The Oxford English Dictionary says: An orthographic and phonetic blend of MRS and MISS
A title of courtesy prefixed to the surname of a woman, sometimes with her first name interposed. Ms has been adopted esp. in formal and business contexts as an alternative to Mrs and Miss principally as a means to avoid having to specify a woman's marital status (regarded as irrelevant, intrusive, or potentially discriminatory).
and finds the first recorded use in 1901 in the Humeston (Iowa) New Era:
“As a word to be used in place of ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.’, when the addresser is ignorant of the state of the person addressed, the Springfield Republican suggests a word of which ‘Ms.’ is the abbreviation, with a pronunciation something like ‘Mizz’. But the Republican does not tell what the new word is or how it is to be spelled.”
I was one of those who tried to resist its widespread introduction in the 1970s. Not because I wanted to cling to the clear denomination of marital status, but because I hated how the word sounded. It was usually pronounced as a short, vicious Mz or an ugly buzz – Mzzz. Went with wimmin. I should have minded much less if it were given a nice Deep South or Caribbean lilt – Mis’ Julie - but that came with its own sensitivities
My first preference would have been to drop honorifics altogether – men had their problems too with Mr Smith, Smith, John Smith or John (I once had to calm down a very angry member of staff who was persistently addressed by a much older colleague by his surname alone. The fact that it was not personal, the older man did it to everyone, was not enough to make the insult go away)
Or, given that some degree of respect & polite distance needed to be maintained, I wanted to be a Mistress
A good old English word, still in use in the Caribbean.
One for which, according to the OED, the earliest meaning was A woman having control or authority (and at school we were taught that Mrs was just an abbreviation of Mistress.)
But by the 1970s 'mistress' meant only one thing – anathema to anything-but-feminist wives & militant lesbian separatists alike
How very odd then that the good old OED tells me that the first uses of the word miss were: A kept woman, a mistress; a concubine. Also (occasionally) a prostitute, a whore.
No wonder we just settled for Ms
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