Mary Beth Norton

When I earned my Ph.D. at Harvard in 1969, I had no obvious female role model in the field of early American history. The only other woman colonialist I knew was my contemporary Pauline Maier, whom I met in graduate school. But then I encountered Mary Maples Dunn through the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the then-small group of northeastern female professors that met annually for spring weekends in Massachusetts or Connecticut. The Berks was founded in 1930 by women Ph.D.s shut out of professional networking by the male-dominated professoriate. After I was recruited to join the group by my colleague at the University of Connecticut, Emiliana Noether, I learned that the weekends were casual affairs; some papers were delivered and business discussed, but there was also a great deal of time for walks and informal conversations among the members.

Mary became my most important professional mentor when I was an assistant professor and moved from the University of Connecticut to Cornell in 1971. Since I was the first and only woman in the Cornell History Department for five long years, I turned to Mary for advice on navigating the mysterious seas of academe. She took me under her wing at conventions, for example, seeing that I attended the right parties, and she introduced me to the people at those parties she thought I should know.

The Berkshire Conference had never focused on women's history—indeed, many of the older members actively resisted the idea that they should be interested in a gendered approach to history. But at the spring meeting in 1972 two members, Mary Hartman and Lois Banner, asked the Berks to officially sponsor a women's history conference they wanted to organize at their institution, Douglass College (then the women's college of Rutgers); they needed an outside sponsor to be able to use the Douglass conference center. After considerable discussion, the Berks agreed to the request. That conference, held in early March 1973, was planned for one hundred attendees, but it attracted three hundred or more. Among them were Mary and I. We discussed there our growing mutual interest in colonial women's history, a new field for both of us. Later that spring, at the annual meeting of the Berks, the membership discussed the conference, decided it had been too successful to allow it to be a onetime event, and agreed to sponsor another. That time it would be at Radcliffe in fall of 1974, the only time the meeting has been held during a semester. Mary was an active supporter of that decision and became one of the organizers of the second conference. In 1978 she brought the fourth Berkshire Conference on Women's History to Bryn Mawr, where she became dean. She also served a term as president of the Berks.

When I needed letters of recommendation as I applied for a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in the fall of 1973, I logically turned to Mary for one of them. I hoped to spend the year back at Harvard at the Charles Warren Center, for I knew I needed an extended period in the Boston area to begin manuscript research on the project—the study of women in the Revolution that in 1980 was published as Liberty's Daughters.¹ Mary wrote a wonderful letter. I know that because she later sent it to me, a warm and generous gesture I deeply appreciated. She even explained to me the one slightly critical comment she included in it, a statement to the effect that because I was a young scholar just getting started in the profession, the challenges that this project presented would help me grow intellectually and improve as a historian. (As indeed it did.) That year's leave and the NEH fellowship I was awarded proved invaluable to me and my subsequent career.

Knowing that Linda Kerber had embarked on a project similar to mine (hers became Women of the Republic, also published in 1980), Mary facilitated a meeting between us at the second Berkshire women's history conference.² Linda and I had...