The dictionary grew out of a 1955 proposal from Harvard University professor of history Arthur Schlesinger. In his role as the chairman of the Advisory Board of Radcliffe College's Women's Archive, he set the board to investigate the need for a dictionary of American women. (That archive has since become the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library.) By 1958, Radcliffe had agreed to sponsor the project, and editorial work began under the direction of Edward T. James.
The new work's model was to be the Dictionary of American Biography (DAB), ten volumes of 15,000 entries published between 1926 and 1936 under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies. Between 1944 and 1995, ten supplemental volumes appeared, of which Edward T. James had been an associate editor. DAB included 706 entries for women. The editors' first task was to assemble a card file of potential biographical subjects, and the DAB entries became the nucleus. Editors culled other entries from encyclopedias, Who's Who compilations, and earlier compendia of female biography. Histories of fields where American women were particularly active yielded more names. When the card file had grown to over 4,000 names, the editors classified each entry by occupation, and sent each category to an expert in that field. From these recommendations and their own research, the editors chose 1,359 American women.
The editors commissioned authors who had a special knowledge of the subject or of her field to compose biographical sketches. In all, 738 contributors submitted sketches. Each author was to establish certain basic facts supported in a bibliography: the subject's ancestral and geographic background, her father's occupation (and her mother's, if she worked outside the home), and her order of birth in the family; her schooling and religious affiliation; the date of her marriage or marriages, the husband's name and occupation, and children's names and birth dates; and the cause and place of death and place of burial.
This dictionary, this "venture in cooperative scholarship," in the words of the authors, was intended set in motion future research and analysis. The project itself yielded two more publications: (published in 1986 in 816 pages, with 442 entries, and edited by Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green), profiled American women who had died between 1951 and 1975. (published in 2005 in 768 pages, with almost 500 entries, and edited by Susan Ware and Stacy Braukman) profiled, as the title suggests, women who died between January 1, 1976, and December 31, 1999.
Students have mined Notable American Women to produce countless papers, then refined that ore into many thousands of dissertations and books. In its fortieth anniversary year, I intend to return to the mother lode and estimate what treasure it has born. Each day this blog will feature a woman whose biographical sketch appeared in the first three volumes of the dictionary. I will compare the 1971 single-author sketch (with editorial review) with the woman's entry in Wikipedia, a "venture of cooperative scholarship" that the editors of Notable American Women could scarcely imagine when they began their research in 1958. Beyond Wikipedia, each day's blog entry will update the 1971 bibliography with the products of the mother lode: articles, dissertations, and books that have led us further into the life of that woman over the past forty years.
My goal is to honor Notable American Women, highlight the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia as a new jumping-off point for student research, and encourage new scholarship in women's history.
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