Mary Ritter Beard

• Mary Ritter Beard
• Born: August 5, 1876
• Died: August 14, 1958

Historian, feminist, and political activist, was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the elder of two daughters and the third among six children of Eli Foster Ritter, a lawyer, temperance advocate, and zealous Methodist, and Narcissa (Lockwood) Ritter, an elegant and cultured woman who had worked as a teacher before her marriage. The family lived in a prosperous suburb of Indianapolis, and Mary Ritter, like her siblings and her father, studied at De-Pauw University, a Methodist institution in nearby Asbury, where she encountered another Indiana student, Charles Austin Beard, whom she married in 1900. She had been graduated in 1897 with a Ph. B. degree.

The couple moved to Oxford, England, where Charles Beard took courses and helped to establish Ruskin Hall, a college for working men, while Mary Beard became actively involved with leading English radical suffragists, an experience that exposed her to the needs of working-class women that she was never to forget.

With Miriam, their year-old-daughter, the Beards went to New York City in 1902. Charles Beard completed his graduate training at Columbia University and began a brilliant career as a historian and educator. Mary Beard left Columbia within two years to work for the National Women’s Trade Union League. In 1907 the couple’s son William was born, and two years later Mary Beard became associated with the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (later, the Women’s Political Union), whose purpose was to politicize the franchise struggle. By 1910 she was at the center of the Women Suffrage party’s activities, organizing, raising money, and developing propaganda; for a brief time she edited The Woman Voter, the official organ of the Woman Suffrage League of New York. Due to her concern for working-class women, she discontinued the editorship in order to focus on the Wage Earners League, a working woman’s affiliate of the state league.

When the Congressional Union, a militant suffragist group inspired by fiery Alice Paul, was founded, Mary Beard supported it. And when the union evolved into the National Woman’s party, she stayed on until suffrage was won. She resigned in 1919 because it seemed to her that the paramount issue had become the Equal Rights Amendment; along with most feminists allied with the trade union movement, she was dubious about E.R.A. and backed instead legislation to protect working women.

In the course of her active politics Beard also did some writing on her own, and she slowly recognized that her most valuable asset was her capacity as a historian and critic. She never lost, however, her belief in the organic connection between ideas and actions, and as she developed her theory of feminism, she sought to apply that knowledge to practical ventures.

Mary Beard’s best-known work, Woman as a Force in History, was published in 1946 when she was seventy. It was the culmination of three decades of writing, thinking, and speaking about the central role of women in society. Her thesis, that women have always been a real, though unrecognized, societal force, grew from her experiences in trade union and suffragist activities. Challenging the prevailing feminist view of history and politics, she rejected the notion that women are primarily an oppressed group. Instead, she argued, women have always been active, assertive, creative contributors to their societies. Their role in the maintenance of life and the development of culture, she contended, was critical to civilization; acceptance of a past and present subordinate designation undermines women’s collective strength, she held.

In Beard’s view, women could free themselves from ideological bondage by discovering their own powerful history and using that knowledge to alter the world. The call for absolute gender equality denies the reality of a special female culture, which, she said, has always existed side by side with male culture. Beard’s book was greeted by a chorus of harsh reviews by traditionalist historians, most of them men, and it virtually disappeared until the 1960s, when new interest in women’s studies recalled the book from its dustbin. Mary Beard was then acclaimed as the mother of modern women’s history in the United States, and she has since been recognized as a linchpin figure in the field.

Her initial book was Woman’s Work in Municipalities, published in 1915. It was followed by A Short History of the American Labor Movement (1920); On Understanding Women (1931); the aforementioned Woman as Force in History (1946); The Force of Women in Japanese History (1953); and The Making of Charles A. Beard (1955). She edited America Through Women’s Eyes (1933) and coedited Laughing Their Way: Women’s Humor in America (1934).

The Beards’s first collaboration, American Citizenship, appeared in 1914. The original two volumes of their monumental national history, The Rise of American Civilization, appeared in 1927. A final joint endeavor, The Basic History of the United States, their “last will and testament to the American people,” according to Charles Beard, was published four years before his death, in 1944.

Mary Beard attempted to translate her knowledge of the past into practical work through three projects. In 1936 she was a founder of the World Center for Women’s Archives, whose purpose was to assemble all data on women everywhere in a massive effort to demonstrate the existence and force of an aggregate female sphere. In 1941, with a staff of three, she undertook a feminist critique of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. She also worked tirelessly within the academic community to develop what are known today as women’s studies courses, publishing in 1934 their first syllabus, a fifty-page outline.

The international archives project disbanded after five years. The Encyclopaedia Britannica editor read her report but ignored it. Few colleges listened with any sympathy to Beard’s notions for curriculum change. But her work created a new historical vision that has only recently been appreciated. Her emphasis on women did not narrow the scope but widened her sense of the past. In Beard’s political as well as intellectual life, she recognized the importance of class, social group, and gender in ways no other progressive reformer had. When she left the former arena to devote herself to scholarly tasks, her pursuits became more radical because they were more audacious. With political activities behind her, she spent the rest of a long life trying to convince women about their own vital chronicle and the power that was within their reach to change the present.

Beard died in Phoenix, Arizona, from kidney disease, during 1958, at the age of eighty-two.

Mary Ritter Beard apparently destroyed most of her papers. There are, however, some materials in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; the Schlesinger Library, Rad-cliffe College; and the DePauw University Archives. The National Woman’s party material in the Library of Congress provides a limited survey of Beard’s early activities. The Schwimmer-Lloyd Collection in the Manuscript Division of the New York Public Library has material on the World Center for Women’s Archives. Some additional correspondence exists scattered in several other locations. Biographical sources include A. J. Lane, Mary Ritter Beard: A Sourcebook (1978), with its analysis of her life and career, as well as portions from her writings; and B. K. Turoff, Mary Beard as Force in History (1979), an eighty-page publication, also offering such an examination. Other valuable short pieces are: B. A. Carroll, “Mary Beard’s Woman as Force in History: A Critique,” The Massachusetts Review, Winter-Spring 1972; L. Zimmerman, “Mary Beard: An Activist of the Progressive Era,” University of Portland Review, Spring 1974; C. N. Degler, “Woman as Force in History by Mary Beard,” Daedalus, Winter 1974. See also The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 6 (1980); Notable American Women: The Modern Period (1980); and Current Biography, 1941. An obituary appeared in The New York Times, August 15, 1958.