Editor’s Note
We are honored to share reflections on the life and scholarship of Dorothy Ross, a pioneering intellectual historian and longtime supporter of this organization, in a special forum. My deepest thanks to everyone who joined us for our panel at the 2024 annual meeting in Boston. Please share your reminiscences of Dorothy and her work in the comments below. –Sara Georgini, S-USIH President
I.
Most of you come to know most of academic women of my generation deep into our careers, often with chaired professorships. I am May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts at the University of Iowa; Dorothy was the Arthur O Lovejoy Professor at Hopkins, Barbara Sicherman, who is with us today, is Kenan Professor at Trinity.
But most of us were unemployed at the beginning. I recently learned that when Dorothy was being considered for a position at Princeton, the search committee spent time wondering how her husband, Stan, would feel if she embarked on a commuting marriage. [They were living in Washington DC and he enthusiastically supported her career]
II.
It was because Dorothy was unemployed that could embrace the role of Special Assistant to the newly formed Committee for Women Historians of the American Historical Association in 1971.
Although other learned societies were also adding committees on women, the AHA was the ONLY one to support a paid staffer charged with supporting the work of the Committee in its effort to redress the discriminatory pattern of employment and opportunities in the profession.
In that role, she answered the bitter letters that poured in [e.g. tenure decisions taken on staircase landings]. These letters can be read in the AHA Papers at the Library of Congress.
And along with her colleagues in the CWH, Dorothy invented a roster of qualified women historians throughout the profession [not only those who were members of the AHA] She consulted the EEOC and got a ruling that so long as we were an information service to assist in affirmative action – a job information service, not an employment agency – we were legal.
We collected information from women historians
We collected information about jobs from departments. She notified the colleges’ equal employment officer, or the college women’s group, where they existed, if we had received no word on jobs from the chair of their history department. And when HEW demanded that jobs be advertised openly, we established the Employment Information Bulletin, which still exists.
The 600 forms from women who enrolled were retyped onto McBee sort cards; another 800 were added several months later. By the end of the year, “on an expenditures of about $1500 for typing and printing and postage,” the AHA had a working roster of 1400 women, “a substantial portion of all women historians.”
We identified 90 jobs
We know of 10 women hired from our lists.
And we contradicted the assumption that many men had formed that there were no qualified women ; they “were forced to consider the large number of able women who were available in the profession.”
III.
Since Dorothy wrote about women only very late in her career, many people don’t recognize the strength of her feminism throughout her life.
She broke a lot of glass ceilings
She cared carefully for all graduate students, with specific advice to women graduate students
You can be a feminist historian without writing women’s history.
She wanted contributions in her memory to go to funds supporting women’s education:
Campaign for Female Education camfed.org [Africa]
Lotusoutreach.org [Asia]
IV.
Philosophy of history
“historians live in the present, and what they think is worth examining is always shaped by their own context”
When she proposed a dissertation on G Stanley Hall, Richard Hofstadter told her that other colleagues had been skeptical of a biography as too narrow! And then that was followed by the magisterial Origins of American Social Science.
V.
I end with a personal note.
Jump to 2020, when the ACLS asked me to write the Haskins Lecture, describing my “Life of Learning.” I was flooded with memories, unable to distinguish between the significant and the trivial. I turned to Dorothy, sent her drafts. With an unerring eye, she sorted me out, distinguishing between what belonged in the essay and what was tangential. The Lecture could not have been shaped without her. Dorothy gave me the gift of perspective on my own life.
