. "She was disgusted that anyone would pass," says her daughter, Holly Wesley. "She identified very strongly as black."
When Hamilton heard about the burgeoning civil rights movement, she was elated.
"It's happening! We're finally fighting back!" she recalled thinking, in an oral history she taped years later with her friend Sheila Michaels. "We're gonna fight back, we're not gonna take it any more!"
She joined the Congress of Racial Equality — a major civil rights organization at the time — and became a Freedom Rider. In 1961, with other Freedom Riders, she was arrested in Jackson, Miss. She remembered sweltering jails, invasive and unnecessary vaginal exams, and disrespectful policemen and jailers — one of whom "just couldn't understand" a black woman like Hamilton answering him with polite noncompliance. "He lost his composure," she said. But other men got angry.
In the years that followed, Hamilton traveled all over the South, organizing for the civil rights movement, registering voters and rising up the ranks at CORE, becoming a field secretary and eventually Southern regional director — a rare level of authority for a woman. Along the way, again and again, she was arrested at protests.
She recalled looking one jailer in the eye, sensing that he wanted to rape her, and telling him he'd have to kill her first. Meanwhile, she also had to fight off pervasive sexual harassment from other activists within the movement.
Violence, too, was everywhere. She was beaten again and again. Another jailer threw her in an elevator and ran it up and down again and again. He told her to scream, saying no one would hear her. Hamilton says she was silent — "out of sheer meanness and spite," she recalled.
Her resistance was nonviolent — polite, quiet, still. But it wasn't passive, and it wasn't calm.
"Dr. King called my mother Red, and not for her hair but for her temper," Wesley says. "For a nonviolent movement ... she was one to get pissed off."
Hamilton's friend Sheila Michaels, a fellow activist and former roommate, recalled her as a "dashing woman with great authority" who could charm and terrify people in equal measure.
"She was generally conceded to be the worst-tempered woman in the Nonviolent Movement," Michaels said. "But she was also an organizer whom others followed to the ends of the earth."
"My name is Miss Hamilton"
Mary Hamilton was constantly confusing and infuriating men in authority by standing up to their disrespect.
In Lebanon, Tenn., when a mayor visited her cell and referred to her as "Mary," Hamilton corrected him. It was Miss Hamilton. Hamilton and Michaels recalled the moment in their oral history: "And if you don't know how to speak to a lady," Hamilton told the mayor, "then get out of my cell."
At the time, throughout the '60s, many white people — particularly in positions of authority — refused to use honorifics like "Miss," "Mrs." or "Mr." to refer to black people.
Barbara McCaskill, an English professor at the University of Georgia, studied the narratives of black Americans and the civil rights movement. She said her own mother vividly remembered being denied the honorific "miss" as a young woman.
"Segregation was in the details as much as it was in the bold strokes," McCaskill says. "Language is significant because language calls attention to whether or not we value the humanity of people that we are interacting with. And in segregation the idea was to remind African-Americans and people of color in general, in every possible way, that we were not equal, that we were inferior, that we were not capable. And language becomes a very powerful force to do that."
Which brings us to Gadsden, Ala. In 1963, Hamilton was arrested for picketing and brought before the court for sentencing. Once again, officials refused to call her Miss Hamilton.
She refused to answer. The judge — muttering lewd comments about what he'd like to do to her if she were in his kitchen — ordered her to answer the prosecutor and apologize. But Hamilton was buoyed by rage at the judge's dismissiveness, and by the support of the lawyer assisting her.
She refused. She was fined and sentenced to a few days in jail for contempt of court.
Her lawyers appealed the case, saying that the prosecutor and judge had denied Hamilton her constitutional rights by treating her differently from the way they treated white witnesses. Eventually her case landed before the Supreme Court in Hamilton v. Alabama.
The justices issued a summary reversal, overruling the Alabama courts without even calling for oral arguments. Their brief decision effectively said that a court could not address black witnesses differently than white ones.
"A desegregation decision, basically," says historian Colin Morris. "And that case, that precedent, stands — and is the law of the land up to the present day."
"She was our hero"
By the time the Supreme Court ruled in 1964, Mary Hamilton was nearing the end of her time as an activist. After years of draining work and repeated beatings, her health was suffering, and she was exhausted.
Her story made headlines across the country, and her face was on the cover of Jet magazine. But as the years went by, and Hamilton became a union organizer and teacher, her name largely faded from memory. By the time she died in 2002, her passing and her legacy received little attention.
Michaels remembered her friend in a speech shortly after Hamilton's death. She described her old roommate "streaking through the bayous & pine thickets of the deep South; organizing, organizing, in her white Plymouth Valiant. For if ever there was a steed aptly named to carry an hero into battle, it was Mary's Valiant. And she was our hero, cast in the heroic mold."
Michaels, who died this summer, fought her own fight over honorifics — she led the crusade for women to be able to go by "Ms." as an alternative to Miss or Mrs.
In fact — as NPR noted in an obituary for Michaels — she was originally inspired by a piece of mail to her roommate, Hamilton:
When Michaels first made her observation about "Ms.," Hamilton wasn't very impressed. As Michaels remembers it, she said something like, "Sheila, we have much more important things to do."
But she also knew honorifics were important. Just a few years later, she was fighting her court battle over her own.
Both women fought for the world to address them on their own terms, battling over language in addition to their work for legal change. But they were fighting from different places. Hamilton had to go to court just to earn the honorific Miss — while Michaels was advocating to move beyond Miss.
And the world remembered their achievements differently. Hamilton's case, the "Miss Mary" case, made headlines in its time but largely faded from memory. Michaels' role in advocating for "Ms." was little known when it happened, but became recognized as a linguistic turning point decades later and was feted at her death.
But Michaels, for her part, sought to carry and share Mary Hamilton's story. She painstakingly recorded her life history and spoke about her to the press — and in that speech, shortly after Hamilton's death.
"Even in a field of extraordinary and heroic women, Mary's career had been singular," Michaels said. "Even where women could suddenly find themselves militant leaders, her career had been meteoric."
Hear more about Mary Hamilton's life — plus the story about how NPR discovered the connection between Hamilton and Michaels and a conversation about what we remember about the civil rights movement and why it matters — in the full podcast episode.
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