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Anne Firor Scott, Scholar of Women’s History, Dies at 97

Anne Firor Scott teaching at Duke University in 1985. Her scholarship emphasized the contributions that women, especially Southern women, have made to history.Credit...Duke University Archives

Anne Firor Scott, a scholar who brought a new prominence to women’s history and taught generations of Duke University students how to study and appreciate it, died on Feb. 5 at her home in Chapel Hill, N.C. She was 97.

Her family confirmed her death.

In her books and in her classroom, Professor Scott underscored the contributions that women, especially Southern women, have made to history, individually and through organizations, an area that had been underreported or ignored in the male-dominated field of historical scholarship.

Her 1970 book, “The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930,” challenged the portrait of Southern women as prettily dressed, tea-sipping spectators to the cataclysmic events of the century of the title.

“Far from fitting the conventional image,” the historian Gerda Lerner wrote in a 1971 review in the Journal of American History, “the Southern lady emerges from the pages of this book as a resourceful, strong and resilient woman living in a society which severely restricted her options and opportunities.”

Professor Scott found insights in places other historians had rarely explored.

“Anne Scott’s love of manuscripts drew her to the voluminous collections of family papers of planters, politicians and Confederate soldiers, archived by admiring descendants,” her daughter, Rebecca J. Scott, herself a historian at the University of Michigan, said by email. “There she found the overlooked letters and diaries of wives and daughters. In her hands, these brought to light a very different and far less demure ‘Southern lady,’ one who had played a vital role in economic, political, and social life.”

It was eye-opening work.

“Arriving at Duke as a young scholar in a male-dominated field, Anne Scott introduced new and more inclusive approaches to the study of the past,” John L. Martin, chairman of Duke’s history department, said by email. Professor Scott was the first woman to chair the department, he said, and influenced generations of future scholars at Duke and beyond.

When Anne Scott received a 2013 National Humanities Medal, presented to her in a White House ceremony by President Barack Obama, the citation heralded her “groundbreaking research spanning ideology, race, and class.”

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President Barack Obama awarded the 2013 National Humanities Medal to Professor Scott during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in 2014.Credit...Charles Dharapak/Associated Press

Anne Byrd Firor was born on April 24, 1921, in Montezuma, Ga., to John William and Mary (Moss) Firor. Her father was a college professor, her mother a homemaker.

“Georgia high schools in the 1930s did not demand extraordinary academic exertion,” Professor Scott wrote of her teenage years in an essay for the collection “Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections” (2004).

“My energies,” she added, “went less into academic exploration than into editing the school newspaper, a job with the fringe benefit of free movie passes.”

Yet she must have been a good student — she received a bachelor’s degree at the University of Georgia at 19. After working for a year at IBM in Atlanta, she earned a master’s degree in political science at Northwestern University.

In 1943 she went to Washington for an internship in a congressman’s office, then took a job the next year with the League of Women Voters. That organization was in upheaval at the time, and suddenly she and two other young staff members found themselves doing high-level work writing letters to cabinet secretaries, drafting congressional testimony, coordinating with other women’s groups and more.

“It was a heady experience,” she wrote, “and one that in retrospect had a great deal to do with my later evolution as a historian of women.”

In 1946 she met a former Navy pilot, Andrew Scott, and the next year they married. He was in graduate school at Harvard, and, joining him there, she secured a fellowship at Radcliffe College. She worked on her Ph.D. there while raising the couple’s three children, obtaining it in 1958 with a dissertation on Southern progressives in Congress.

“It would not pass muster in today’s graduate programs,” she wrote of that dissertation. “But it did contain the germ of an important insight: In examining the varieties of reform in which Southerners were involved over the years after 1890, I kept stumbling over women.”

Her husband was hired as a professor at the University of North Carolina, and she was soon teaching a few American history courses there. At a faculty seminar, she delivered a paper called “The ‘New Woman’ in the New South.”

“To my surprise,” she wrote in the autobiographical essay, “the all-male faculty took to the subject with enthusiasm and spent so much time telling me about their grandmothers that I never quite finished delivering the prepared essay.”

In 1961 the history department at nearby Duke found itself with an opening and invited her to fill it “until we can find somebody,” as the chairman’s letter to her put it. She stayed for 30 years, serving as department chairwoman from 1980 to 1985.

Professor Scott’s books after “The Southern Lady” included “Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History” (1991). In its introduction, she explained how the book came about, noting that in her research on Southern women she kept encountering women’s groups that had played important social roles. Delving deeper, she realized that this had been true all over the country, with such organizations promoting the care of orphans, school lunches, better trash collection and all sorts of other issues.

“It soon became clear that women’s associations were literally everywhere,” she wrote, “known or unknown, famous or obscure; young or ancient; auxiliary or freestanding; reactionary, conservative, liberal, radical, or a mix of all four; old women, young women, black women, white women, women from every ethnic group, every religious group had their societies. Before long, as the scope, magnitude, and diversity of this phenomenon came into view, I realized that it lay at the very heart of American social and political development.”

Professor Scott’s husband died in 2005. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by two sons, David and Donald; six grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

In her autobiographical essay, Professor Scott reflected on those who had influenced and furthered her interests over the years.

“I have had three kinds of vital mentors,” she wrote, “living women, women whose documents I have studied, and academic men and women. And of course my students, who have been central to the process of learning.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Anne Firor Scott, 97, a Scholar of Women’s History in the South and Beyond. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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