Dr. Anne Firor Scott, for three decades a professor of history at Duke University and a nationally recognized scholar who advocated a different perspective of and appreciation for women’s history died at her Chapel Hill home on February 5, 2019 at the age of ninety-seven.
She was born on April 24, 1921, in Macon County, Georgia. At the age of nineteen she received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Georgia and subsequently her master’s in political science from Northwestern. During the Roosevelt Administration she worked for a congressman and then for the League of Women Voters. Following her marriage in 1947 she secured a fellowship to Radcliffe from which she earned her doctorate on 1958- her dissertation being on Southern progressives in the Congress. From 1961-1991 she was a professor at Duke and in 1980 became the first woman to chair its history department. She influenced generations of future historians and scholars. Upon her retirement she was presented the University Medal for Distinguished Meritorious Services.
Dr. Scott was noted for her emphasis on the long-neglected contributions of women to history either singly or collectively. Her groundbreaking 1970 volume, “The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930” fostered additional research and publications on this heretofore neglected area of American and regional history. She served on President Johnson’s Citizens’ Advisory Council on the Status of Women in the 1960s and in 2013 President Obama presented Dr. Scott with a National Humanities Award- the citation of which noted her “groundbreaking research spanning ideology, race, and class.” Dr. Scott was predeceased by her husband Dr. Andrew Scott of the UNC faculty in 2005 and three children survive.
Dr. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall presented the memorial below at the Spring 2019 HSNC Meeting.
Memorial for Anne Firor Scott (1921-2019)
Historical Society of North Carolina, Campbell University, April 12, 2019
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
I vividly remember my first encounter with Anne Firor Scott. It was 1972, two years after The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics (1970) put women on the map of southern history and the South on the map of historians of women. I was a timorous graduate student, and she seemed formidable. I got up the nerve to write to her and then the further nerve to call her on a research trip to Chapel Hill, never dreaming that I would spend my career there and enjoy the great gift of her friendship for more than forty years.
Scott loved to tell the story of how, in 1961, after a male professor left the Duke History Department, the chair asked if she could come teach until they “could find somebody.” Apparently that somebody never did materialize, since nineteen years later, she was named William K. Boyd Professor of History and appointed chair of the department, the first woman to hold that position. She retired thirty years later, after a career brimming with accomplishments and honors. She died on February 5, 2019, at ninety-seven, with her children and grandchildren by her side.
Anne Byrd Firor Scott was born on April 24, 1921 in Montezuma, Georgia, and grew up in Athens, where her father taught agricultural economics at the University of Georgia. She graduated from UGA in 1940, with honors in history. But she did not set out to become a historian. Indeed, when she looked back at her career—which she did, wryly and astutely, in the introduction to a collection of her essays published in 1984 and in a book entitled Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections”–she stressed over and over that “contingency is all.” In college she had, she said, “dreamed impartially about becoming a medical doctor or the mother of six.” After graduation, she tried working at IBM, then interned for a Congressman and got an M.A. in political science at Northwestern. By that time, World War II was opening new doors to women, and Scott went to work for the national League of Women Voters, which was led at that time by former suffragists. That eye-opening experience taught her what organized women could do. It also introduced her to figures who exemplified the progressive female reform tradition she would bring to visibility in her work. “People see what they are prepared to see,” Scott wrote. “These women were teaching me to see things that other historians had overlooked.”
In 1946, she met “an interesting and ebullient young man who invited me to marry him and go to Harvard.” From the way she and Andrew Scott always told it, that’s a pretty good summary of their whirlwind romance. Once in Cambridge, she enrolled in the Ph.D. program in American Civilization. Under the direction of Oscar Handlin, she set out to write a dissertation on “Southern Progressives in the National Congress,” which, she said, “was usually viewed as an oxymoron.” By this time, however, Andy was ready to start his career, and they both assumed that hers would follow his. Over the next eight years, they moved three times and Anne gave birth to three children. In 1958, she completed her degree and they moved to Chapel Hill, where he became a member of the Political Science Department and Anne took a temporary position in history.
Like previous studies of southern Progressivism, Scott’s focused on male leaders. But in the course of her research, she “kept stumbling over women.” Once in Chapel Hill, she turned her attention to those female activists. In The Southern Lady, which came out in 1970, she brought them from the margins to the center of the Progressive movement, and she placed them in a narrative that considered not only women’s politics but also the subjects that were central to the “new social history”: work, marriage, reproduction, and family relationships.
