Groundbreaking historian, Anne Firor Scott, dead at 97

NEW YORK (AP) — Anne Firor Scott, a prize-winning historian and esteemed professor who upended the male-dominated field of Southern scholarship by pioneering the study of Southern women, has died. She was 97.

Her death was announced last week by Duke University, where she taught for three decades. Additional details about her death were not immediately available. Scott, who in 2013 received a National Humanities Medal, was a resident of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Scott’s “The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics 1830-1930” was published in 1970 and is now regarded as among the first major works of its kind. For years, Scott had been dismayed by the absence of women in histories of the South and so vowed to “add to our understanding” of “social reality.” Drawing upon diaries, newspaper accounts, letters and government records, Scott set out to tell their story and to challenge the ideal of the pious, selfless Southern wife.

“If talking could make it so, antebellum Southern women of the upper class would have been the most perfect examples of womankind on yet seen on earth,” she wrote. “If praise could satisfy all of women’s needs, they would also have been the happiest.”

Scott documented the private frustrations of seemingly contented spouses, and how the roles of women changed after the Civil War and changed again in the 20th century as opportunities for work and education expanded. Well before the civil rights era and the rise of feminism, they served on committees with black women, formed an association to ban lynching and established “get out the vote” campaigns.