Anne Firor Scott
Anne Firor Scott was an American historian, specializing in the history of women and of the South.
Early life and education
Scott was born April 24, 1921, in Montezuma, Georgia.She earned her PhD from Radcliffe College of Harvard University in 1958.
Career
Scott was appointed to the Citizen's Advisory Council on the status of women in 1965.She taught part-time at both Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, before teaching full-time at Duke University. In 1980 she became the first female chair of the history department at Duke. She retired from teaching at Duke in the early 1990s.
She was the president of the Organization of American Historians from 1983 to 1984, and the president of the Southern Historical Association in 1989.
Honors
- Honorary degrees from Northwestern University, Radcliffe College, Queens College, and the University of the South
- Berkshire Conference Prize in 1980
- University Medal for Distinguished Meritorious Services, from Duke University in 1991
- Organization of American Historians' Distinguished Service Award in 2002
- Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004
- American Historical Association’s Scholarly Achievement Award in 2008
- 2013 National Humanities Medal
Legacy
The Anne Firor Scott papers, 1963–2002, are held at Duke University.In 1992, the Organization of American Historians established the annual Lerner-Scott Prize, named for Scott and Gerda Lerner. It is awarded annually to the writer of the best doctoral dissertation that year in U.S. women's history.
Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, a collection of essays drawing inspiration from Scott's 1984 work, Making the Invisible Woman Visible, was published in 1993.
Writing Women's History: A Tribute to Anne Firor Scott was published in 2011. It contains essays on how women's history is written in the wake of Scott's book The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930. Edited by Elizabeth Anne Payne, the collection has contributions from Scott herself, Laura F. Edwards, Crystal Feimster, Glenda E. Gilmore, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Darlene Clark Hine, Mary Kelley, Markeeva Morgan, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Deborah Gray White. It is based on papers presented at the University of Mississippi's annual Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History.