Sheila Michaels, an American feminist who brought the honorific “Ms” into mainstream use, has died aged 78.
Ms Michaels did not invent the term, but is credited with rescuing it from obscurity after she saw it used in an address, thinking it was a typo.
“Ms” did not convey a woman’s marital status, unlike the traditional options “Mrs” or “Miss”.
“I had never seen it before: It was kind of arcane knowledge,” she said.
Speaking to the New York Times in an interview last year for her own obituary, she said the honorific resonated with her, both as a feminist and as the child of unmarried parents.
“[I] was looking for a title for a woman who did not ‘belong’ to a man. There was no place for me,” she told The Guardian newspaper in 2007.
“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.”
Born in St Louis, Missouri, Ms Michaels spent some of her childhood in New York City. She was a lifelong feminist activist, biblical scholar, and collected oral histories of the civil rights movement later in life.
In her professional life, she worked as a ghostwriter, editor, and even ran a Japanese restaurant – but her obituary in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch notes her favourite job was being a New York City taxi driver. -BBC