Scott’s timing could not have been better. A resurgent feminist movement was creating a voracious demand for women’s history. Her book helped to open the floodgates to a generation of historians eager to be part of this new field. As it did so, she found herself in an anomalous position. She was almost fifty and publishing her first book. At the same time, she was one of a small handful of established scholars who were in a position to mentor these younger scholars. Her standards were high and she could be stinting in her praise. But her intervention in your behalf could make all the difference, and for many members of my generation it did.
In her afterword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the Southern Lady, published in 1995, Scott ended with the hope that her book would “still seem worth arguing with.” Remarkably, almost a half century after its publication people are still arguing about the issues it raised. Were plantation mistresses secret abolitionists or bulwarks of slavery? Did the Civil War shore up the patriarchy or set a chain reaction of liberation in motion? What impact did women have on the emergence of a modern welfare state? Did southern suffragists reinforce white supremacy even as they promoted their own emancipation?
“The surprising thing,” Scott observed, “is how one thing leads to another, how the resume grows. . . and suddenly, or so it seems, one is a senior person, called on . . . to preside over this and that learned society, to sit on boards and give advice.” She was underestimating her own gifts and ambitions, but she was right about the resume and the leadership roles: they grew and grew.
In the books and gem-like essays that followed The Southern Lady, Scott explored women’s biography, voluntary organizations, education, and other subjects, not only within the South but in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. more generally. To take just a few examples: In Natural Allies (1992), she offered a portrait of women’s voluntary associations over the entire sweep of American history. In Unheard Voices: The First Historians of Southern Women (1993), one of my personal favorites, she provided poignant portraits of the female scholars who had preceded her, but who were excluded from institutions of higher learning. After retirement, she published Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware: Forty Years of Letters in Black and White (2006), which traced the lives and relationship of two leading figures in U.S. women’s history.
Even before The Southern Lady was published, Scott was making her mark as a leader. She served as chair of the North Carolina Commission on the Status of Women and on President Lyndon Johnson’s Citizens’ Advisory Council on the Status of Women. She went on to become the long-standing editor of the Women in American History series at University of Illinois Press and president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association.
She and her work were showered with countless symposia, festschrifts, and other honors. These included awards for lifetime scholarly distinction from the American Historical Association (2008) and for distinguished service from the Organization of American Historians (OAH), as well as election to the Academy of Arts and Sciences (2004). Since 1992, the OAH has awarded an annual Lerner-Scott Prize to the writer of the best doctoral dissertation in U.S. women’s history. It is named for Anne and her peer Gerda Lerner. Scott also received honorary degrees from, among others, Radcliffe and UNC-Chapel Hill. Two collections of essays by scholars she has influenced have appeared: Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism in 1993 and Writing Women’s History: A Tribute to Anne Firor Scott in 2011. Perhaps most important, near the end of her life (2014) she was presented with a National Humanities Medal by President Barak Obama at a ceremony in the White House.
Of all these achievements, Scott always said that, next to creating a family, her greatest satisfaction came from undergraduate teaching. One of my favorite anecdotes illustrates that point of pride. In 2000, the Women’s Studies Program asked her to be on hand to greet former students at Duke’s annual reunion. Eight showed up. She enjoyed the conversation so much that she “let the Alumni Office know that she would be in a certain room on Saturday afternoon to meet with students the following year. A single sentence in the fat program included this information. That time forty-nine people showed up.” The next year ninety people attended.
Scott’s beloved husband died in 2005, just as they were preparing to move from the Highland Woods neighborhood where they had lived for forty-seven years to Carol Woods Retirement Community. She moved alone and created a whole new life for herself, an exemplary last act, complete with new friends; new opportunities to read, and write, and teach; and an abiding stance of gratitude for her blessings and interest in the world around her. At a celebration of her life on March 3, her son David recalled a conversation with his mother that, to me, wonderfully captured her spirit, especially her spirit in her later years. Shortly before she died, she asked if he planned to say something at her memorial. He said yes. And she said, “Well, tell them I was lucky and I knew it.” She was lucky and so much else besides.