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Bitten by the political bug and intrigued by the challenges of
grappling with major issues, Scott got a job as a research associate
at the national headquarters of the League of Women Voters, where
she produced pamphlets and traveled to visit local chapters. During
her three years there, she met women who had been active in the
Women’s Suffrage Movement and introduced her firsthand to
the long history of the struggle for women’s rights. Scott’s
sense of her own possibilities grew. “My parents had never
suggested that being female should limit my aspirations,” she
says, “and the League of Women Voters and all the other women’s
associations with which it cooperated reinforced this assumption.”
In the fall of 1947, the newly married Scott moved to Boston, where
Andy was in his second year of graduate studies. She entered the
Ph.D. program at Radcliffe and in three years’ time had earned
her degree and become a mother three times over. While rearing
her toddlers—David, Donald, and Rebecca—Scott again
worked with the League of Women Voters, serving as a Congressional
representative and editor of its National Voter publication from
1951 to 1953. She was awarded a fellowship by the American Association
of University Women in 1956 and became a lecturer in history at
Haverford in 1958. (Years later, asked which of her accomplishments
made her the proudest, she answered, without hesitation, “my
children.”)
In the fall of 1962, Scott’s article, “The ‘New
Woman’ in the New South,” published in the South Atlantic
Quarterly, established her reputation as a ground-breaking historian
and undoubtedly helped earn her an invitation from President Lyndon
Johnson to serve on his Advisory Council on the Status of Women.
Caroline Ware was also a member of the council, and the two became
fast friends. Ware completed the triangle by telling Murray about
Scott’s 1970 book The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics
1830-1930. (Still in print and referred to as a landmark text,
The Southern Lady is now available from the University of Virginia
Press in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition with a new afterword
by Scott.)
In Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware, Scott is a thorough editor,
including, for example, helpful identifications for figures named
in the letters (Francis Biddle and Alger Hiss are examples) and
providing key historical context. But she goes further, becoming
a third voice in the book. She begins with a meaty twenty-two-page
introduction and concludes with a fascinating personal postscript
in which she acknowledges that many questions about the two women
remain unanswered, especially about the very private Ware.
She shares personal anecdotes from the McCarthy era, as well as
amusing observations about Ware deftly broiling steaks while carrying
on intense conversations. She doesn’t hesitate to address
Murray’s belief that she was probably meant to be a man “but
had by accident turned up in a woman’s body,” nor her
dilemma of living with mixed heritage in “a no man’s
land between the whites and blacks.”
Not long after Ware and Murray met, their teacher-student relationship
deepened into friendship. Ware even provided financial assistance
when her student needed what Ware called “a little lunch
money.” Ware also served as Murray’s cheerleader and
consoler in her efforts to publish or to run for office, sending
detailed letters of constructive criticism or essay-like commentaries
on the times, and she joined Murray in her optimism about the candidacy
of Adlai Stevenson and the election of John Kennedy.
In her letters and journals, Murray’s voice ranges from passionate
to introspective. She tells Ware, “You are my self-appointed
godmother” and shares with her the homesickness she feels
when teaching in Ghana in 1960 (made possible by a loan from Ware).
Whenever faced with the disappointments of an unpublished book
and a job rejection at Yale, Murray records in her journal a long
list of what she takes to be her weaknesses.
Scott, by contrast, found her strengths recognized in 1980 when
she, the only tenured woman in the thirty-two-member history department,
was named the first female chair, an appointment that Robert Durden,
a professor emeritus, recalls “delighted everyone,” though
the Durham Morning Herald reported cryptically that “at least
three were strongly opposed to her appointment.” Kenneth
Pye, then Duke’s chancellor, may have spoken for others when
he said, “She is one of the most pleasant people to disagree
with.”
In his own endorsement of Scott, fellow Duke history professor
Warren Lerner nominated her for the United Methodist Church’s
Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award in 1985. Writing of her as a
model to Duke students “of a woman progressing in the profession
long before affirmative-action programs facilitated such progress,” Lerner
noted her caring qualities and classes “marked by challenge,
lucidity, and individualized attention.”
Scott’s indelible imprint on a generation of scholars became
apparent to Elizabeth Dunn, a research-services librarian with
Duke’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library,
when she was conducting research for a 1988 exhibition, “No
Longer Unheard Voices: Women Historians of the American South.” In
the text that accompanied the exhibition, Dunn observed: “Check
the acknowledgements pages in nearly any scholarly text on women
and the American South and you will find an expression of gratitude
to Scott. She has read manuscripts, advised, encouraged, and sometimes
nagged all in the name of bringing the historical experiences of
women to the fore.”
Dunn mentions Suzanne Lebsock, one of Scott’s young scholarly
protégées, who noted in the acknowledgements to her
book Free Women of Petersburg that when she was working on her
doctoral dissertation, she received a postcard from Scott asking
simply, “Are you writing? If not, why not?”
The scholar who has been so steadfast in demanding the best of
her students has asked no less of herself. Yet, just as she taught
them to explore all facets of historical figures, including their
imperfections, she is quick to acknowledge her own shortcomings.
At a 2001 symposium held by Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library
to honor her eightieth birthday, Scott noted that “people
see what they are prepared to see.” Her own preparedness
to see the kind of iniquities that came into sharp focus during
the civil-rights movement “awakened slowly,” she says. “I
became involved, at first hesitantly, and later as a compelling
cause.”
In 1948, she attended a meeting of the Southern Historical Association
to hear the influential postwar American historian C. Vann Woodward.
By strange coincidence, she also ended up hearing an obscure but
promising young scholar named John Hope Franklin. “Woodward
and a few others had, so to say, smuggled John Hope Franklin in
to give a paper and attend the dinner, which had never before included
a black scholar.” She read Franklin’s landmark book,
From Slavery to Freedom, when it came out the following year, and,
of course, they eventually became colleagues.
The encounter with Franklin was, in some respects, a preview of
what she would face when she moved south. She came to Duke in the
racially tumultuous 1960s, prepared to be the only female in the
history department but not expecting the kinds of questions about
the American past that the president of the black-students group
at Duke brought to her survey class. She responded by reorganizing
her syllabus to include reflections on the American past from an
African-American perspective.
She says, “I took my cue from my father, who said, ‘It
is said that I am a good teacher. If it is true, and I have reason
to think it is, it is because I did not know the answers, but sought
them in company with my students.’ That was what I tried
to do, though not always with success.”
Scott’s students of the ’60s recall her sympathy for
their civil-rights activism. In 1963, June Ryan-Rau ’64 found
herself in the Orange County jail for participating in a sit-in.
Although devoted to Scott’s classes, she missed a few days
and was called into Scott’s office to explain her absence.
Ryan-Rau, now a psychiatric social worker in Winston-Salem, remembers
that Scott’s response was reassuring—“so much
so that I was able to face my parents with slightly more confidence.”
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