"The abbreviation ‘Ms.’ is simple, it is easy to write... 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."

So said The Sunday Republican, a Springfield, Massachusetts newspaper in 1901. And:

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.’).”

I'm reading all that in a NYT obituary for Sheila Michaels, whose claim to fame is that she "introduced" the term that she did not coin "into common parlance."

Ms. Michaels first saw the word written in the address her friend's copy of News & Letters, which the NYT calls "a Marxist publication."

The Marxists... appeared to have had a handle on “Ms.” and its historical meaning.

For Ms. Michaels, something in that odd honorific resonated....

The Marxism? The "bucolic" sound? The NYT implies it was (at least in part) the latter.

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....