Sheila Michaels (May 8, 1939 – June 22, 2017) was an American civil-rights organizer and feminist whose most durable public mark was linguistic: she popularized Ms. as a courtesy title that did not announce a woman’s marital status. She never claimed to have invented the abbreviation. What she did was notice it, keep it alive for years when almost no one wanted it, and then say it aloud at the right moment. The rest of her life—Mississippi field work, a New York taxi medallion, a Japanese restaurant, and a late-career oral-history project—makes the honorific look less like a slogan than like one expression of a longer refusal to be filed under someone else’s name.
She was born Sheila Babs Michaels in St. Louis, the child of Alma Weil Michaels, a playwright and radio writer, and Ephraim London, a New York civil-rights lawyer who did not publicly acknowledge her. Alma was separated from her first husband, Maurice “Bill” Michaels, a shoe salesman; the child received that surname. At three she was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in the Bronx. Around eight she returned to St. Louis to her mother and stepfather, the metallurgist Harry H. Kessler, and for a time used Kessler as her last name. The arrangement did not last. Her mother and stepfather later disowned her over her politics and told her to drop Kessler; she went back to Michaels. The family story mattered to her later argument about titles. She described herself as having been born, in her own blunt phrasing, as someone who “belonged” to no man, and she did not want a husband to fill that vacancy.
After high school in St. Louis in 1957 she entered the College of William & Mary. She was expelled, in part for anti-segregation writing on the student paper. She worked odd jobs in St. Louis, then moved to New York in October 1959. There she studied at night at Columbia and drifted into the orbit of the Congress of Racial Equality. By 1961 she was working with CORE in New York; in 1962 she was in Jackson, Mississippi, where CORE and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee overlapped so thoroughly that the two organizations were, she later said, “one there.” She became a SNCC field secretary—one of only a handful of women among dozens of men—and worked in Tennessee and Georgia as well. In 1963 she edited The Knoxville Crusader, a civil-rights paper. During Freedom Summer in 1964 she served as project manager for the Council of Federated Organizations’ Hattiesburg project. She later wrote a memoir fragment about a first arrest, time in jail, and the family rupture that followed. Some accounts also place her among those who helped organize the 1963 March on Washington and work on John Lewis’s speech. The movement that had “freed” her, she later argued, also narrowed: SNCC, CORE, and SCLC had been started or built in large part by women, then led by men.
The Ms. story begins in that same early-1960s apartment life. Her roommate was Mary Hamilton, a Black CORE activist who would win a Supreme Court case over the right to be addressed as “Miss” rather than by her first name in an Alabama courtroom. Mail arrived addressed to “Ms. Mary Hamilton”—a copy of the Marxist paper News & Letters. Michaels first took the title for a typo. Then it struck her as the word she had been looking for: a title for a woman who did not belong to a man. Miss and Mrs. had both come from mistress, but that older word was no longer usable. Ms.already existed as occasional stenographic shorthand for a woman whose marital status was unknown; a 1901 newspaper item had floated it. It had not become common speech. Michaels began what she later called a “timid eight-year crusade.” Feminist groups were not immediately interested. In 1969, during a lull on a WBAI interview with the group The Feminists, she put the term on the air. Word reached Gloria Steinem, who was looking for a name for a new magazine. Ms. appeared as an insert in New York in late 1971 and as a stand-alone magazine in 1972. Usage spread. The New York Times accepted the title on its pages in 1986. Steinem’s circle sometimes treated the source as anonymous. Michaels, who was grateful the idea circulated, still recorded that she had created her use of it in 1961 from Hamilton’s address plate.
After the high years of the southern movement she did not settle into a single career. In 1975 she went to Laos to work with children injured in the Vietnam War. She traveled and worked in Singapore, Turkey, India, Korea, and Japan. In New York she drove a cab for about a decade and wrote short observational pieces about passengers for New York magazine. She married the chef Hikaru Shiki; they ran a Japanese restaurant in Lower Manhattan for more than ten years, and she used the name Sheila Shiki-y-Michaels. The marriage ended in divorce. She also taught biblical studies in synagogues and women’s groups. Late in life she became an oral historian almost by accident. An archivist at the University of Southern Mississippi asked whether she was the Sheila Michaels who had worked in Hattiesburg in 1964. That inquiry pulled her into recording veterans of CORE, then SNCC, the War Resisters League, and related peace groups. She wanted a record of people who had done the work without becoming famous. Columbia University holds a large collection of her interviews—thousands of transcript pages and more than a hundred cassettes. Additional papers, including a field diary and issues of the Mississippi Free Press, are at the University of Southern Mississippi. She once thought the project would take four years; she came to expect it would last as long as she did.
Michaels died of acute leukemia in Manhattan on June 22, 2017, at seventy-eight. Survivors included a half brother, Peter London. Obituaries described a woman who had been a field secretary, cabdriver, editor, restaurateur, and collector of other people’s testimony. The title she midwifed is now ordinary on forms, nameplates, and news copy. That ordinariness is the point. Ms. does not advertise independence so much as decline to answer a question that used to be asked first. Michaels’s own life—unacknowledged daughter, expelled student, disinherited activist, late oral historian—makes the small punctuation mark look like a consistent habit: she would not let other people’s categories finish her sentence.
What remains most useful about her is the combination of scale. She helped staff dangerous, unglamorous movement offices in the early 1960s, then spent years on a two-letter reform that cost no one a jail term and changed daily speech. She was not the public face of second-wave feminism, and she was not a household name in civil-rights memory either. She kept interviewing people who also were not household names. The through-line is documentary rather than charismatic: notice what is already there, insist on it, and leave a tape or a usage behind. Ms. is the part everyone can see. The interviews and the field diary are the part that matches how she actually spent her time.