Modern history: Scott, who has left an indelible imprint on a generation of scholars, remains active and feisty at the age of eighty-five

Les Todd

Picture Duke in the early 1960s: Reynolds Price ’55, a Rhodes Scholar fresh from the University of Oxford, strides across the campus wearing his dashing black cape. Sean Flynn, son of the movie star Errol Flynn, lounges in the women’s dorms before swapping studying for acting and moving to Hollywood. Mary Travers flings her long blonde hair and knocks ’em dead when the trio of Peter, Paul, and Mary performs at Joe College weekend. Freshman “girls,” required to wear white bows in their hair and take classes on East Campus, hear the deans describe them as women and warily register for American history with the department’s newest faculty member, Anne Firor Scott, a recently hired part-time assistant professor with a Ph.D. from Radcliffe College, who has already established a reputation for toughness.

Continuing Influence

My friends and I debated signing up for her 8 a.m. survey class. We’d heard about her high standards, her piercing questions. We knew she expected that our research papers, preferably about overlooked women in American history, use only primary sources.

The braver among us enrolled, well aware that we dared not be absent and dared not fail to answer. But, over the course of the semester, we learned that we did dare to push ourselves harder than ever before as we grew accustomed to her famous question: “What do you think?”

In 1958, Scott’s husband, Andy Scott, was hired to teach political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the two left their teaching positions at Haverford College and moved south with their three children. Three years later, Duke’s history department asked Scott, then teaching part-time at UNC, to fill in “until we can find ‘somebody.’” For the next thirty years, Scott proved herself to be that somebody—and so much more: author and co-author of well-received books, award winner selected by students and fellow academics for her teaching and her scholarly accomplishments, and administrative groundbreaker as the first female chair of the history department in 1980.

Former students need little prompting to recall details of their classes with Scott. Ann Kettering Covington ’64, who was the first female chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court, now retired, remembers that “although reserved and professional,” Scott occasionally mentioned her husband, Andy, “and let us know that she was a mother. She seemed to have accomplished everything and conveyed the unstated message, ‘This is what a woman can be and do.’ ”

John Holland ’80 says he was still a “back-of-the-room kind of guy” in his senior year when he took Scott’s American history survey course, which she called “History in the Microcosm.” He was among her best and brightest, she recalls, an engineering major whose friends told him he was crazy to sign up for her section. She assigned seats, forcing him into the second row, new habits, and regular class participation. Perhaps he was mentioned in her daily post-class journal in which she recorded observations on teaching strategies that worked—or didn’t.

Scott, injecting her own brand of humor into the historian’s objectivity, recalls that one of her students answered the teacher course-evaluation question “Is he accessible?” with “she is accessible but not approachable!” While she prefers being called blunt and honest to the occasional “intimidating,” she bows to critics who have said she liked the bright students best.

She held herself to the same standards she required of her students, recalls Holland, even giving his one late paper “lots of comments and suggestions.” Holland, who now works for Northrop-Grumman Electronic Systems in Baltimore, notes that while many historians then focused on the “big picture”—major battles and biographies of generals and heads of state—Scott assigned letters, diaries, and journals of everyday Americans, to demonstrate that “the little picture is important, too.”

Scott retired in 1991 but continues to serve as a model for all ages. Now eighty-five, she’s an active member of the Southern Association for Women Historians and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She continues to deliver lectures to such venerable organizations as the Southern Historical Association. And she still pursues her writing. Last year she published the lengthy correspondence of two remarkable American women in her newest book, Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware: Forty Years of Letters in Black and White (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

The project began by chance when Scott, exploring documents in the Pauli Murray collection in Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, discovered folder after folder of correspondence with Ware. The Reverend Pauli Murray (1910-1985) was a lawyer and civil-rights activist, a founder of the National Organization for Women, and the first African-American female ordained as an Episcopal priest in the U.S. Scott, who had been friends with Caroline Ware, was surprised how often Ware’s name appeared in the documents. Though Scott never met Pauli Murray, she often used in her courses Murray’s memoir, Proud Shoes, a book given to her originally by Ware.

Ware (1899-1990) was a formidable woman in her own right—a social historian, a pioneer in consumer affairs, an editor, and a community-development specialist in Asia and Latin America. Ware and Pauli met in 1942, when Pauli signed up for Ware’s class on constitutional law at Howard University Law School. The correspondence that so inspired Scott began soon after.

In some ways, these two quite different women reflect two sides of Scott herself. She is outwardly more similar to Caroline Ware, the Harvard University Ph.D., and social historian who successfully maintained the dual roles of spouse and scholar. But from her own childhood spent in “genteel” poverty in Athens, Georgia, Scott also had experienced Pauli Murray’s less prosperous, more provincial beginnings. Scott’s father, a faculty member at the University of Georgia, experienced years during the Depression when the state couldn’t meet its payroll.

Scott entered the University of Georgia at age sixteen. She lived at home, and her father paid her tuition (forty dollars a semester) using his World War I bonus. After graduating at age nineteen, Scott saved fifty dollars of the ninety she earned as a secretary for IBM in Atlanta and, in 1942, headed to Northwestern University to begin work on her master’s degree. The following summer, she was selected for an internship with the National Institute of Public Affairs in Washington, and worked in the office of California Congressman Jerry Voorhis.

Designed to interest young people in government, the internship was an illuminating introduction to politics and power, Scott says. Over tea at the White House and, on another occasion, in an after-dinner discussion that went on late into the night, Eleanor Roosevelt talked to Scott and her fellow interns about the postwar landscape and the role the younger generation would be called on to play. Ambassador Edward Wood, Viscount Halifax, hosted a dazzling party for the interns at the British embassy. And Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer welcomed the interns to his office, where he, as Scott remembers it, “gossiped freely” about various wartime agencies and political leaders.