Anne Firor Scott receives honorary doctorate

Anne Firor Scott was a recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Sunday, May 11, 2014.

Anne Firor Scott, a pioneering historian of American women whose efforts helped open the doors of the history profession to female scholars, is William K. Boyd Professor Emerita of History at Duke University. In the 1960s and 1970s, Scott was a founder of the field of U.S. women’s history, and especially of southern women’s history. Her path breaking book “The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics” (1970) moved women from the margins to the center of southern history.

Inspired to study women reformers after working for the National League of Women Voters in the 1940s, Scott had earned her Ph.D. at Harvard/Radcliffe in 1958. In 1961, she took a history position at Duke until a “suitable replacement” for a departing man could be found. By 1980 she was William K. Boyd Professor of History and the first woman to chair Duke’s history department. She would go on to serve as president of the Organization of American Historians (1983–84) and then the Southern Historical Association (1989), and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.